APPLICATION OF OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUES FOR ACOUSTICAL RESONATORS

Following our preceding work on the optimization of structural vibrating components of musical instruments, we now have extended those techniques to acoustical resonators for marimba-type instruments or other applications. In this paper we suggest that acoustical resonators may be tuned to multiple modes of the vibrating bars, in order to enrich or simply modify the timbre of the instrument. After a short review of our modelling and optimization techniques, we illustrate the approach with several examples. A detailed study of the acoustical properties of three optimized resonators with various relationships of the optimized acoustic modal frequencies is presented, based on finite-element acoustic computations. The shapes of such multi-modal optimized resonators are completely different from the typical cylindrical resonators. Finally, we present experimental results which validate the theoretical approach