When playing a self-sustained reed instrument (such as the clarinet), initial acoustical transients (at the beginning of a note) are known to be of crucial importance. Nevertheless, they have been mostly overlooked in the literature on musical instruments. We investigate here the dynamic behavior of a simple model of reed instrument with a time-varying blowing pressure accounting for attack transients performed by the musician. In practice, this means studying a one-dimensional non-autonomous dynamical system obtained by slowly varying in time the bifurcation parameter (the blowing pressure) of the corresponding autonomous systems, i.e., whose bifurcation parameter is constant. In this context, the study focuses on the case for which the time-varying blowing pressure crosses the bistability domain (with the coexistence of a periodic solution and an equilibrium) of the corresponding autonomous model. Considering the time-varying blowing pressure as a new (slow) state variable, the considered non-autonomous one-dimensional system becomes an autonomous two-dimensional fast–slow system. In the bistability domain, the latter has attracting manifolds associated with two stable branches of the bifurcation diagram of the system with constant parameter. In the framework of the geometric singular perturbation theory, we show that a single solution of the two-dimensional fast–slow system can be used to describe the global system behavior. Indeed, this allows us to determine, depending on the initial conditions and rate of change of the blowing pressure, which manifold is approached when the bistability domain is crossed and to predict whether a sound is produced during transient as a function of the musician’s control.
