All We Need is Newton

Since there are no relativistic or quantum effects to worry about in musical instruments or audio effects (at least not yet), good old Newtonian mechanics will suffice for our purposes. Newton's three laws of motion can be summarized by the classic equation^2.4

However, the apparent mathematical simplicity of Newton's basic laws of motion does not mean that our task will always be easy. Models based on Newton's laws can quickly become prohibitively complex. We will usually need many further simplifications that preserve both sound quality and expressivity of control.

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About the Author: Julius Orion Smith III
Julius Smith's background is in electrical engineering (BS Rice 1975, PhD Stanford 1983). He is presently Professor of Music and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), teaching courses and pursuing research related to signal processing applied to music and audio systems. See http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/ for details.