This paper presents a musician-oriented modelling and simulation environment for designing physically modelled virtual instruments and interacting with them via a high performance haptic device. In particular, our system allows restoring the physical coupling between the user and the manipulated virtual instrument, a key factor for expressive playing of traditional acoustical instruments that is absent in the vast majority of computer-based musical systems. We first analyse the various uses of haptic devices in Computer Music, and introduce the various technologies involved in our system. We then present the modeller and simulation environments, and examples of musical virtual instruments created with this new environment.

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