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From: ian@wcwvax.UUCP (Ian Kemmish)
Newsgroups: net.music.synth
Subject: Difficulty of synthesising piano sounds
Message-ID: <669@wcwvax.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 5-Feb-86 07:04:55 EST
Article-I.D.: wcwvax.669
Posted: Wed Feb  5 07:04:55 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 11-Feb-86 05:25:49 EST
Organization: Whitechapel Computer Works, London
Lines: 21

I think there are two main difficulties with synthesising the
sound of a real piano.  First, a modern (post-Steinway) piano
appears to be one of the most harmonically complex sounds around;
and it shows quite a lot of variation across the keyboard.  I
saw an article recently which said that Dr. John Chowning and
Dave Bristow (on secondment from Yamaha) were working on doing
a "proper" synthetic piano at IRCAM - and using *all* of a TX816
(16 lots of 96 oscillators) to do it!   On the other hand, you
can get a reasonable imitation of a Broadwood era piano on a
DX7.

The second problem is that the upper harmonics of a piano tone
are *not* exact multiples of the fundamental.  This is why pianos
are normally tuned in that funny way - slightly sharp at the top
of the keyboard, slightly flat at the bottom.   I don't know the
exact mechanism that causes this effect, but then I would imagine
that the equation describing the oscillatory motion of a thick,
massive, inhomogeneous wire under a lot of tension is quite a bit
more complicated than the simple wave equation we all solved in
Fourier Analysis at university! (Maybe someone in netland can even
write it down??!)