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As this paper is composed from a technical point of view, some elucidation of facts, forming the basis of it, is desirable before we proceed to the chronological statement of the subject. These facts are the strings, and their strain or tension; the sound-board, which is the resonance factor; and the bridge, connecting it with the strings.
We have here strings, bridge, and sound-board, or belly, as it is technically called, indispensable for the production of the tone, and indivisible in the general effect. The proportionate weight of stringing has to be met by a proportionate thickness and barring of the sound-board, and a proportionate thickness and elevation of the bridge.
All three are with unimportant differences having nothing to do with structure, Cristofori instruments, wrest plank, sound-board, string-block, and action; the harpsichord scale of stringing being still retained.
He strengthened his harpsichord sound-board against a thicker stringing, renouncing the cherished sound-holes. Yet the sound-box notion clung to him, for he made openings in his sound-board rail for air to escape.
The strings, sound-board, and bridge are indispensable, and common to all stringed instruments. The special fact appertaining to keyboard instruments is the mechanical action interposed between the player and the instrument itself. The strings, owing to the slender surface they present to the air, are, however powerfully excited, scarcely audible.
By the frequency of vibration, that is to say, the number of times a string runs through its complete changes one way and the other, say, for measurement, in a second of time, we determine the pitch, or relative acuteness of the tone as distinguished by the ear. We know, with less exactness, that the sound-board follows similar laws.
The sound-board bridges are much further apart than obtains with the English grand, or with the Anglo-French Erard. The advocates of the American principle point out the advantages of a more open scale, and more equal pressure on the sound-board. They likewise claim, as a gain, a greater tension.
The sound-board itself is made of most carefully chosen pine; in Europe of the Abies excelsa, the spruce fir, which, when well grown, and of light, even grain, is the best of all woods for resonance.
He ran a string-block round the case, entirely independent of the sound-board, and his wrest-plank, which also became a separate structure, removed from the sound-board by the gap for the hammers, was now a stout oaken plank which, to gain an upward bearing for the strings, he inverted, driving his wrest-pins through in the manner of a harp, and turning them in like fashion to the harp.
The pulsations of the strings are communicated to the sound-board by the bridge, a thick rail of close-grained beech, curved so as to determine their vibrating lengths, and attached to the sound-board by dowels. The bridge is doubly pinned, so as to cut off the vibration at the edge of the bearing the strings exert upon the bridge.
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