What Noise Does a Tambourine Make?

February 29th, 2020
jammer, music
I recorded myself playing around with a tambourine, and I was somewhat surprised to see what it looked like:


(mp3)

I'm thinking of it as four notes, and I hear four notes, but there are really more like eight. As I start to move my wrist to play a note there's a small jingle, and then a larger jingle when I complete the movement. The larger jingle is on the beat, but without the early one it doesn't sound like a tambourine. This two part sound is probably why our onomatopoetic term is "jingle".

If I want to recreate this with sampling, one important question is whether the spacing depends on tempo. If the jingle is longer at lower tempos and shorter at faster tempos, then I need to treat it as two sounds, while if the jingle is always the same length but played more or less frequently, then I can take the whole jingle as a sample.

It looks to me like it's the latter:

The distance between peaks of the jingle looks like ~100ms with both fast and slow playing. In the slow playing (top) the peaks of a jingle are closer to each other than to the peaks of adjacent jingles, while in faster playing (bottom) the peaks are more evenly spaced.

It looks like I only need two samples. First, a free jingle (1, 2, 4):

(wav)

And then a, louder, stopped jingle (3):

(wav)

One thing that makes this tricky is that this is very "slow to sound". You need to trigger the sample ~100ms before you want the beat to fall. In my stage setup I tap the downbeats and it predicts the upbeats, so I handle this by, for the tambourine, additionally predicting the next downbeat so it can anticipate it by 100ms.

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Tuberculosis Considered As Dating Strategy

Against some evopsych

via Thing of Things July 8, 2025

Retrospective on life tracking and effectiveness systems

I’ve been doing life tracking for around 10 years, and this post is looking back at some things I learned from the data (since my previous retrospective in 2017). Highlights include what I get out of the Oura ring, correlations between sleep and deep work…

via Victoria Krakovna July 4, 2025

Elixir's Last Dance

On May 18th, the contra dance band Elixir had their last gig ever. The dance was packed: there were three hundred people. It was the only dance BIDA has ever done where they sold tickets. People flew from across the country just to hear Elixir play one la…

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts June 5, 2025

more     (via openring)