Towards improving the acoustical consistency of manufactured musical instruments

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The best musical instruments in the world are built by hand, permitting wooden structural pieces to be individually shaped so that the overall instrument is tuned to specific frequencies. In contrast, manufactured instruments suffer from a lack of acoustical consistency. This is because wood itself is inherently non-uniform and inconsistent and thus machining wooden parts to dimensional tolerances does not guarantee the achievement of desired frequencies for the final assembled product. The goal of this research program is to determine a methodology to improve the acoustical consistency of manufactured instruments so that they match that of a hand-built instrument. To achieve this, it is necessary for structural/tuning components to be individually dimensioned and cut to match the frequency/vibrating component it will be mated with so that the combined system achieves a given frequency. In order to determine the practical problem of how tuning components should be individually dimensioned to other vibrating components, a technical research program needs to be carried out. This involves both forward acoustical/vibrations modelling problems and then setting up and solving specific inverse vibrations problems. The achievement of these goals will imply that (i)our understanding of the modelling and manufacture of musical instruments will improve (ii) research on inverse vibrations problems will progress and (iii)any Canadian manufacturer of musical instruments will be able to adopt these results to produce higher quality instruments that can command a higher sales price for very little additional manufacturing cost.