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Wood Density May Explain Stradivarius Secret
Whorhay writes "A Dutch doctor and a violin maker from Arkansas have compared five classical and eight modern violins in a computed tomography (CT) scanner. Apparently the 300-year-old violins are made of wood with a more consistent density than the modern violins. They aren't saying for sure that this is what gives the Stradivarius violins their unique sound, but it's the first scientific explanation I've heard for it that seems to have merit." Unfortunately science has yet to explain how how all three chords I know ROCK on my SG.
"Wood", "Stradivarius", and "Secret" made me think that the article must be about Dinosaur pr0n. :/
It might go a log way to preventing them from producing undesirable harmonics.
Anyone know of any studies which looked at the waveforms to find unique qualities?
Check out my sysadmin blog!
Here's an article from 2004 about the fact that the Little Ice Age was most likely responsible for slowing tree growth and creating perfect wood for violins: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/01/0107_040107_violin.html
Hasn't this been known for years? The trees these violins were made from grew during the Maunder Minimum (or Little Ice Age) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_minimum resulting in denser wood.
Well, perhaps this is the final verdict? However, in the past the claim was the wood was from logs that were at the bottom of a swamp or something. Also, it was thought to be the chemical treatment. I suspect this is just the latest theory.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Stradivarius-Violins-Mystery-Solved-41462.shtml
Does this mean that after the study, they'll be able to tell violin makers how to "reproduce" a Stradivarius ?
If yes, does this also means that the value of the originals would be going down, or would it still be considered a highly valuable collectible item ?
They aren't saying for sure that this is what gives the Stradivarius's their unique sound but it's the first scientific explanation I've heard for it that seems to have merit.
This idea (and papers supporting it) have been around for years... a quick Google Scholar search turns up papers going back to at least 2003. The only new part was the use of CT imagery, as far as I can tell.
I remember watching something on History or Discovery a couple of years ago where they postulated that the higher density of the wood used for Stradivarius violins was attributable to the Little Ice Age. It was quite an interesting program all around.
Unfortunately science has yet to explain how how all three chords I know ROCK on my SG.
;) Next up, you should extend your skills and bend those fingers to play the Hendrix Chord.
Actually, Rob, they have explained it. Please see the explanation on Wikipedia for the power chord. Note that they reference Townshend as a popular example of the power chord
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
The varnish on a Stradivarius is what biochemist Joseph Nagyvary thinks is relevant. Cheaper varnishes may be too rubbery and as a result damp high frequencies. He's built some violins based on his ideas, though apparently a good musician can still tell the difference between one of his and a Stradivarius.
One problem with the wood density idea is that not all Stradivarius violins have the sound for which they're famous.
This is a problem with woodwork. It is difficult to get dense wood. Only 20 years ago it was easy to get good dense wood that could be built and oiled so it would last a very long time. Now all I see is light junk wood.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I'd like to know how long they were trying to determine the differences without considering wood density. Other than the shape and size, what other differences could there be?
Whale
... somebody has discovered "the secret of Stradavari" yet again.
There was something on the History Channel a while back about the "Little Ice Age". The Stradivarius violins were showcased because they were made during that time period. Their explanation for the density and tonal properties of the wood was due to the colder climate, the trees grew slowly so the grain was much finer than the trees of today.
The game.
I heard something similar from a violin maker in Indiana. He said the wood was treated by submerging it in the acidic bogs around Cremona. Supposedly this efficiently removed the pectin leaving only the cellulose.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
what wood is the world's smallest violin made out of?
There have been other studies to try and explain it.
I recall there being one a while back about the wood having been treated by soaking in wine.
Then another about varnish.
Now this about the density of the wood.
What if it is a mix of all the factors?
There was a TV show some years back about a physicist who tried to figure out what makes violins sound good. He found a few interesting things.
High-frequency response depends on the shape of the bridge. All those curly-cues cut into it control the transfer function from the strings to the body.
Mid-range response depends on the shape of the f-holes in the body. In this range, the bridge is rigid. The strings push on the bridge, and the bridge rocks the portion of the top plate between the f-holes back and fourth so that it radiates sound.
Bass goes from the strings, through the bridge, down through the sound post to the back panel, and is radiated by the back panel. Stradivarius shaped the back panel of his violins asymmetrically, so that the center of percussion was right where the sound post pushes on the back panel. IIRC, getting the center of percussion under the sound post was a distinguishing characteristic of Stradivarius violins.
