A passive nonlinear digital filter design which facilitates physics-based sound synthesis of highly nonlinear musical instruments

Recent work has led to highly efficient physics-based computational models of wave propagation in strings, acoustic tubes, membranes, plates, and rooms using the digital waveguide filter, the 2-D digital waveguide mesh, and the 3-D tetrahedral digital waveguide mesh, all of which are suitable for real-time musical synthesis applications. A simple first-order nonlinear filter structure derived from a passive nonlinear impedance circuit is described which extends the usefulness of these models, and which avoids the difficulties of energy conservation when memoryless nonlinearities are inserted in resonant feedback systems.