Alejandro Gallardo

Modeling the Banjo

Banjo Experiment

A little while back, a few physics folks and I were wondering: why are banjo sounds so heckin’ hard to recreate digitally? To this end, we ventured to explore the weird and strange properties of banjo strings and their plucked sounds! We found really interesting nonlinear behavior for a string’s harmonics that support the difficulty in modeling banjos. You can read the paper by clicking the button below!

 
We plucked a specific banjo string, and observed how the first, second, and third harmonics of the pluck became quieter over time, and this graph shows what we saw!

We plucked a specific banjo string, and observed the dampening behavior of the first, second, and third harmonics of the pluck. This is one of the properties of banjos that give it such a unique sound!