Originally Posted by
pdlamb
I remember Brandt's dis on plucking. I also remember watching a good violinist playing for an oscilloscope. What sounded like a clean tone coming from a musical instrument looked exactly like Brandt's description of the spoke. I figure if a human can pick out the pitch of a violin, guitar, etc. and tune to that, a trained human ear can listen to the sound of a spoke and tune that as well.
These electronic tuners have to deal with all the cross-talk from other strings, so I'd expect they can do the same with a wheel.
Indeed, I'm a musician, and I use pitch to help me when I'm tensioning a wheel. In addition there's a math formula that tells you the tuning frequency as a function of tension and the mass of the spoke / string, but that formula doesn't apply to butted spokes. I don't try to do it super precisely, mainly because I'm not a professional wheel builder and so my tensions never turn out perfectly uniform. Instead, I'm mainly concerned that all of the spokes are sufficiently tensioned so I don't have to worry about spoke breakage. Plucking spokes is a quick way to find that one spoke that somehow got neglected.
I check my "master" pitch by plucking a known-good wheel and making sure it's believable. But I have very quick hearing, and it's quicker and cheaper than any kind of gauge.