Acoustic analysis of musical pillars of vitthala temple, Hampi

Abstract

This thesis is a systematic investigation on the acoustics of musical pillars of Vitthala temple at Hampi, India. The columns of different pillars produce sounds of different musical instruments (in particular, instruments used in Indian classical music) when struck by a finger. The earlier works in this area constituted a detailed dimensional and spectral analysis of these musical columns. The use of beam theories to model the columns and calculate the flexural frequencies was also suggested before. In this thesis, the performances of two major beam theories, viz., Euler-Bernoulli beam theory and Timoshenko beam theory, are compared based on the calculated flexural frequencies. The Euler-Bernoulli model gives better performance despite the fact that it is the simplest beam model and does not consider shear and rotation effects of beam bending. The concept of linear prediction (LP) from speech processing is applied onto the columns of musical pillars. The LP spectrum obtained matches closely with the spectrum of sound from the pillar. The concatenated tube model is also used to estimate the varying area function of the columns. Furthermore, an attempt for synthesis of sound from musical pillars is presented using the digital waveguide model. Eventhough the synthesized sound is audibly similar to the pillar’s sound, the model needs many improvements to match its spectral characteristics with that of the sound from the musical pillar.