A highly accurate plucking mechanism for acoustical measurements of stringed instruments

This paper introduces a fully automated plucking apparatus for stringed instruments. The basic idea of the proposed mechanism is to make use of the constant tensile strength of bare wires. It defines the plucking intensity of a clasped string by pulling the wire until it breaks. The main components of the apparatus are bare wires for the string plucking, solenoids for the transmission of traction, bipolar transistors for the electric circuit switching, and a signal generator for the trigger settings. The mean average of the correlation coefficients between several individual excitations is well above 99%.