ABSTRACT
At this stage there is not much I can say about the soundboard. You can guess why it’s there. The natural sound that a string makes is very soft. If you are to hear any sound, the air has to be set vibrating; but a string cannot do that efciently because of its small size. On the other hand, a soundboard has a large area and can get a lot of air moving. The board acts as a sort of amplier but doesn’t really affect the pitch or the timbre
76 Music of the note. It is obviously similar in that function to the bell of a brass instrument. I’ll leave till later the whole question of how the vibration is communicated, both string to board and board to air-a question which was not understood by scientists until the late 19th century. For now I’ll concentrate on the strings only.
