Ah, the occasional benefits of working at Pixar: UC Berkeley researcher Cynthia Bruyns is coming by today to give a technical seminar on her work in creating software to simulate the sounds of virtual percussion instruments of varying shapes. Here is her website.
A somewhat interesting mathematical question is “Can you hear the shape of a drum?” There is lots of good math hiding in simple musical instruments.
[tags]Music,Drums,Percussion,Music Synthesis[/tags]