Principles of musical instruments

Across the variety of musical instruments, one concept is often true, at least to first order: sound production can be separated into a low dimensional excitation mechanism coupled to a possibly high dimensional resonator acting both as a filter and as a mean of radiation. Excitation and resonator models can generally be decomposed themselves into sub-blocks (e.g. the resonator of a guitar, composed of the strings, the bridge, the body and the air surrounding it).

Examples of exciters/resonator pairs representing minimal models of several musical instruments include :

• Bow friction / string and body,
• Mouthpiece and reed / bore,
• Vocal folds / vocal and nasal tract.

This project tries to keep the constituting elements of the instruments clearly separated (at least in the theory writing) and exploits the port-Hamiltonian framework to then connect the elements together in a graph-like fashion.