Did anybody else hear the theme from Deliverance while reading that?
Anyway, you can make your own jokes with the captioned line, but shouldn't that be "fiddle maker from Arkansas? or "sqeaky-squawky box maker from Arkansas?
Maybe they sound better because the instruments are not played by schmucks, and they are worried about wreaking a $1m+ Stradivarius.
So, the old tradesman's excuse is true:
It appears you really can't get the wood these days!
those instruments were KNOWN to sound better when first created. I would suspect that value may go down a bit, but will stay high due to name. OTH, I would be very surprised if new instruments are not made of very finely selected wood. In fact, I would guess that new trees would be planted for just this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
... that I have read about.
The first was the precise age of the wood. The second was a kind of mold that grows "exclusively" in the wood of Stradivariuses. Etc.
This one sounds no more plausible than the others.
Walked into a bar in Nantucket.....
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
The story I heard long ago rejected the old story of him tapping on trees. Instead he bought his wood from local suppliers. To easily move and manage their inventory, the suppliers kept the logs floating in water (canals or lagoons, I forget). This surreptitiously altered the wood.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
BRRRRRRRR! It is going to take a while to recover from THAT one!
I, for one, prefer my Les Paul ...
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
So, there's some big mystery about Strads that makes them sound better than other violins? Or do people just think they sound better, because a single Strad goes for millions of dollars? Jon Rose adheres to the second theory:
As any honest violin dealer will tell you (and there are a few) the sound of a violin can be priced in a range from $50 (bad, but playable), to $10,000 (good-sounding) to $20,000 (extremely good tone and projection) to $100,000 (simply over-priced). The rest is snotty-nosed hubris. As has been proven on a number of occasions, most notably by the BBC in 1975, a well-made, top modern violin can sound just as good if not better than the prized golden age models. In a recording studio, behind a screen, the violins of Isaac Stern, Pinchas Zukerman and Charles Beare were played back to them. The instruments were a Strad, a Guarneri del Gesu, a Vuillaume, and a Ronald Praill (a modern instrument less than a year old). None of the esteemed violin experts really had a clue which violin was which. Furthermore, two of them couldn't even tell which was their own instrument. They were left mumbling platitudes about the personal relationship between fiddle and player — bloody obvious if you spend most years of your life playing the violin.
His full rant here.
Most plausible:
Stradivarius violins don't sound any better than a good quality modern violin, and nobody is able to tell the difference in an ABX test.
Who alternately and randomly played a strad and a fake strad for an audience and for experts. Turned out that the well made violin was dubbed a strad equally often as the strad even by experts.
What really makes a strad sound good is the musician playing it.
How many entry level violin players play a strad?
There is no magic, there is just LOTS of practice.
God: "I don't leave footprints!"
Why is it that people seem to seek the most complex answer for these type of things? It's the wood. It's the varnish. It's the 'Little Ice Age'. Why not Stradivarius was the best violin craftsmen? Ever. Like other artists before him, he had a unique understanding of how to make this particular instrument and polished his abilities to perfection, the results of which the musicians and listeners still enjoy hundreds of years later.
I've got your sig, right here.
The SG's design carries the neck through to the tail, effectively making the instrument one piece with two attached side pieces. This differs from standard Gibson practice, attaching the neck at the heel, as in my ES-335.
Most players feel that this audibly contributes to sustain, enhancing the harmonic effect of Rob's power chords (all three).
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
Where's Sealand?
"This one sounds no more plausible than the others."
So you're saying you don't think the density of wood influences sound? Or is the implausibility that it is the density itself that is responsible?
If it's the first, then no. There's nothing implausible about claiming the primary material influences the final characteristics. If it's the second, I think that's more reasonable, as it's akin to saying it's the pigments that made Picasso's art what it was, or it's the marble that made Donatello's sculpture what it was.
An artist takes pieces and assembles them into a whole, which is art. Claiming that it is the pieces that are the determining factor misses the point.
This actually kind of old news. These violins were made with wood from trees that went through the Little Ice Age. Cold weather hinders growth in trees and the resulting wood has densities different than what can be found anywhere in the world now. Even if you found a tree that old, like a redwood, it would have rings/growth from after this time period and the harmonics would be different. That's what makes these violins so special... they're literally irreplaceable.
...but it can explain how. Shameless self promotion: look for my book Referential Structuralism when it comes out 8 years from now.
