Hammer weight

[Stephen Birkett]

Terry Miller wrote:
> This sounds like a great project for a Physics Grad student.
>
> A soup-to-nuts study might include all the math, the diagrams, theory,
> testing in various pianos, and maybe some time-lapse photog (do we REALLY
> know what's going on at hammer/string contact.
>
There has been an enormous amount of research done on this problem
going back well before a group of Indian researchers c1930s (much of
their work was poor to downright incorrect in the math), to c1980s
which saw two groups: one in Japan (H. Suzuki et al) and a series of
papers in the J. Amer. Acoustical Soc. by D. Hall. This work from the
1980s is probably reasonably accurate (to a point), which is why I
quoted some of the results earlier. However the analytical and
computational techniques needed to study this seemingly simple
problem with any degree of realism have only really just become
available within the last few years. I'm hoping that some new
computational techniques for analysing multi-body mechanical systems
will be applicable to this problem (that's the main approach in the
computer model I'll be developing). To achieve anything resembling
realism has always been virtually impossible because of the
computational difficulties arising from the nonlinearity...but
these new methods were devised precisely to make this kind of
work tractable.


Stephen Birkett (Fortepianos)
Authentic Reproductions of 18th and 19th Century Pianos
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
tel: 519-885-2228
fax: 519-763-4686