Phantast, I just sent to ExpandingWave a suite of drawings of Japanese instruments from a musical encyclopedia... which I read while scavenging and scanning. Even traditional oriental instruments have a way of shortening the strings! It doesn't matter if there are 5 notes or 24 notes to the scale, or even if the form is modal rather than scalar, there are still different pitches involved. Those pitches are caused by the vibration of the strings and are amplified by the resonance of the instrument itself. If you just want a simple one-note humming sound, you can use a lyre, but it will not have a sweep of strings, maybe a handful, and it will have some sort of attached sound box. Carolly