The pluck you hear is not a recording. It is a Karplus–Strong synthesis: a buffer of white noise of length L = sample-rate / fundamental-frequency, then iteratively averaged with itself shifted by one sample, producing a periodic signal that decays into a recognisably stringlike tone. Kevin Karplus and Alex Strong published the algorithm in "Digital Synthesis of Plucked-String and Drum Timbres" in Computer Music Journal in 1983, having stumbled onto it as a curiosity in a noise generator. It remains the cleanest demonstration that a string is, fundamentally, a delay line with loss.
The guitar itself is a strange creature: an instrument largely peripheral to European art music until the twentieth century, it became the central voice of popular music almost overnight. Andrés Segovia legitimised the classical guitar in concert halls; Julian Bream and John Williams extended its lutherie back into the Renaissance; Mick Goodrick's The Advancing Guitarist (1987) reframed jazz pedagogy around the fretboard's spatial logic rather than scales-on-paper. Earlier still, fretted instruments had their own notation entirely: tablature, where the page describes where to put the fingers rather than what pitches sound. Adrian Le Roy's lute books (1551 onward) and John Dowland's First Booke of Songes (1597) are written this way, and modern guitar tab is a direct descendant.
The cultural breadth of fretted instruments runs far past the steel-string acoustic. The Persian tar and setar, the Arab oud (fretless, but a near cousin), the Chinese pipa, the Indian sitar, the Andean charango, the Hawaiian ukulele — each has its own tunings, idioms and tonal worlds, and each makes the modern guitar feel like one branch of a much wider tree. Even within the guitar tradition, alternate tunings opened compositional doors: Joni Mitchell's Blue, Nick Drake's Pink Moon, John Fahey's American Primitive — each owes much of its harmonic colour to retuned strings.
Karplus, K. & Strong, A. (1983). "Digital Synthesis of Plucked-String and Drum Timbres." Computer Music Journal, 7(2), 43–55.
Goodrick, M. (1987). The Advancing Guitarist. Hal Leonard.
Dowland, J. (1597). The First Booke of Songes or Ayres. London.