William J. Strong's musical instrument models

Abstract

After studying acoustics with Harvey Fletcher at Brigham Young University (BYU) in the 1950s, Bill joined the computer music sound analysis/synthesis group led by Melville Clark, Jr., at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959. He presented his first musical acoustics paper, on clarinet tone synthesis, at the fall, 1964 ASA meeting in Austin. This was followed by a paper on oboe synthesis at the spring, 1965 meeting in Washington. These papers were elaborated on in two wind instrument synthesis papers he and Clark published in JASA in 1967. The pioneering method was called spectral envelope synthesis, although temporal envelope functions were also incorporated in the model. Parameters for this complex synthesis method were obtained from time-variant spectrum analyses done by David Luce (Ph.D. thesis, MIT, 1963). Later back at BYU, in the late 1970s and 1980s, Bill and his students began analyzing acoustic structures of wind instruments, culminating with Michael Thompson (M.S. thesis, BYU, 2000) and Bill publishing results on measurement and simulation of nonlinear propagation in a trombone in JASA in 2001. This clearly demonstrated that nonlinear propagation of waveforms in a pipe can produce very significant effects on the “brassiness” of a brass instrument’s output sound.