I've read differing opinions of whether the ends of a lute belly's bracing bars should be glued to the ribs (thereby adding support and helping to define the shape of the bowl) or not glued as such (leaving the belly more free to vibrate). My experience and intuition don't add up to enough to guess either way. And I suspect that the historical record is muddied by the fact that bellies have been removed and reglued so many times, such that what we see is merely the most recent revision and not necessarily "the way it was done".
Is there any definitive record of this being done one way or the other in (say) the Renaissance period? On the one hand I'm inclined to say that the amount of 'hinging' provided by tapering the bars away from the ribs (and not gluing them to the ribs) is minimal and beyond the scope of acoustic comprehension of our Renaissance forebears. On the other hand they made some pretty neat stuff, and our own modern comprehension of how musical instruments work is lacking in some respects too. As far as I know the lute hasn't been subjected to the strenuous testing that violins have been subjected to, the spectrum analysis and physics simulations and such. But if it has, was a correlation found between the type of connection between the bars and ribs and the type of sound produced? -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
