# String Materials



## Enthalpy

Hello nice people! Here's a thread about *string materials*.

Former thoughts can be found there
scienceforums - chemicalforums
Your inputs are obviously welcome. This topic should passionate musicians, as strings are paramount to the sound, and constitute the easiest and cheapest way to adjust the sound of an instrument.

========== Harp detuning

Detuning plagues the harp. Several research papers try to relate that with the sensitivity to temperature and humidity of catgut and wood.

But violinists would think first at a different explanation, by experience. Played with a bow, a string stays tuned for long. Playing *pizzicato detunes it* immediately, especially if forte. So *extension beyond the elastic limit* is a more immediate cause, more so because this limit uses to be fuzzy for natural materials.

More people, harpists or not, must suspect the material's plastic deformation. But too many researchers look in secondary directions.

========== Need materials

I hereby renew my call to polymer chemists. When I'm a mechanical engineer, I have enough strong and stiff fibres. But I need fibres and materials that absorb much deformation energy, both to dissipate it or to restore much of it. I needed them when developing apparatus for crash-tests, something beyond PU would be very nice. String instruments and tennis champions rackets use sheep gut because stretched polyamide is less elastic, while superfibres are too lossy and stiff.

At strings, strong lossless deformation is needed, and sqrt(sigma/rho) (used stress and density) must exceed the 340m/s air sound speed. Other uses prefer more strength or more deformation or more damping.

Whether the material is man-made or processed or natural, I don't care. Whether it resembles collagen or bone or has ortho and meta bonds rather than para, I don't care neither.

Marc Schaefer, aka Enthalpy


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