Accuracy and stability in mass-spring systems for sound synthesis

This paper examines the stability and accuracy of mass-spring systems used in sound synthesis. We show that the standard method used in mass-spring systems has no numerical damping, but does have frequency warping and is unstable at frequencies above 1/ times the sampling rate. We compare the standard method with two higher order numerical methods: the fourth order Runge-Kutta, and the VEFRL algorithm, a fourth order symplectic algorithm. We …