On the Inharmonicity of a Struck String

Abstract

This paper describes the phenomenon called the inharmonicity for a struck string. It is known that its spectral components consist of two inharmonic peak series: “the first partials” due to the elastic stiffness of a string and “the second partials”. Experimental tests for examining a mechanism of the generation of the second partials were performed with a model of a piano string. The experiments suggest that the second partials are those that have frequencies equal to the sum of the frequencies of a pair of the first partials. Furthermore, numerical simulations were done with nonlinear wave equations involving large string deflection.