Animation of Moving String Termination and Digital Waveguide Models

In the force wave simulation of Fig.6.5b,^7.4 the termination motion appears as an additive injection of a constant force at the far left. At time 0, this initiates a force step from 0 to traveling to the right. Since force waves are negated slope waves multiplied by tension, i.e., , the slope of the string behind the traveling force step is . When the traveling step-wave reaches the right termination, it reflects with no sign inversion, thus sending back a doubling-wave to the left which elevates the string force from to . Behind this wave, the slope is then . This answers the question of the previous paragraph: The string is in fact piecewise linear during the first return reflection, consisting of two line segments with slope on the left, and twice that on the right. When the return step-wave reaches the left termination, it is reflected again and added to the externally injected dc force signal, sending an amplitude positive step-wave to the right (overwriting the amplitude signal in the upper rail). This can be added to the amplitude samples in the lower rail to produce a net traveling force step in the string of amplitude traveling to the right. The slope of the string behind this wave is , and the slope in front of this wave is still . The force applied to the string by the termination has risen to in order to keep the velocity steady at . (We may interpret the input as the additional force needed each period to keep the termination moving at speed --see the next paragraph below.) This process repeats forever, resulting in traveling wave components which grow without bound, and whose sum (which is proportional to minus the physical string slope) also grows without bound.^7.5The string is always piecewise linear, consisting of at most two linear segments having negative slopes which differ by . A sequence of string displacement snapshots is shown in Fig.6.6.

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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.