Printone

This paper presents an interactive design interface for three-dimensional free-form musical wind instruments. The sound of a wind instrument is governed by the acoustic resonance as a result of complicated interactions of sound waves and internal geometries of the instrument. Thus, creating an original free-form wind instrument by manual methods is a challenging problem. Our interface provides interactive sound simulation feedback as the user edits, allowing exploration of original wind instrument designs. Sound simulation of a 3D wind musical instrument is known to be computationally expensive. To overcome this problem, we first model the wind instruments as a passive resonator, where we ignore coupled oscillation excitation from the mouthpiece. Then we present a novel efficient method to estimate the resonance frequency based on the boundary element method by formulating the resonance problem as a minimum eigenvalue problem. Furthermore, we can efficiently compute an approximate resonance frequency using a new technique based on a generalized eigenvalue problem. The designs can be fabricated using a 3D printer, thus we call the results "print-wind instruments" in association with woodwind instruments. We demonstrate our approach with examples of unconventional shapes performing familiar songs.