Rollins College Rollins Scholarship Online Honors Program Theses Spring 2020 The Origins of Phantom Partials in the Piano Lauren M. Neldner Rollins College,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.rollins.edu/honors Part of the Other Physics Commons, and the Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics Commons Recommended Citation Neldner, Lauren M., "The Origins of Phantom Partials in the Piano" (2020). Honors Program Theses. 105. https://scholarship.rollins.edu/honors/105 This Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by Rollins Scholarship Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Program Theses by an authorized administrator of Rollins Scholarship Online. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. THE ORIGINS OF PHANTOM PARTIALS IN THE PIANO Lauren M. Neldner A Senior Honors Project Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Honors Degree Program March 2020 Faculty Sponsor: Thomas R. Moore Rollins College Winter Park, FL Contents Acknowledgments 6 1 Introduction 7 1.1 History of the Piano . 7 1.2 The Modern Piano . 9 1.2.1 Frame and Case . 11 1.2.2 Soundboard . 11 1.2.3 Bridges . 13 1.2.4 Strings . 14 1.2.5 Hammers and Action . 16 1.2.6 Pedals and Dampers . 17 2 Phantom Partials 19 2.1 Historical Context . 20 2.2 Historic Theory of Phantom Partials . 21 2.3 Production in Non-string Components . 25 3 Two Plausible Theories 30 3.1 Pressure Induced Nonlinearity . 30 3.2 Contact Nonlinearity . 33 1 4 Experiments and Results 37 4.1 Pressure experiments .