THE STEELPAN AS A SYSTEM OF NON-LINEAR MODE-LOCALIZED OSCILLATORS, PART II: COUPLED SUB-SYSTEMS, SIMULATIONS AND EXPERIMENTS

This paper is a sequel to reference [1]. In that paper, the dynamics of the steelpan notes were developed as systems of non-linear mode-localized oscillators. The present paper examines the coupled note-note and note-skirt systems on the steelpan modelled as a plexus of non-linear oscillators interconnected by linear mechanical filters. The tonal qualities of a note depend on the degree of coupling and the closeness in frequency of the excited modes on the interacting subsystems. Modes above the fundamental (the partials) are produced by internal and combination resonances.