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It was now due to his firm to introduce a fixed stringed plate, instead of plates intended to shift, and in a few years to combine this plate with four solid tension bars, for which combination he, in 1827, took out a patent, claiming as the motive for the patent the string-plate; the manner of fixing the hitch-pins upon it, the fourth tension bar, which crossed the instrument about the middle of the scale, and the fastening of that bar to the wooden brace below, now abutting against the belly-rail, the attachment being effected by a bolt passing through a hole cut in the sound-board.
Each lower note struck of the undamped instrument, by excitement from the sound-board carried through the bridge, sets vibrating higher strings, which, by measurement, are primes to its partials; and each higher string struck calls out equivalent partials in the lower strings. Even partials above the primes will excite their equivalents up to the twelfth and double octave.
To make them sufficiently audible, their pulsations have to be communicated to a wider elastic surface, the sound-board, which, by accumulated energy and broader contact with the air, re-enforces the strings' feeble sound. The properties of a string set in periodic vibration are the best known of the phenomena appertaining to acoustics.
I pointed to the cypress wreath. "When she died," said he in a very hoarse solemn voice, "when she died, the soundpost of that violin broke into pieces with a ringing crack, and the sound-board was split from end to end. The faithful instrument could only live with her and in her; it lies beside her in the coffin, it has been buried with her."
The Germans further displayed that ingenuity in fancy stops Mersenne had attributed to them in harpsichords more than a hundred and fifty years before, by a bassoon pedal, a card which by a rotatory half-cylinder just impinging upon the strings produced a reedy twang; also by pedals for triangle, cymbals, bells, and tambourine, the last drumming on the sound-board itself.
The formation of nodes is helped by the barring of the sound-board, a ribbing crosswise to the grain of the wood, which promotes the elasticity, and has been called the "soul" of stringed musical instruments.
For me the great drawback to one unbroken casting is in the vibratory ring inseparable from any metal system that has no resting places to break the uniform reverberation proceeding from metal. We have already seen how readily the strings take up vibrations which are only pure when, as secondary vibrations, they arise by reversion from the sound-board.
These are: First, The making of the framing and the sound-board; Second, The stringing; Third, The keys and action; Fourth, The case and ornamental work. The framing requires strength and simplicity.
I pointed to the cypress wreath. "When she died," said he, in a very hoarse solemn voice, "when she died, the sound-post of that violin broke into pieces with a ringing crack, and the sound-board was split from end to end. The faithful instrument could only live with her and in her; it lies beside her in the coffin, it has been buried with her."
The sound-board has a crack in it somewhere, Nino says, and two of the notes are dumb since the great German maestro came home with my boy one night, and insisted on playing an accompaniment after supper. We had stewed chickens and a flask of Cesanese, I remember, and I knew something would happen to the piano.
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