The paper doesn't mention any grant money in the acknowledgments section. The author isn't claiming to have discovered anything new about banjo sounds. In fact, he repeats throughout the paper that his findings largely confirm what banjo players and makers have known for many years. But that's not the point. What he did was to come up with a mathematical model--a series of equations--to analyze the effects of different structural qualities of banjos, based on the physics of wave propagation, on several aspects of the sound they make. In this paper he started simple, looking at only three sound qualities (loudness, brightness, and decay), and varying just a few structural aspects, like head tension, bridge mbutt, point picked along the string. He included lots of other structural parameters (e.g. rim radius, density) but kept them constant for his calculations. We all know a banjo is way too complicated to be able to model everything perfectly, at least on the first try, but I think this is a great start. With models like this, instrument makers at least have a reference point for directing their tinkering, and the models may point out some surprising ways to improve sound (or make good sound less expensive to achieve) that banjo makers might otherwise never have come up with. I can only see that as a good thing.

Paul