SOUNDING WOOD, Tonal differences of woods employed in historical soundboards

Abstract

This work starts giving a short introduction about woodworking and devotes the second chapter to collecting and commenting historical sources dealing with wood used in stringed keyboard instruments. In the following part, looking both at sources and extant instruments, an approximate atlas of the wood types used in various building traditions is sketched; natural range and features of the most important trees used in soundboards are also given. A special kind of clavichord has been designed and built to test different soundboard materials without changing strings and bridge: pictures, together with a description of the instrument's genesis and technical features are provided in the fourth chapter. Physical measurements of the wood used in the sample soundboards and spectrum analysis of the recorded sound complete the work.