Books › Old Violins And Their Makers, 1883 › scan 267
Scan 267
Old Violins And Their Makers, 1883
4 lines. Read by computer on 27 September 2026. Printed page 253. See the scan on archive.org.
1another figure is obtained, and still other figures are formed if the sound be lowered a tone, a half-tone, or even less.
3Although this experiment may be difficult to perform well, one may easily see, even if it succeed imperfectly, that the movement of the string, communicated by the bridge, is shared by the plate, and the various figures, which the sand will form each time a different note is played, will indicate that each of these sounds is reinforced by a particular mode of vibration of the plate in relation to the period of that of the string. If, in this experiment, instead of a plate of lead or copper, one of glass be taken, the "timbre" of the sound will be changed, which indicates that the string and the plate give simultaneous sounds. No doubt the sounds, thus the result of communicated vibrations, would be very feeble if they existed separately, but as in a violin large surfaces are given to the body which produces them, and these surfaces act on a large mass of air excited by analagous movements, the original sound acquires a great deal of intensity. One might think that the plate would only vibrate when the sound of the string is one of those which the plate can yield itself, but experiments proved that this was not the case. It was further proved, by an additional series of experiments, that the greatest regularity and symmetry in the form of these plates were required, in order to obtain the best quality of tone, and this was illustrated by the results obtained from an imperfect string. The most minute irregularity in construction rendered the tone false, and even when the string was not cylindrical it pro-
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