Simulating saxophone sound and vibrato

Inspired by his years of playing saxophone, Diego Tonetti was always interested in the acoustics of the instrument. When he was younger, he wanted to 3D-print a mouthpiece for his saxophone, but he lacked the knowledge of the science behind the mouthpiece’s acoustics to correctly replicate one.

However, this interest has remained even into higher education, so using the resources in his lab, Tonetti and his advisor Edoardo Piana synthesized the sound of a saxophone using its acoustic impedance and reed vibration measurements.

Previous literature had studied the mouthpiece’s effect on the sound of a saxophone, so the researchers turned their focus to the saxophone’s acoustic impedance and player-reed interaction, which allows saxophonists to create complex sound effects such as “vibrato.”

“Here in the laboratory, we are used to measuring and characterizing acoustic impedance of porous materials,” Tonetti said. “We use a two-microphone impedance tube that allows us to basically measure the pressure and particle velocity at the front face of the sample.”

Tonetti 3D-printed the custom two-microphone impedance tube to measure the saxophone acoustic impedance, while he 3D-printed a second device to assess the reed vibrations with a high-speed camera while interacting with an artificial lip.

Once the measurements of the reed oscillation under the acoustic pressure were taken, he derived a model to couple the reed with the pressure reflections modeled by the saxophone acoustic impedance. By combining these two models, Tonetti was able to create a sound simulation synthesis.

This passion project isn’t finished with the publication of his paper. In the future, Tonetti wants to use simulations to create more compact woodwind instruments that sound similar to the larger models, such as the bass clarinet.

Source: “Saxophone acoustical modeling and vibrato “a la machoir” sound synthesis,” by Diego Tonetti and Edoardo A. Piana, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, (2026). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0041855 .