On the need for musical instrument strings to dynamically stretch
Evan B. Davis · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2007
Given clamped or fixed boundary conditions a string must stretch or elongate to vibrate. Many have analyzed the effect of string stretch under the fixed boundary condition assumption and the related nonlinear motion of the string. However, if the boundary of the string at the soundboard was fixed the soundboard would not move. A rigid soundboard is not a very useful design for the production of music. It will be shown that there are geometries which allow soundboard motion without string stretch well as geometries that require string stretch for soundboard motion.