Athons

Athons is the complete string-engineering workbench for harp builders, lyre makers, zither craftspeople, and anyone who designs, repairs, or experiments with plucked and struck string instruments. Enter the speaking length, pitch, and material for each string and Athons instantly computes tension, stress as a percentage of the breaking limit, inharmonicity, elongation, feel, and down-bearing load on the bridge — everything a luthier needs to know before a single string goes on the frame. The Workshop lets you build and save complete string-set designs for any instrument, from historical Greek lyres to modern concert harps. The built-in Gauge Optimizer scans a gauge ladder and finds the ideal wire diameter for every string in the set, automatically switching from plain to wound construction when stiffness-driven inharmonicity climbs too high, and substituting denser materials when geometry demands it. The Beat Map calculates beat rates and psychoacoustic roughness for every interval pair in a design, so you catch problems on paper long before your instrument does. A standalone Bench Solver handles single-string calculations in four modes: solve for gauge, tension, pitch, or speaking length, and sweep across any axis to visualize trade-offs. Athons ships with a deep tuning system library covering equal temperament, Pythagorean, four meantone variants, three historical irregular temperaments including Werckmeister III and Kirnberger III, Young II, pure just intonation, and Ptolemy's intense diatonic. You can also define your own systems by specifying a generator fifth, per-fifth deviations, just ratios, or raw cent values. The engine computes fifth and third errors, identifies wolf intervals, and ranks every key by consonance score. String materials span steel music wire, stainless steel, phosphor bronze, red bronze, yellow brass, copper, silver-plated copper, tungsten, and titanium alloy for metal strings, plus nylon, fluorocarbon, synthetic gut, natural gut, and silk for non-metal strings. Export a finished string chart as an image, attach a photo of the physical instrument, and set your preferred tension unit — Newtons, kilogram-force, or pound-force — along with a reference pitch anywhere from 390 to 470 Hz.