Literature on Piano Acoustics and Synthesis

There has been much research into the musical acoustics of the piano, including models of piano strings [543,18,75,76,144,42] and the piano hammer [493,63,178,60,486,164,487]. Additionally, there has been considerable work to date on the problem of piano synthesis by digital waveguide methods [467,519,523,56,42].

A careful computational model of the piano, partially based on physical modeling and suitable for high-quality real-time sound synthesis, was developed by Bensa in the context of his thesis work [42]. Related publications include [43,45,46].

An excellent simulation of the clavichord, also using the commuted waveguide synthesis technique, is described in [501]. A detailed simulation of the harpsichord, along similar lines, but with some interesting new variations, may be found in [514].

The 2003 paper of Bank et al. [29] includes good summaries of prior research on elements of piano modeling such as efficient computational string models, loss-filter design, dispersion filter design, and soundboard models. A more recent paper in this area is [30].

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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.