Stephen Birkett

Associate Professor
Stephen Birkett

Contact information

Phone: 519-888-4567 x45792
Location: E3 3158

Website

Stephen Birkett

Biography summary

Stephen Birkett is an Associate Professor in the Department of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo.

His research interests are in piano design, organology, physical systems, animal growth modelling, and environmental systems.

Professor Birkett has now completed the bulk of his research in early iron and is in the process of starting to draw wire for pianos. He has been working with high-speed imaging of various fortepiano actions. The P-wire has been thoroughly researched, developed and tested over the past decade by Professor Birkett, and is about to enter commercial production. It is drawn in the proportional Nuremburg sizes and has been reported to have the added advantage of natural corrosion resistance.

Research interests

  • Piano design
  • organology
  • physical systems
  • animal growth modelling
  • environmental systems
  • Computer Simulation of Systems
  • Modeling & Simulation

Education

  • 1990, Doctorate, PhD, University of Waterloo
  • 1986, Master's, MASc, University of Waterloo
  • 1976, Bachelor's, BSc, University of London,King's College

Courses*

  • SYDE 114 - Matrices and Linear Systems
    • Taught in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024
  • SYDE 312 - Applied Linear Algebra
    • Taught in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024
  • SYDE 351 - Systems Models 1
    • Taught in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023

* Only courses taught in the past 5 years are displayed.

Selected/recent publications

  • Masoudi, Ramin and Birkett, Stephen, Experimental validation of a mechanistic multibody model of a vertical piano action, Journal of Computational and Nonlinear Dynamics, 10(6), 2015
  • Birkett, Stephen, The slippery path from piano key to string, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 136(4), 2014, 2132 - 2132
  • Masoudi, Ramin and Birkett, Stephen and McPhee, John, A Mechanistic Multibody Model for Simulating the Dynamics of a Vertical Piano Action, Journal of Computational and Nonlinear Dynamics, 9(3), 2014
  • Birkett, Stephen, Experimental investigation of the piano hammer-string interaction, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 133(4), 2013, 2467 - 2478
  • Borland, Matt and Birkett, Stephen, The implementation of pyschoacoustical signal parameters in the wavelet domain, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132(3), 2012, 1886 - 1886

Graduate studies