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Meridian Field Archive Vol. 09 · Clustering Report · Ward linkage / spectral distance

Twenty-one recordings, sorted by how alike they sound.

Every tape in the ninth collection was reduced to a 48-band spectral fingerprint and merged, pair by nearest pair, until one root remained. Read the tree right to left: the further left a join sits, the less the two branches have in common. Drag the cut to slice the tree into groups.

Right-angled dendrogram of 21 field recordings clustered by spectral similarity

    A text list of all recordings and their cluster assignment is available from the archive index.

    Linkage

    Ward

    Variance-minimising merges over 48 mel bands, 30-second medians.

    Cophenetic r

    0.874

    Correlation between tree distance and raw spectral distance.

    Groups at cut

    4

    Recomputed live as the cut line slides along the similarity axis.

    Total runtime

    2h 14m

    Twenty-one tapes, recorded between Bergen and the Wash, 2021–2024.