The previous section treated an ideal point-mass striking an ideal string. This can be considered a simplified piano-hammer model. The model can be improved by adding a damped spring to the point-mass, as shown in Fig.9.22 (cf. Fig.9.12).
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The impedance of this plucking system, as seen by the string, is the
parallel combination of the mass impedance
and the damped spring
impedance
. (The damper
and spring
are formally
in series--see §7.2, for a refresher on series versus
parallel connection.) Denoting
the driving-point impedance of the hammer at the string contact-point
by
, we have
The impedance formulation of Eq.(9.19) assumes all elements are linear and time-invariant (LTI), but in practice one can normally modulate element values as a function of time and/or state-variables and obtain realistic results for low-order elements. For this we must maintain filter-coefficient formulas that are explicit functions of physical state and/or time. For best results, state variables should be chosen so that any nonlinearities remain memoryless in the digitization [364,351,558,556].