An elastic ideal 2D propagation medium, i.e., a membrane, can be simulated by
models discretizing the wave equation on the time-space grid (finite difference
methods), or locally discretizing the solution of the wave equation (waveguide
meshes). The two approaches provide equivalent computational structures, and
introduce numerical dispersion that induces a misalignment of the modes from
their theoretical positions. Prior literature shows that dispersion can be
arbitrarily reduced by oversizing and oversampling the mesh, or by adpting
offline warping techniques. In this paper we propose to reduce numerical
dispersion by embedding warping elements, i.e., properly tuned allpass filters,
in the structure. The resulting model exhibits a significant reduction in
dispersion, and requires less computational resources than a regular mesh
structure having comparable accuracy.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, to appear in the Proceedings of the International
Computer Music Conference, 2000. Corrected first referenc