Classification and identification of recorded and synthesized impact sounds by practiced listeners, musicians, and nonmusicians.

Three experiments were conducted to test the viability of a low-parameter modal model for synthesizing impact sounds to be used in commercial and psychoacoustic research. The model was constrained to have four physically based parameters dictating the amplitude, frequency, and decay of modes. The values of these parameters were selected by ear to roughly match the recordings of ten different resonant objects suspended by hand and struck with different mallets.