>> Sound boards *do* affect inharmonicity--and they are affected by relative >> humidity. . >> >OK, perhaps soundboards DO have inharmonicity. Ric, That's not what he said. What was said is that soundboards **affect** inharmonicity. Cotton in your ears may affect your hearing, but that doesn't mean the cotton can hear, or if it can, it's not talking about it. Soundboards *are* talking about it, but it's tough to tell what they're saying. Soundboards **may** indeed have what might reasonably be called inharmonicity since the vibration modal patterns change so much at different driving frequencies at different points on the board, but that hasn't been suggested yet. What's been noted is the changes in inharmonicity readings with humidity shifts. I'm reading an interesting little book on the history of PI from the first attempts, which consisted of drawing very large circles and comparing the directly measured circumference against the radius, through Hippocrates, Euclid, Archimedes, Gauss, Huygens, Descartes, Newton, and on into the present day where it's computable to 100,000 decimal places on a home computer in a few minutes. We're somewhere between Archimedes and Newton on soundboards at this point, so the decimal places just aren't available yet. We can make informed judgements, but can't claim anything near absolute understanding or precision. When some Newtonesque sort happens by and supplies us with the soundboard specific equivalent of the calculus, we'll be on our way. Incidentally, that's Sir Isaac, not Hunt. Our Newton's not quite that old, though I understand people drop apples on him from time to time. Ron N
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