Musical instruments, even those made from everyday objects such as sticks, saws, pans, and bowls, must have the ability to create sustained notes for them to be effective. While this ability is often built into the design of the instruments, the musical saw, used to make music across the world for over a century and a half, is unusual in that it is just a carpenter’s saw but held in an unconventional manner to allow it to sing. When a saw is either bowed or struck by a mallet, it produces a sustained sound that mimics a “soprano’s lyric trill” Importantly, for such a note to be produced, the blade cannot be flat or bent into a J shape but must be bent into an S shape. This geometric transformation allows the saw to sing and is well known to musicians who describe the presence of a “sweet spot,” i.e., the inflection curve in the S-shaped blade; bowing near it produces the clearest notes, while bowing far from it causes the saw to fall silent