I'm having a hard time with one of Farnell's exercises. In Chapter 29 of Designing Sound, he shows you how to synthesize an old telephone bell and in Exercise 2 he says to do your own analysis of tubular bells, cowbells or Tibeten singing bowls. I chose cowbell and found a sample online. I had it analyzed in SPEAR and Sonic Visualizer:

In SPEAR, some frequencies stand out more than others, which seems helpful- however, the analysis lacks detail and there's very little information about amplitudes of frequencies.

In Sonic Visualizer, there's more information, but when I see these thick vertical bands of frequencies, I'm not sure what to do- make very thick clusters with oscillators? That would mean using a lot more oscillators than are in the telephone bell patch and doesn't seem in line with the methodology set forth in the telephone bell patch. I've never used Sonic Visualizer, so it's possible I'm using the wrong analysis layer.

This zip-file contains the following two patches + necessary abstractions:
cowbell - the main patch of my resynthesis. It also has the cowbell sample in an array for comparison.
telephoneBell- Farnell's original patch synthesizing a telephone bell.

cowbellProblem.zip

For my resynthesis, I mostly chose frequencies based on the SPEAR analysis and then looked up their amplitude with the Sonic Visualizer analysis. I also made the dynamic envelopes steeper than in the telephone bell patch. I can hear that it's wrong, and doing a rudimentary spectral comparison in PD shows that in the model file, there's much more amplitude around the 430Hz and the 1100Hz range. I'm just not sure how to derive the proper values from an analysis and where within those frequency ranges (the thick red-orange lines) I should be placing the oscillators..

Could anyone give me suggestions on how to go about this analysis/resynthesis? I've been fiddling with this/trying different things too long already and feel like I'm not getting anywhere.

In Sonic Visualizer, there's a spectrogram option called 'Bins' that, when I set it to 'Frequencies', seems to show precise frequencies like SPEAR, but with a higher resolution/more info. I'll try using that for a new analysis and see if it helps...

I guess I should read through the SV documentation at some point.

OK, I've made a new version based on Sonic Visualizer's "Melodic Range Spectrum" (the other modes had too much information):

Perhaps one reason no one is replying to this thread is the hassle of having to unzip the patch + abstractions, so this version uses subpatches instead of abstractions:

cowbell.pd

I'd be grateful for any tips at all, eg. your methods for analyzing sounds, your means of interpreting which data are meaningful for a resynthesis, or your ideas about how to approach this resynthesis using additive synthesis (the method set out by Farnell for a telephone bell) or other techniques.

And if it's of any use, here's the original cowbell sound in wav-format:

364919__gowlermusic__cowbell.wav

@s.elliot.perez For me, using windows, unzip is easier and quicker.
Maybe no-one has bought Andy's book?
I have never tried, so my only thought is that a bell is designed to be pitched and resonant, and a cowbell is designed not to be much of either (many pitches.... so little resonance).
This might be a good read if you haven't seen it already...... not Pd...... but useful I think......
https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/synthesizing-cowbells-claves

Just replying really.
It is miserable being ignored......
David.

Thanks for the reply, @whale-av , I appreciate it, haha.

This part of that article was of particular interest:

Now, here's a trick that I've used on many occasions to fine-tune imitative patches... I sample the sound I'm trying to emulate, and then replay it two or three octaves below its original pitch. This reveals many signal components that are of either too high a frequency, or too short a duration to be distinguished at the normal pitch. Performing this experiment on the CR8000's cowbell reveals no extra high-frequency information, but exposes a halo of noise surrounding the partials, particularly during the impact phase. I was able to recreate this on the Nord by adding a noise generator to the two oscillators, choosing a suitable 'colour', and mixing it in at a low level. I found that pink-ish noise (ie. one with the high frequencies suppressed) gave me the effect that I wanted, as shown in Figure 6.

What's funny is, I had moved on to the next chapter, which includes a PD resynthesis of a metal can using noise clicks run through four [bp~]s at different frequencies (found through a spectral analysis). So before I saw your post, I was thinking a similar technique might work for the cowbell, since it seems to have a very noisy spectrum. I'm going to go ahead and assume Farnell doesn't really expect you to create a perfect cowbell with only additive synthesis but just wants you to try? lol