> Not necessarily. You forgot about density. > RT I did not forget about density, I just didn't see the need to set down all the details. If you would like I'll give you all the numbers (but not tonight as I don't know which drawer my notes are in). The charactistics of the material that are relevant are the density, the elasticity and the tensile strength per unit cross section. There are others, but not quite so important to string selection (although perhaps to tonal quality). The anomaly (I should have said "coincidence") is that steel wire, gut, and nylon (and now Nylgut) have compensating values in density and tensile strength (neglect the elasticity, that has more to do with holding tune). When you work the density and tensile strength through the formulas they all three (four) come up with almost a constant.
The pitch of a string is defined by its frequency of vibration (which you know). That is dependent on its length and density and guage. (Guage determines the cross sectional area and density the weight for a unit length). Again, as you know, the greater the density the smaller the guage needed for a given pitch and length. This is all tautology. But what I said was the coincidence of the commonly used strings for the various stringed instuments. Breaking point is a function of tension and guage and tensile strength. Tensile strength is a characteristic of the material, but the thicker the guage the more "pull" the material can handle before breaking. So to come back to my original statement there is a combination of pitch and string length that will cause string breakage at about the same pitch when dealing with steel wire, gut, nylon and Nylgut (bronze and brass wire are different). For example, the 63.5 cm of my flat back (since redesigned by the maker) can't hold a g', whatever the guage or material, without breaking (except the high tensile strength fishing line I'm using for the chanterelle). This isn't theory, nor is it design, it is coincidence. The most commonly used strings have different densities, and different tensile strengths but they balance out. And they all come within about a half to full tone of each other in breaking point (pitch/length). Best, Jon To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
