Four Banjo Necks and One Pot

Abstract

Four necks of different type of wood with the same shape and hardware were attached to a single pot, with the same set-up. Sound files of played music and single plucks are provided. Most people will recognize small differences in the pluck sounds and identify the necks (albeit not unambiguously) in the played music either from experience or “training” from labeled examples. It is not known whether the differences arise solely from the wood or from some other inadvertent variation. Spectrograms show differences in intensity and decay time across the entire frequency range. These differences reflect differences in timbre and its time evolution. No simple physics narrative is identified to connect weight and large-scale stiffness to the observed sound variations.