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In acoustic musical instruments special attention needs to be paid to those particularly sensitive parts made of tonewood whose function is to respond to vibrations. One of the most important tonewoods is spruce because of its good resonance properties. Spruce is especially used for soundboards, these being the primary source of sound. Piano manufacturers dry their soundboards to approximately 6% wood moisture, at which drying stage they are glued into the instrument. Fluctuations of the moisture content in the wood affect the tone. With changing moisture content, the instrument can go out of tune, even cracks can appear at very low moisture content in the wood. In addition, the tone colour will change. This may result from changes in the hammer felt or from changes in the vibration properties of the soundboard. Strain-and frequency-dependent damping measurements were carried out on spruce wood at different wood moisture contents in order to investigate the effect of the moisture content on the vibration behaviour. Wood which is slowly dried in air for several years is preferably used for high-class pianos. Therefore, damping measurements on new and on more than 130-year old spruce wood samples were performed.

Magnesium cast parts as well as indirectly and hydrostatically extruded profiles were used in order to investigate the influence of different microstructures on the damping behaviour of magnesium AZ-alloys. Especially, hydrostatic extrusion leads to a significant grain refinement in the extruded profile compared to indirect extrusion. Strain dependent damping measurements were carried out at room temperature using alloys AZ31, AZ61 and AZ80. Damping was determined as the logarithmic decrement of free bending beam vibrations. The results of these measurements after indirect and hydrostatic extrusion are shown and discussed.