Dr. Feinberg explains to us a phenomenon more commonly known as "Stratitis." A magnet can affect the vibration of the metal strings in a musical instrument. Here it is shown that a magnetic field can cause splitting of a metal guitar string's normally degenerate transverse vibration modes, leading to a beat note in the resulting sound. A distributed spring model accurately predicts the natural frequencies of a vibrating guitar string in the non-uniform magnetic field.
