Coupled Piano Strings

Perhaps it should be emphasized that for good string-tone synthesis, multiple filtered delay loops should be employed for each note rather than the single-loop case so often used for simplicity (§6.12; §C.13). For piano, two or three delay loops can correspond to the two or three strings hit by the same hammer in the plane orthogonal to both the string and bridge. This number of delay loops is doubled from there if the transverse vibration planes parallel to the bridge are added; since these are slightly detuned, they are worth considering. Finally, another 2-3 (shorter) delay loops are needed to incorporate longitudinal waves for each string, and all loops should be appropriately coupled. In fact, for full accurancy, longitudinal waves and transverse waves should be nonlinearly coupled along the length of the string [394] (see §B.6.2).