Separation of Site Identity from Day-to-Day Environmental Variation

Establish whether site-level acoustic identity can be separated from day-to-day environmental variation by repeating recordings at each suikinkutsu site across a range of conditions.

Background

Each suikinkutsu site was visited on a different day, so differences in traffic, wind, conversation, and other ambient conditions may contribute to between-site variation. Although within-site recordings were more similar than between-site recordings, the design cannot determine how much of that separation reflects the vessels rather than the particular environmental conditions on the recording days. Repeated visits under varied conditions are required to resolve this issue.

References

First, it cannot rule out the possibility that some between-site differences are also attributable to each site having been visited on a different day, and therefore under somewhat different ambient conditions; disentangling site-level acoustic identity from such day-to-day environmental variation would require repeated visits to each site across a range of conditions, which we identify as a direction for future work.

— A computational framework for the acoustic characterization of Suikinkutsu (water harp cave)  (2610.11219 - Haimes et al., 8 Oct 2026) in Section 4.1, “Limitations”

It is worth noting that the boundary between genuine low-frequency resonance and ambient noise cannot be established with certainty.

— A computational framework for the acoustic characterization of Suikinkutsu (water harp cave)  (2610.11219 - Haimes et al., 8 Oct 2026) in Section 3.5, “Resonant Characteristics,” and Section 4.1, “Limitations”