Topic: design question - piano size and soundboard
Hi,
I should first say that I do find the achievements by Pianoteq truely amazing! I have a design question (mainly to the developpers, I guess, but may be somebody else is in the know...).
There are settings for the soundboard and piano size, which I would think should be coupled in a real piano design. They are not here, and may be that leaves more freedom, but I'm not sure whether the "normal" design behaviour is actually implemented. What I mean is the following:
A larger size piano will have both longer strings and larger soundboard. Longer strings means larger inharmonicity which is tuned by the "piano size" setting. It will also change the sustain properties of the string. This can apparently be controlled by the soundboard impedance, which may be fine to model the same thing. But the "soundboard" parameters have no size parameter. With size the resonances of the soundboard change in a complex pattern - e.g. if the contact point (the bridge) for a certain string happens to be at the location of a node of the appropriate resonance closest in frequency there would be very little energy transfer to the soundboard from that string. (These are actually potential imperfections of a real piano, so it may not be wanted to simulate these, but I'm curious how this is done.) The dominant effect from changing soundboard size however would be decreasing the frequency of the lowest resonance. Below that resonance, which is usually higher than the fundamentals of the lowest strings in a grand piano, almost no sound is radiated from the soundboard. This is often called the "missing fundamentals". I would have thought that this is one important detail of piano design. Is this implemented in Pianoteq?
Also for different sizes one might want to vary the location of the bridge relative to the edge of the soundboard - is that been done?
Best regards, Thomas