Articles techniques et présentations

The vibration of the walls of brass wind instruments has been a subject of study in the field of musical acoustics throughout the last decades. The amplitude of such vibrations, stimulated by the oscillating air pressure inside the instrument bore, is very small compared to the dimensions of the instrument. However, it has been recently shown that at the flaring regions of the bell of brass instruments the internal air pressure can excite axi-symmetric vibrations of significantly large amplitude, which can affect the sound quality.

This paper presents the structural properties of brass wind instrument bells and analyses the effect of their vibrations to the acoustic response of the instrument, using an acoustic-structure interaction model.