Simulations of Realistic Trombone Notes in the Time-Domain

Time pressure waveforms associated with four musical notes produced at different volumes on a trombone were measured and then reproduced using a computational model. Special care was taken to accurately model the change in the trombone’s cross-sectional area. An axisymmetric formulation of the compressible Euler equations was used and then numerically solved using the discontinuous Galerkin method. To evaluate the chosen model, the numerical solutions were compared against the measured data collected outside the bell. We found that accounting for the nonlinear behaviour for both high and low sound volumes yielded a good quantitative match between the computed and measured tones. For all four notes, once the sound pressure level drops 30 dB below the main peak, the computed pressure overestimated the measured spectral components.