Strike a bell, a bar, or a drum and it rings at a handful of modes — fixed frequencies, each fading at its own rate. Model the object instead of the waveform: excite a bank of tuned resonators (one band-pass filter per mode) with a short noise burst, and the resonances do the rest. The magic is the ratios — a bell's partials are stubbornly inharmonic (0.56, 0.92, 1.19…), which no single repeating waveform can make. Higher modes decay faster, so the tone brightens on the attack and mellows as it rings.
A short, brighter burst hits the high modes harder — a hard mallet vs a soft one.
play with your keyboard (a s d f …) or click the keys