To this day almost all guitar makers worldwide primarily use tropical wood like palisander (Dalbergia spp.) for their manufacturing. Due to the current CITES regulation from January 2017 related to the trade of tropical wood it gets unavoidable to generate and establish alternative materials with equal material properties. One possibility of improvement is the thermal modification of wood which increase technical and acoustical properties of different European wood (Pfriem, 2006, Zauer et al., 2015). Besides determining material properties the sound quality of the finally build instrument is of considerable importance. Therefore the method developed at the IfM (institute for musical-instrument making) which enables a substantial proposition of the acoustical performance of string instruments was used to obtain an acoustical comparison of a guitar made of modified wood and a guitar traditionally made of tropical wood.
Keywords: thermally modified wood, acoustic
Authors
Christoph Munk
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany
Lothar Clauder
Alexander Pfriem
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