Musical instruments - Sound synthesis of virtual idiophones

It is the novel contribution of this paper to provide a systematic approach for synthesizing sound from vibrating structures with arbitrary geometries just from their surface vibrations. In case of musical instruments, the resulting sound can be evaluated and rated by psychoacoustic criteria to define a target function for their numerical optimization. The method is applied to a bar modeled according to the design of typical vibraphone bars. The sound resulting from the synthesis algorithm is validated against the boundary element approach and results from microphone measurements.