Sound impact of simple viscoelastic damping changes due to aging and the role of the double bentside on soundboard tension in a 1755 Dulcken harpsichord

TL;DR

This study uses finite-difference and finite-element models to analyze how aging affects the soundboard damping and tension in a 1755 Dulcken harpsichord, revealing complex damping effects on sound brightness and minimal tension change due to string attachment variations.

Contribution

It introduces a combined FDTD and FEM modeling approach to investigate aging effects and structural features in historical harpsichords, providing new insights into damping and tension behaviors.

Findings

Aging influences sound brightness through frequency-dependent damping effects.

No significant tension change due to string attachment location was observed.

Lower strings exhibit higher brightness, while higher strings show decreased brightness with aging.

Abstract

The sound perception of wood aging is investigated on a Dulcken harpsichord of 1755 from the Museum of Applied Arts in Hamburg, Germany using a Finite-Difference Time Domain (FDTD) model of the harpsichords soundboard. The soundboard thickness was measured on the instrument at 497 positions during strings being deattached and used in the model. Impulse responses were taken on the instrument to estimate the present internal damping by calculating the T60 decay time and used as a model input. By varying the internal damping from this measured damping as a logarithmic decrement, impulse responses were simulated at 52 string positions on both, the 8' and 4' bridge. To estimate the changed sound brightness due to changed internal damping, spectral centroids were calculated from the simulated impulse responses. A dependency of brightness change due to aging on string position was found, where the lower strings have higher brightness, as expected, while the higher strings have decreased brightness. This counterintuitive finding is caused by the frequency-dependent filter effect of changed damping. Future studies need to incorporate viscoelasticity to differentiate this effect further. Furthermore, the attachment of the 8' string to the outer instead of the inner wall, a characteristic feature of Dulcken harpsichords, is investigated using a 3D Finite-Element Method (FEM) model simulation of the whole instrument. No considerable changes on the soundboard tension were found compared to an attachment of the 8' strings to the inner wall, pointing to another reason for this special construction.