Block-Based Physical Modeling with Applications in Musical Acoustics

Block-based physical modeling is a methodology for modeling physical systems with different subsystems. Each subsystem may be modeled according to a different paradigm. Connecting systems of diverse nature in the discrete-time domain requires a unified interconnection strategy. Such a strategy is provided by the well-known wave digital principle, which had been introduced initially for the design of digital filters. It serves as a starting point for the more general idea of block-based physical modeling, where arbitrary discrete-time state space representations can communicate via wave variables. An example in musical acoustics shows the application of block-based modeling to multidimensional physical systems.