page_title: Monochord
section_title: Instruments
hierarchical_section_title: Monochord / Instruments
caption_attribution_description: English: String instruments at the Musical Instrument Museum, Berlin.
context_page_description: A monochord, also known as sonometer, is an ancient musical and scientific laboratory instrument, involving one string. The term monochord is sometimes used as the class-name for any musical stringed instrument having only one string and a stick shaped body, also known as musical bows. According to the Hornbostel–Sachs system, string bows are bar zithers while monochords are traditionally board zithers. The "harmonical canon", or monochord is, at its least, "merely a string having a board under it of exactly the same length, upon which may be delineated the points at which the string must be stopped to give certain notes," allowing comparison.
  A string is fixed at both ends and stretched over a sound box. One or more movable bridges are then manipulated to demonstrate mathematical relationships among the frequencies produced. "With its single string, movable bridge and graduated rule, the monochord straddled the gap between notes and numbers, intervals and ratios, sense-perception and mathematical reason." However, "music, mathematics, and astronomy were [also] inexorably linked in the monochord."
context_section_description: Parts of a monochord include a tuning peg, nut, string, moveable bridge, fixed bridge, calibration marks, belly or resonating box, and an end pin.
  Instruments derived from the monochord (or its moveable bridge) include the guqin, dan bau, koto, vina, hurdy-gurdy, and clavichord ("hence all keyboard instruments"). A monopipe is the wind instrument version of a monochord; a variable open pipe which can produce variable pitches, a sliding cylinder with the numbers of the monochord marked. End correction must be used with this method, to achieve accuracy.
caption: Monochords
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