Most musical instruments consist of dynamical subsystems connected at a number of constraining points through which energy flows. For physical sound synthesis, one important difficulty deals with enforcing these coupling constraints. While standard techniques include the use of Lagrange multipliers or penalty methods, in this paper, a different approach is explored, the Udwadia-Kalaba (U-K) formulation, which is rooted on analytical dynamics but avoids the use of Lagrange multipliers. This general and elegant formulation has been nearly exclusively used for conceptual systems of discrete masses or articulated rigid bodies, namely, in robotics. However its natural extension to deal with continuous flexible systems is surprisingly absent from the literature. Here, such a modeling strategy is developed and the potential of combining the U-K equation for constrained systems with the modal description is shown, in particular, to simulate musical instruments. Objectives are twofold: (1) Develop the U-K equation for constrained flexible systems with subsystems modelled through unconstrained modes; and (2) apply this framework to compute string/body coupled dynamics. This example complements previous work [Debut, Antunes, Marques, and Carvalho, Appl. Acoust. 108, 3-18 (2016)] on guitar modeling using penalty methods. Simulations show that the proposed technique provides similar results with a significant improvement in computational efficiency.

Studying the problem of wave propagation in media with resistive boundaries can be made by searching for "resonance modes" or free oscillations regimes. In the present article, a simple case is investigated, which allows one to enlighten the respective interest of different, classical methods, some of them being rather delicate. This case is the 1D propagation in a homogeneous medium having two purely resistive terminations, the calculation of the Green function being done without any approximation using three methods. The first one is the straightforward use of the closed-form solution in the frequency domain and the residue calculus. Then the method of separation of variables (space and time) leads to a solution depending on the initial conditions. The question of the orthogonality and completeness of the complex-valued resonance modes is investigated, leading to the expression of a particular scalar product. The last method is the expansion in biorthogonal modes in the frequency domain, the modes having eigenfrequencies depending on the frequency. Results of the three methods generalize or/and correct some results already existing in the literature, and exhibit the particular difficulty of the treatment of the constant mode.

This paper presents a free and open-source numerical framework for the simulation and the analysis of the sound production in reed and brass instruments. This tool is developed using the freely distributed Python language and libraries, making it available for acoustics student, engineers and researchers involved in musical acoustics. It relies on the modal expansion of the acoustic resonator (the bore of the instrument), the dynamics of the valve (the cane reed or the lips) and of the jet, to provide a compact continuous-time formulation of the sound production mechanism, modelling the bore as a series association of Helmholtz resonators. The computation of the self-sustained oscillations is controlled by time-varying parameters, including the mouth pressure and the player's embouchure, but the reed and acoustic resonator are also able to evolve during the simulation in order to allow the investigation of transient or non-stationary phenomena. Some examples are given (code is provided within the framework) to show the main features of this tool, such as the ability to handle bifurcations, like oscillation onset or change of regime, and to simulate musical effects. *

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