Digital waveguide synthesis

Digital waveguides are efficient computational models for physical media through which acoustic waves propagate.

For this reason, digital waveguides constitute a major part of most modern physical modeling synthesizers.

These traveling waves will reflect at boundaries such as the suspension points of vibrating strings or the open or closed ends of tubes.

Vibraphone bars, bells, singing bowls and other sounding solids (also called idiophones) can be modeled by a related method called banded waveguides, where multiple band-limited digital waveguide elements are used to model the strongly dispersive behavior of waves in solids.

The term "digital waveguide synthesis" was coined by Julius O. Smith III, who helped develop it and eventually filed the patent.

This is possible because the digital waveguide is linear and makes it unnecessary to model the instrument body's resonances after synthesizing the string output, greatly reducing the number of computations required for a convincing resynthesis.

[1][2] The first musical use of digital waveguide synthesis was in the composition "May All Your Children Be Acrobats" (1981) by David A. Jaffe, followed by his "Silicon Valley Breakdown" (1982).