A Methodology for the Estimation of Propagation Speed of Longitudinal Waves in Tone Wood

Abstract

In this paper we propose a methodology for the estimation of the longitudinal wave velocity in tone wood. Differently from techniques adopted in the field of luthiery, the proposed estimation method does not require neither specific user skill nor expensive instrumentation. The introduced method exploits the impulse response of the wood block, acquired by means of accelerometers. The measured signals are processed in order to compute an estimate of the longitudinal wave velocity of the tone wood in a rake receiver fashion. We tested the technique both on synthetic data and measurements of actual tone wood blocks, showing the effectiveness of the proposed solution with respect to state-of-the-art methods.