MIT's virtual violin offers luthiers a new design tool

Violin makers, aka luthiers, traditionally learn from hands-on experience how to craft parts and select materials to shape an instrument's final sound. MIT engineers hope to streamline that painstaking process with their new virtual violin. It's a computer simulation tool that can capture the precise physics of the instrument and even reproduce a realistic sound of a plucked string, according to a paper published in the journal npj Acoustics.