Transmission Line Based Plucked String Model

Abstract

As one way to describe the behavior of a vibrating string, analogies to a transmission line have been made based on the fact that they have oppositely travelling waves on each of them. In such analogies, a rigid end to the string has been represented as an open circuit, and the displacement of the string as the current on the transmission line. However it turns out that the rigid end corresponds to a short circuit, the displacement to the voltage by the theory of the transmission line, and it is confirmed by experiments with circuit simulations. Based on these discoveries, a transmission line based plucked string model comprising a transmission line, two piecewise linear current sources, and switches is proposed. The proposed model is validated by showing that the voltage at the arbitrarily chosen location, and the voltage calculated over an infinitesimal portion at the end of the transmission line are consistent with the displacement at the corresponding location and the force on the rigid end of the string from the well known difference form of a wave equation governing the behavior of the string with its fundamental frequency tuned to that for the proposed model, respectively. Moreover, the applicability of the proposed model to modeling string and wind instruments is presented.