Participants: Antoine Lefebvre and Gary Scavone

Period: 2005 - 2012

This research was focused on the design of woodwind instruments with improved acoustical and mechanical characteristics, accomplished with the aid of new materials, physical modelling, impedance measurements, and collaborations with professional musicians. It included experiments to characterize the influence of important acoustical parameters in assessing the quality of instruments. The work also involved computer-based design optimisation using the Transfer Matrix Method, which parameters derived from Finite Element Modeling.

The Wind Instrument Acoustic Toolkit (WIAT) is a Python package that was developed in the course of this research.

• Lefebvre, A. and Scavone, G. "A Comparison of Saxophone Impedances and their Playing Behavior." In Proceedings of the 2011 Forum Acusticum Conference, Aalborg, Denmark, 2011, pp. 539-544.

• Antoine Lefebvre, "Computational Acoustic Methods for the Design of Woodwind Instruments." Ph.D. thesis, McGill University, 2010. [4.8 MB]