Guitars and Plucked String Instruments

Abstract

We have seen the wind instrument and the bowed and friction instrument family to be self-organizing by nature. But how about plucked string instruments like the guitar? We would not expect it to be self-organizing, as there is a string that vibrates with its frequencies on its own, and there is no way to find any nonlinearity in this. Also, all other features for a self-organizing process are missing, like the sudden onset of a pitched musical tone out of previous noise, hysteresis loops, or more complex sounds coming from the instrument. No matter how soft we pluck the string, it always sounds harmonic.