Acoustics Research Project Completed

Today completes the 4 month project I have been working on with MechE professor Isaac Greber. I compared digital, synthesized, instruments to live instruments (flute, saxophone, marimba, and violin). Our hypothesis, which was confirmed, was that the instruments with simple waveforms were better approximated by the digital synthesizers than instruments with complex waveforms. There were some other interesting and unexpected results. The most striking being that the high frequency peaks in the complex waveforms (violin and saxophone) have been drastically reduced in the synthetic sound. We think this is done on purpose so that the synthesizer can support many instances of the same sample while avoiding "beating" in the upper registers.