Recent Developments

A model of woodwind toneholes for real-time musical performance was developed by Scavone and Cook [140]. See [140,142,187] for related developments. A model of interaction between the conical bore and the vocal tract is given in [136].

Recent scientific observation of the clarinet reed [47] has largely verified the simple linear, Bernoulli-flow model wherein reed mass is neglected. (See, e.g., [93] for a review of the acoustics of the clarinet reed.) However, effects of viscosity become important near reed closure, and these have not yet been fully formulated theoretically as a function of normal playing conditions (embouchure, mouth pressure), let alone fully verified by experiment, although much has been measured and described [75,76,77,198].

Van Walstijn and Campbell have published a recent paper on woodwind modeling [186] using a hybrid approach which combines a digital waveguide model of the bore with a ``wave digital'' model [60] of the mouthpiece. In more recent work [9], Avanzini and van Walstijn developed a model for the clarinet mouthpiece with particular attention to how the reed closes along the mouthpiece lay; these dynamic details have a large effect on the spectrum of the tone produced, and a sequel to this paper is concerned specifically with this aspect [185].

In the commercial world, a recent offering for ``virtual wind players'' is the ``Patchman Turbo VL'' upgrade chip for the Yamaha VL70-m.²⁰The VL70-m is a rack-mount descendent of the Yamaha VL-1, introduced in 1994, that has accumulated a modest but apparently devoted user base among wind players. The Patchman upgrade is aimed specifically at wind players utilizing wind controllers such as the Yamaha WX7 et al.