dc.contributor.author | Donovan, Liam | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2019-01-03T15:12:36Z | |
dc.date.available | 2019-01-03T15:12:36Z | |
dc.date.issued | 14/11/2018 | |
dc.identifier.citation | Donovan, L. 2018. Travelling Wave Control of Stringed Musical Instruments. Queen Mary University of London | en_US |
dc.identifier.uri | https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/54052 | |
dc.description | PhD | en_US |
dc.description.abstract | Despite the increasing sophistication of digital musical instruments, many performers, composer
and listeners remain captivated by traditional acoustic instruments. Interest has
grown in the past 2 decades in augmenting acoustic instruments with sensor and actuator
technology and integrated digital signal processing, expanding the instrument’s capabilities
while retaining its essential acoustic character. In this thesis we present a technique, travelling
wave control, which allows active control of the vibrations of musical strings and yet has been
little explored in the musical instrument literature to date. The thesis seeks to demonstrate
that travelling wave control is capable of active damping and of modifying the timbre of
a musical string in ways that go beyond those available through the more conventional
modal control paradigm. However, we show that travelling wave control is highly sensitive to
nonlinearity, which in practical settings can lead to harmonic distortion and even instability
in the string response. To avoid these problems, we design and build a highly linear optical
string displacement sensor, and investigate the use of piezoelectric stacks to actuate the
termination point of a string. With these components we design and build a functioning
travelling wave control system which is capable of damping the vibrations of a plucked
string without adversely affecting its timbre. We go on to show that by deliberately adding
nonlinearity into the control system, we are able to modify the timbre of the string in a
natural way by affecting the evolution of the modal amplitudes. The results demonstrate the
feasibility of the concept and lay the groundwork for future integration of travelling wave
control into future actuated musical instruments. | en_US |
dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
dc.publisher | Queen Mary University of London | |
dc.subject | Engineering & Materials Science | en_US |
dc.subject | fine suspended aqueous sediments | en_US |
dc.subject | aqueous flocs | en_US |
dc.subject | flocculated particles in suspension | en_US |
dc.subject | correlative tomography | en_US |
dc.title | Travelling Wave Control of Stringed Musical Instruments | en_US |
dc.type | Thesis | en_US |
dc.rights.holder | The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author | |