Detection of string vibrations using home equipment

[DudasPL]

Hi

I have a problem in detecting whether string is vibrating or not. I'm going to conduct experiment which will investigate impact of different factors on time of decaying of guitar's string oscillations but I have no idea how to measure when oscillations stopped. Acoustic method doesn't work well, I can detect sound using microphone only for ~6 sec, while string is vibrating ~20sec. Any other ideas?

 

[mikeph]

Perhaps you can try using a video camera and a strobe light (of known frequency) to detect the vibrations.