The article makes it sound like this is a very a new idea, but physical models of music instruments, including violin, has been around for over 40 years. Daisy Bell, the first piece of computer music and performed by their model, utilized a physical model of the human singing voice based on measurements of human vocal tract, and that was done in 1962.

Julius Smith wrote pretty comprehensive textbook on the subject of building physical models of musical instruments, available online. Here, for example, is a chapter on modeling bowed string sounds: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/pasp/Bowed_Strings.html

“As it is, the new computational model is the first to generate realistic sound based on the laws of physics and acoustics.”

Ouch: this is completely inaccurate. Physical modeling has its roots in the 80s and Stefan Bilbao has been doing FDM based methods for over 20 years. I think he discusses fem in numerical sound sysnthesis

Semi-related?

"Show HN: Anyma V, a hybrid physical modelling virtual instrument" 01-aug-2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41132104 29 comments

"Show HN: I built a synthesizer based on 3D physics" 02-may-2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43873074 123 comments

Someone made a virtual car engine that was able to generate realistic sounds a few years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKT-sKtR970

Reminds me of this last years siggraph paper about cello playing animation

https://youtu.be/ODR6eQOjm9w

https://github.com/Qzping/ELGAR

It's just fun to see solutions to problems you didn't even know to exist.

it doesn't sound as a real violin at all. A professional violinist would immediately tell that something is wrong.

Bowed instruments are very cool to model because of the nonlinear slip of the bow against the string. A bit curious why bowing was not discussed or used in the example of a violin, just plucking. Do luthiers test violins more by plucking than bowing?

As a disclaimer I haven't read the article, nor do I know much about simulating instruments in particular, but I just wanted to point out that accurately simulating the physics of a musical instrument is most likely still a very difficult problem.

I have no doubt there's been analytical/semi-analytical models around for decades. I mean a program that can take an arbitrary geometry or class thereof with specific materials and simulate the high frequency vibrations and model interactions with the body with high fidelity (not through ad-hoc models) is probably still out of scope of real time simulation.

My point is really that there's often families of models that deal with one thing, from semi-analytical first coded in Fortran in the 80s that can run in milliseconds but is only valid in certain configurations with a low degree of accuracy, to "first principles" simulations that may well require a supercomputer to produce results to a useful degree of accuracy (and not in real time). So, just because you see someone claim they can "simulate X", and then another makes the same claim 40 years later, that doesn't mean they're doing the same thing.

For instance, aeronautics has XFOIL. It's a semi-analytical model first devised in the 80s that computes aeronautics coefficients for a certain class of airfoils (NACA). My understanding is it's a very clever, and industrially significant, piece of code, but ultimately it works in a narrow regime with some heavy simplifications. You can now get results from this in real time on a webpage. A proper CFD calculation to a NACA wing will take in the order of minutes to hours on a workstation (depending on requested precision and settings, e.g. speed of air), and while closer to first principles, it's still using physical simplifications (RANS). So yeah, although nominally people have been "simulating airfoils" for 40 years, the techniques have refined considerably, and will continue to do so (practical LES and, someday, DNS). It might be another century that people are still "simulating airfoils" in ever more accurate (nailing down within the constraints), high fidelity (lifting constraints) and generic ways.

Back to instruments, this is a difficult coupled problem, in fairly high frequencies (high frequencies = more expensive), with possible fluid-structure interactions, not to mention the geometries are fairly complex (to even get a workable mesh to begin with). My uneducated guess is we're still at either semi-analytical, or at the "considerably simplified first principles" stage for this type of problems. Just like DNS, I'm sure you could "just resolve the scales and run it through a simulation with a really tiny time step", and this is liable to be similarly expensive as DNS (million dollar single simulation). Additionally, they have to deal with the human ear, which is perhaps more unforgiving than an error plot on drag or lift. So I wouldn't dismiss news of instrument simulation as stale just because someone made something that produced similar artifacts in the past, as the methods will continue to evolve considerably.

Not sure if that's news, Audio Modeling[1] has been doing that for quite a long time now. The big plus of physical modeling instead of sampling is disk size - instead of tens of GB of samples, you get a 15MB plugin.

It's much more difficult to use, though - you have to control lots of aspects of the simulation (using automation in DAW or MIDI controllers) to make it sound actually realistic.

OK I guess it seems like this is more of a tool for luthiers than for composers or music producers.

[1] https://audiomodeling.com/