Oh hey, it does. But why? (Seems like the same thing is true on actual physical strings.)
Here for example is a piece made up largely of the harmonics (Portrait of Tracy Jaco Pastorius) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsZ_1mPOuyk That's an electric bass and the bell-like sounds are harmonics. Basically he's just lightly touching the string in specific places to suppress the fundamental tone so you just hear the harmonics.
Whereas here (Stir it up - Bob Marley and the Wailers) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hwL3S3Gtzs when the bass comes in, the player is holding his hand near the bridge (back of the strings) with the side of the palm resting on the strings to suppress all the harmonics so you only get the fundamental tone and it has this sort of muffled quality (because a lot of the brightness comes from harmonics).
Palm muting is one big technique to the more aggressive and chunkier metal sounds[1].
Even if you take out the music theory - or blatant disregard for - except kinda not, it's complicated, the different way you can create sounds with an electric guitar[2] in weird ways is quite amazing.
Touching the string at different points will excite different vibrational modes. Notably if you pluck in the exact center you activate none of the even-numbered nodes, if you pluck around the 1/3 point that's optimal for activating the second harmonic, etc. You can never not activate the fundamental mode touching it in one spot but you activate it less if you get close to the edge.
Why is this the case? It is funny that my guitarist's intuition seems very clear about it - "the string is tougher and clickier at the bridge compared to the neck, of course the tone is more shrill" - but in terms of actual analytical evidence I just have to say "something something Fourier coefficients" :) Refining the physical intuition a bit: I believe the boundary at the end of the string dampens lower-frequency (i.e. lower-energy) vibrations faster than higher-frequency vibrations, so the lower harmonics die off more quickly than the higher "nasal" harmonics.
https://www.cycfi.com/2014/07/virtual-pickup-placement-part-...
IMO which answer you prefer depends on perspective:
- if you assume a wave can be broken down into sinusoidal overtones then your geometric approach is much more immediate and intuitive: sinusoidal overtones => higher overtones clearly have more kinetic energy near the boundary, just draw a picture.
- if you assume that higher-pitched overtones have more kinetic energy then the physics approach explains why they are sinusoidal. Not the specific shape unless you do the math, but the "gist" of the slope. If the overtones were more like square waves, with no real difference in shape between frequencies beyond the length of the rectangle, then the pickup position wouldn't matter. But they can't be, the overtones have to be more "trapezoidal." And in particular, the lower overtones must have a more gradual slope than the higher overtones.
The geometric approach makes a big (but correct) physical assumption for an easy analytical argument; the physical approach goes the other way, only depending on Newton's laws + a lot of elbow grease.