Simulating a guitar with a conventional sonometer

Abstract

Musical acoustics is an interesting sub-field of physics which is usually able to engage students in a dual perspective, by combining science and art together. The physics principles involved in most musical instruments can be easily demonstrated with standard laboratory equipment and can become part of lecture or lab activities. In particular, we will show in this paper how to simulate a guitar using a conventional sonometer, in relation to the problem of the instrument intonation, i.e., how to obtain correctly tuned notes on a guitar or similar string instruments.