String materials for historical zithers
Henna Tahvanainen, Jolan Thomasset, Rauno Nieminen · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2025
In both physical and numerical restoration of historical string instruments, knowledge of the string materials and their acoustical properties is needed. In this research, we construct a test instrument with five different string materials for historical zithers: steel, copper, horse hair, gut, and nylon. By keeping equal tension and length for each string, we can study how different choices of string material affect the sound of the instrument in terms of partials, their decay times, and inharmonicity among other things. The results can be used for sound synthesis as well as determining what kind of string to use for copies of historical zithers.