String Instruments
Stringed instrument, any musical instrument that produces sound by the vibration of stretched strings, which may be made of vegetable fibre, metal, animal gut, silk, or artificial materials such as plastic or nylon. In nearly all stringed instruments the sound of the vibrating string is amplified by the use of a resonating chamber or soundboard. The string may be struck, plucked, rubbed (bowed), or, occasionally, blown (by the wind); in each case the effect is to displace the string from its normal position of rest and to cause it to vibrate in complex patterns.
The strings are the largest family of instruments in the orchestra and they come in four sizes: the violin, which is the smallest, viola, cello, and the biggest, the double bass, sometimes called the contrabass. (Bass is pronounced "base," as in "baseball.") The smaller instruments, the violin and viola, make higher-pitched sounds, while the larger cello and double bass produce low rich sounds. They are all similarly shaped, with curvy wooden bodies and wooden necks. The strings stretch over the body and neck and attach to small decorative heads, where they are tuned with small tuning pegs.
Because most stringed instruments are made from wood or other easily perishable materials, their history before written documentation is almost unknown, and contemporary knowledge of “early” instruments is limited to the ancient cultures of East Asia and South Asia, the Mediterranean, Egypt, and Mesopotamia; but even for these places historians must depend largely on iconographic (pictorial) sources rather than surviving specimens.
Types
- Lutes
- Zithers
- Harps
Lutes
Probably the most widely distributed type of stringed instrument in the world is the lute (the word is used here to designate the family and not solely the lute of Renaissance Europe). The characteristic structure consists of an enclosed sound chamber, or resonator, with strings passing over all or part of it, and a neck along which the strings are stretched. Players move their fingers up and down the neck, thus shortening the vibrating portion of the strings and producing various pitches.
Zithers
Instruments of the zither family, in which the strings lie parallel to and are of the same length as the string bearer (often also the resonator), are especially widely distributed in Eurasia, the Americas, and Africa. The least-complex zither type of instrument is the musical bow, shaped very much like a hunter’s bow. (The musical bow is sometimes classified as a harp.) The bow’s single string is tapped or struck, and the pitch can be varied by varying the tension of the string or by using the player’s mouth as a resonator and varying its size and shape, thus emphasizing different harmonics. It is a favourite instrument in equatorial Africa and Brazil, and it is also common in New Guinea.
Harps
With three fundamental components—a number of strings of uneven length, a resonator, and a neck—instruments of the harp family exhibit an extraordinary variety of constructions. The strings of a so-called open harp are attached at one end to the soundboard of the resonator; at the other end, they are attached to the instrument’s neck, which extends away from the resonator, either in an arch or at a sharp angle. If the instrument has an additional pillar that joins the distal end of the neck with the resonator, it is called a “frame harp.” Regardless of the shape of the resonator, the trajectory of the neck, or open or closed structure, the plane of the harp’s strings lies perpendicular—as opposed to parallel—to the plane of the soundboard. It is primarily this string-soundboard orientation that distinguishes harps from other chordophones.
List of String Instruments