A simple demonstration of playing the saw quickly reveals the robustness of its musical quality to imperfections in the saw, irregularities in its shape, and the precise details of how the blade is flexed. Fig. 1D shows a time trace and spectrogram of the saw clamped in either a J shape or an S shape (Fig. 1 B and C) when struck or bowed near the sweet spot. The dull and short-lived sound (Audio 1) associated with the J shape might be contrasted with the nearly pure tone (≈595 Hz) lasting several seconds (Audio 2) when the saw is bowed while shaped like an S. While the pitch can be varied by changing the curvature of the saw, the sustained quality of the note is largely indifferent to the manner of excitation and the specific nature of the clamps, as long as the inflection point is present.