Acoustic analysis of racket-ball impact in Padel

Engineering of Sport 15 - Proceedings from the 15th International Conference on the Engineering of Sport (ISEA 2024)

Due to economic, health, and environmental reasons, it is important to know when to change racket but no method existsto assist players. Acoustic analysis of racket-ball impact could help us to detect a critical wear index and deserves to be proved. Indeed, we hypothesise that mechanical alterationsto the racket could change its acoustic behaviour and these differences could be perceived by the players. That’s why we search for a possible relationship between the physical and perceptual features of the racket-ball interaction. Physical measurements and perceptual descriptions for golf clubs (decay rate, sound pressure level, spectral centroid) and table tennis rackets (modal frequency) have been found to correlate. To our knowledge, such studies do not yet exist in padel. However, informal discussion with players and the influence of racket composition on its acoustics tend to show that such a link could also exist in padel. In order to provide a first proof of principle for assessing racket wear using their acoustics, the current study set out to determine the acoustic differences between two rackets.