What a fun discussion!
If I may, some terminology issues are confusing people. "Sound" means different things to different people, and although I agree with Mr. Hart, I think his term should be modified from "sound" to "player's sound" or something similar to avoid future confusion. Most of us should be using the word timbre unless we want to include articulation, dynamics, rhythm, phrasing, timbre, and frequency under the general heading of "Sound." In that case, "Sound" encompasses BOTH equipment (bass, bow, room--including furniture [like chairs, spoons, mothballs, and other people in the room], and ears) and player's sound into one big Sound.
Ha...
As for bows resonating at a frequency. Of course they do! But like every musical instrument, they have a fundamental resonating frequency and some overtones. Those overtones may or may not be in some easily identifiable mathematical happiness (like your standard resonating tube or string: 1*f + 2*f + 3*f + ... + n*f). More likely, they come in some more high-density and more random form like many percussion instruments (Bells being a crazy and cool exception because you can tune the overtones!)
Okay! So when you tap your bow against your leg (as I have a habit of doing during rehearsal) you feel it wiggle at a very low frequency: approximately 10-15 Hz... Some bows may resonate as high as 50 Hz. Our low C is approximately 32.7 Hz. It should be easy to infer that many of the frequencies the bow resonates at and the bass resonates at will overlap and create widely different timbres--canceling and augmenting certain frequencies.
Keep in mind that a huge swath of frequencies is produced when you tap-wiggle your bow or pluck a string--many of which are unrelated to the note we want to hear. The attack alone is more like 5 ms of white noise, and the bow is (ideally) constantly "attacking" the string with the hair and re-plucking it over and over--think about flicking a coin that's already twirling on your tabletop to keep it going, or spinning the carousel your kids are enjoying... that's bowing. (on a side note, now imagine the HUGE amount of effort it would take to change bow directions in a millisecond like we ask our poor basses and bows to do--much less turn the carousel in the opposite direction without your kids flying off... : P) Erm.. the point of that was that that constant "attacking" sound is always going to figure into the timbre in a pretty big way. [haha, "that was that that." I love it]
I'd love to see a study on the interactions of the two in terms of frequency. We could surely do it these days. Perhaps carbon fiber bowmakers have already done it?
Ugh, sorry about the long post... my first post, too! Hope I didn't say anything stupid....
-Trevor
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