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plectrum| In music, a device for plucking a string instrument. For a guitar or lute, it may be worn on the finger, as a substitute fingernail; others are held between two fingers, for example to play the mandolin. The harpsichord employs mechanical plectra of quill or leather to pluck the strings. |
| Most plectra are hard, but soft felt plectra are also used to ease abrasion of the ball of the finger. A plucked sound can be simulated on a synthesizer by programming an instantaneous or rapid onset, followed by a rapid decay and longer reverberation. |
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| ? Mentioned in | | ? References in classic literature |
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| Now slow The plectrum led to prayer the cloistered chords, Now loudly with the crash of falling rain, Now soft as the leaf whispering of words, Now loud and soft together as the long Patter of pearls and seed-pearls on a dish Of marble; liquid now as from the bush Warbles the mango bird; meandering Now as the streamlet seawards; voiceless now As the wild torrent in the strangling arms Of her ice-lover, lying motionless, Lulled in a passion far too deep for sound. For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard the forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefinitely far; such a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable plectrum, the very lingua vernacula of Walden Wood, and quite familiar to me at last, though I never saw the bird while it was making it. You mean, I said, those gentlemen who tease and torture the strings and rack them on the pegs of the instrument: might carry on the metaphor and speak after their manner of the blows which the plectrum gives, and make accusations against the strings, both of backwardness and forwardness to sound; but this would be tedious, and therefore I will only say that these are not the men, and that I am referring to the Pythagoreans, of whom I was just now proposing to enquire about harmony. |