Terminated String Impedance

Note that the impedance of the terminated string, seen from one of its endpoints, is not the same thing as the wave impedance of the string itself. If the string is infinitely long, they are the same. However, when there are reflections, they must be included in the impedance calculation, giving it an imaginary part. We may say that the impedance has a ``reactive'' component. The driving-point impedance of a rigidly terminated string is ``purely reactive,'' and may be called a reactance (§7.1). If denotes the force at the driving-point of the string and denotes its velocity, then the driving-point impedance is given by (§7.1)

where and denote the Laplace transforms of and . In the case of a rigidly terminated string above, as well as in any system in which all energy delivered to the system is ultimately reflected back to the input, the impedance is purely imaginary at every frequency (a ``pure reactance''), as is easy to show:

where denotes the string length. Let denote the period of string vibration. Then on the frequency axis we have

Thus, the driving-point impedance of a rigidly terminated string is purely reactive (imaginary), with alternating poles and zeros along the axis. Impedance will be discussed further in §7.1 below.

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About the Author: Julius Orion Smith III
Julius Smith's background is in electrical engineering (BS Rice 1975, PhD Stanford 1983). He is presently Professor of Music and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), teaching courses and pursuing research related to signal processing applied to music and audio systems. See http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/ for details.