Study of timbral variation of tenor steelpan mallets through spectral analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The steelpan is an instrument with unique acoustic properties that allow for a wide range of timbral possibilities influenced by the choice of actuator. It is increasingly common for composers and performers to experiment with mallets made from a variety of materials that produce highly differentiated timbres. Examples of mallet types include wood and aluminum shafts covered with rubber tips, chopsticks, dowel rods, and cardboard tubes. Understanding how mallets interact with the steelpan is an important aspect of performance practice. Aside from standard rubber tipped mallets, most other mallets types are homemade and these characterizations will inform mallet design and construction in order to achieve the desired timbral result. While there have been studies analyzing the modes of vibrations of steelpan notes, the interactions between mallets and timbre hasn’t yet been studied and characterized. The goal of this work is to measure and characterize the timbral influence of a wide variety of mallets on a tenor steelpan through low level audio analysis with a focus on spectral features. Audio recordings were made with five different mallets on a tenor steelpan.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".