Immersive Melodies: Classical Strings Expansion

An addon for Immersive melodies that adds the string section: the four bowed instruments of the orchestra, and the harp that sits behind them. Craft them, load a melody, and play — they slot into everything the base mod already does, including the melody browser, recording and imports.

Instruments

Violin	The bright one. A strong resonance around 2.5 kHz — the bridge hill, which is what makes a real violin carry over an orchestra.
Viola	The violin's shape with a nasal edge, from resonances at 220, 350 and 420 Hz. Close enough to be mistaken for a violin, far enough to sound wrong for the part.
Cello	Played upright on its endpin, leaning back over the shoulder. Its bridge hill has dropped to 1.2 kHz, so it is warm where the violin is brilliant.
Double bass	The darkest, with its bridge hill down at 700 Hz. Slow, big and felt more than heard.
Harp	Plucked with the pad of the finger rather than a nail or a plectrum, so it starts soft and rings the longest of anything here.

Four sizes of one instrument

The bowed four share a body, because that is what they are — the same instrument built at four scales. They differ in varnish, in how large they are rendered, and in whether they stand on an endpin. What changes in the sound is where the body resonates: the bridge hill walks steadily downward from 2.5 kHz to 700 Hz as the instrument grows, which is most of why a bass cannot pass for a violin no matter what note it plays.

They also stop quickly. A bowed string goes silent almost the moment the bow leaves it, so these have the shortest sustains in the whole set — 200 ms for the violin, growing only slightly with size. The harp is the opposite: 600 ms, the longest ring of any plucked instrument I have built.

How the sound is made

None of these are recordings. Every sample is synthesised from a physical model of the instrument — the harp from a plucked string model on a delay line, the bowed four from a deliberately over-bright source shaped by fixed resonant filters, with bow noise, slow pitch wander and per-partial attack times so the tone brightens as the note speaks. Fixed formants are what make the ear hear a wooden body rather than a transposed oscillator.

Each instrument ships eight samples, one per octave from C1 to C8, so the mod never has to stretch one recording across the keyboard.

Fitting in

The instruments join the immersive_melodies:instruments item tag, so anything keyed off it treats them as first-class instruments. They live in their own creative tab rather than crowding the base mod's.

Requires Immersive Melodies 0.6+ for Forge 1.20.1.

Immersive melodies - Classical strings expansion