Experimental lecture: the sound of gongs and cymbals

Gongs and cymbals are percussion instruments whose sound has always fascinated by its fullness and richness. Unlike most musical instruments, they do not emit a well-defined tonal pitch, but rather are characterized by a broad frequency spectrum. In this talk, we will show how the vibratory regime can be characterized, using controlled experiments that will reveal a succession of transitions before arriving at a regime that has many analogies with turbulence in the fluids.
We will then show how we can simulate this strongly non-linear vibratory behavior using dedicated methods, which allow us to obtain extremely realistic synthetic sounds that we will listen to.