In movies, every time someone fires a bow, there’s that springy sound effect that’s clearly intended to be the string straightening back out from the drawn position. Did real bows made of the wood, sinew, etc people had before modern materials ever actually sound like that? Did they have a sound at all?
I know that the bows people are typically shown using in movies are generally nothing like the ones they’d really be using. Usually they’re either so thin and have such a recurve that I don’t think the can even be fired at all, or a plain bow that’s far too short to have the firing power they’re depicted as having. But all the bows I’ve seen fired in person are your standard modern recreation types, made of completely different substances than the bows of fiction and history- so for all I know, that sound effect could be accurate.
Historical and primitive bows are all over the map, sound-wise. Twangy bowstrings, as in the clip, indicate a bow out of tune, the usage of thin bowstrings, or arrows that are a bit low in mass for the particular bow, leaving energy in the bow end of things to make sound. I wouldn’t be surprised if the film makers picked up the sound of the bowstring for effect (although nowhere near to the level heard in movies). Having built and shot historical bows for some 20 years, when standing close to a traditional archer, the sound of the flying arrow is usually more prominent than the sound of the bowstring, kind of opposite from the clip. Hunters opt for neither, and a well-tuned bow shooting well-tuned arrows is near silent on release. Not that string noise was of much concern to the Tudor bowmen the clip emulates.
