One Japanese researcher actually made violin strings from spider silk!
Shigeyoshi Osaki, a professor at Nara Medical University in southern Honshu, used between 3,000 and 5,000 strands of silk for each string, which produced ‘a soft and profound timbre’ when played.
A video of this can be found in the source of this fact.
Osaki bred 300 female Nephila maculata spiders to make the strands. Don’t worry, this didn’t affect the spiders’ feeding. The silk all came from strands the spiders used to hang from not their webs.
Of course, these violin strings must be pretty strong if they use spider silk. Indeed, they have a greater strength than either gut or steel strings!
This is in part because the strands of silk are not completely cylindrical, but rather have 4-6 sides, allowing the researchers to cut down on gaps between strands.
