Literature on Piano Acoustics and Synthesis

There has been much research into the musical acoustics of the piano, including models of piano strings [547,18,75,76,145,42] and the piano hammer [496,63,179,60,489,165,490]. Additionally, there has been considerable work to date on the problem of piano synthesis by digital waveguide methods [469,523,527,56,42].

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 [505]. A detailed simulation of the harpsichord, along similar lines, but with some interesting new variations, may be found in [518].

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].