Vibration and acoustic characteristics of domestically produced compressed cedar wood stringed instruments

Abstract

To develop domestically produced stringed instruments, the sound and vibration characteristics of the top plate of the ukulele made from the compressed cedar wood in Japan were experimentally investigated and compared with those produced from rosewood. We measured the density of compressed cedar wood plates and found that the density was close to that of the rosewood plate when the compression rate was over 70 %. Then, the vibrational accelerations of the top plate were measured for modal analysis when each string was played. The results showed that the vibrational modes were similar to each other for the fundamental frequency of each string. However, it was found that they were quite different at harmonic frequencies.