Green guitars
Green guitars
Sound from acoustic guitars may soon become more melodious for environmentalists. Hiroyuki Yano, Yuuzoh Furuta and Hiroyuki Nakagawa of the Kyoto Prefectural University in Japan have discovered a replacement for Brazilian rosewood, an endangered tree that has been used to make the backs and sides of the best guitars. The researchers started with a tree that can be grown in sustainable plantations, the Japanese cedar, and tried to give it the acoustic properties that make rosewood such a desirable material. The density of cedar is less than one-third the density of rosewood, and is far less stiff. So the researchers compressed strips of cedar at 150