VERY LONG STRINGS

Musical strings that are very long – like, say, 15 feet or more – present a musical world that is different from that of conventional strings. One reason is that for very long strings the fundamental is likely to be subsonic, and what’s to be heard in the hearing range is a sonic landscape crowded with closely spaced overtones. There are practical challenges in making a twenty- or thirty-foot instrument, but as a temporary approach I decided to run some strings the length of my shop, clamped to a vise at one end and with a jerry-rigged tensioning system at the other. I did a lot of crazy things with these strings, most with the aid of magnetic pickups. Some involved slides, springs, rattling bridges, dampers, weights and what not. Since this was not to be a permanent set-up, I sampled the sounds for later use. You can hear some of the samples in the sound clip on this page.

(For a very different approach to long strings, using longitudinal rather than the usual transverse vibration, see Ellen Fullman’s Long String Instrument.)