Designing soundboards with flexural disk models
Evan B. Davis · Proceedings of meetings on acoustics · 2012
A flexural disk soundboard and ported box system is developed to explore various structural acoustic design strategies for musical instruments. The flexural disk is used to link structural and acoustic properties of the soundboard. Musical instrument are designed to reproduce a range of frequencies defined by the playing range of their strings. The lowest frequency of the playing range is the note of the lowest open string. The highest commonly played note frequency is taken to be octave above the frequency of the highest open string. The fundamental frequency of the main wood mode of many string musical instruments is tuned to the geometric mean of the playing range. The main air mode is commonly tuned an octave below the main wood mode. The simple flexural disk models with their linked structural acoustic properties demonstrate a solid structural acoustic logic to the empirically developed instruments and why these designs have been so resistant to change by inventive and creative contemporary instrument makers.