Active control applied to wind instruments

Musicians have always been interested in the evolution of their instruments. This evolution might be done either to adapt an instrument’s quality to musicians’ and composers’ needs, or to enable it to produce new sounds. In this study, we want to control the sound quality and playability of wind instruments, using modal active control. The modal active control makes it possible to modify the input impedance (frequency, gain and damping) of these instruments and to modify the instrument’s quality. The simulations for a first experiment are presented here. We simulate a control of the modes (frequency, damping) of a cylinder, which is considered as a simple ”wind instrument”. We consider the use of a microphone, a speaker, an observer and a controller to modify theses modes, then we look at the modifications on the sound and playability using Modalys. Our next goal will be to apply the control to a real cylinder, and to evaluate it in a musical context with a musician