Banded Waveguides: Towards Physical Modeling of Bowed Bar Percussion Instruments

Efficient physical models of bar percussion instruments which preserve spatial sampling are not yet available. In this paper, banded waveguides are proposed as an efficient method for simulating the physics of bars including spatial sampling. In addition two other models are investigated. One is a generalization of the waveguide idea replacing unit delays by all-pass filters modeling the phase delay characteristics. The other extends on existing finite difference (FD) methods. According to this study all-pass filter chains show no advantages over FDs in terms of performance and physical realism. Finally, real bars were the target of experimental measurements.