Come on, everybody knows there are no violins or violinists in Arkansas.
There are only fiddles and fiddlers.
Did anybody else hear the theme from Deliverance while reading that?
Q: What's the difference between a violin and a fiddle?
A: People actually like fiddle music!
There was a world class concert violinist (don't remember his name, it has been several years ago) who said he tried to learn to play the fiddle. "Turkey in the Straw is Mozart played real fast with extra notes!" he siad.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
There was a story posted on slashdot about
that guy conducting a concert for a bunch of violin experts,
and they consistently picked his violin as the better sounding
Consider this. The most valuable and sought after violins in the world are made by Giuseppe Guarneri del GesÃ. He was the grandson of Andrea Guarneri who was appreticed with Stradivari under Nicolo Amati, who designed the modern violin in Cremona. There was set of skills and techniques passed on through the Amati family to Stradivari and the Guarneri family, they just made the best.
Unfortunately science has yet to explain how how all three chords I know ROCK on my SG.
It's called overdriving the tubes...everything rocks with a little analog chaos grit. ;)
onion link to susaphone hero
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
Maybe it's just because they're so expensive that only virtuosos can afford them / are allowed to play them?
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
I have played fiddle for 10 years, mostly bluegrass and Irish music. I've also spent time in an orchestra as a clarinet player, as well as a smattering of other instruments. The world of bowed strings and the prices associated with Strad-grade instruments has always astonished me. I can't name another type of musical instrument people are willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for, and I think there are a couple of factors behind it:
1. Most classical violinists play in the company of others, i.e. in an orchestra, where 'one-upmanship' can play a big role. If your instrument isn't as expensive as your stand partner's, you might fear the perception that you value your craft less highly! In fact, I'm told some orchestras won't audition players unless their instrument cost a certain (quite high) dollar amount.
2. I can say as a violin player that the instruments are basically impossible to perform systematic A/B tests with. For example, I can't A/B two different brands of string on my instrument, because changing the strings takes at least 5-10 minutes, by which point my short-term aural memory is already gone. Furthermore, it's next to impossible to change strings without shifting bridge and tailpiece position, both of which affect tone as well. Need some more nails in the coffin? Rosin buildup on the strings and string age also affect the tone _more_ than different brands of strings do. It's a different picture than, for example, factory built electric guitars, where you could set up two identically built solidbody guitars with your A and B stringsets, and (at least within a first order) you could claim equivalence between your two string-testing platforms.
In the absence of the ability to perform systematic tests, it seems like string players go for a lot of "magic" - $90 sets of strings, rosin with gold flecks in it for "warmer, richer tone" - and a lot of other bullshit, including price-performance equivalence. Like Lotus owners, violinists are usually limited far more by their technique than their instrument (once you get into the 10-20K range), and yet there is still a push to buy the 100K instrument!
As for the Strad instruments: scientific inquiry into things like wood density, varnish, etc, seems pretty disingenuous if no one can reliably detect the qualities the instruments are supposed to have. If, as the earlier posters mention, Strads can't be reliably detected in double-blind conditions, it seems obvious that any investigation into their unique properties would be chasing one's own tail. Even if there is an amazing, one of a kind Little Ice Age, shipwreck-sunk virgin blood Stradivarius, none of those attributes are relevant if they don't impact the sound. And if "what makes Strads so great" isn't about the sound, then WTF is the point of the investigation? Dense wood really isn't great for its own sake.
Whew. rant over.
Find a music teacher. http://www.learningmusician.com/
That it was the volcanic dust they used to finish rubbing the wood before varnishing, which stayed in the wood to leave a very hard layer under the varnish - it floated my boat.
-- Only information exists, the rest is just smoke and mirrors.
I'm a woodworker and some of my friends have tried to make violins. They all looked good and sounded terrible. It's definitely a tough business.
Who'd have thought that, way back in 2003, people whould have been smart enough to theorise that the sound of a wooden instrument might be affected by the quality of the wood?
I tell you, those ancients had astounding intellects.
there was article with the same ideas like two years ago
Obviously we aren't there yet, not even close; but in principle the future(possibly even a future some of us will live to see) will hold nanolevel assembly techniques that will allow us to construct objects out of pretty much any material or mixture of materials that plays well with existence. I find it extraordinarily unlikely that the best possible violin is made of some sort of naturally occurring wood, finished with simple hand tools and crude chemistry. How long, though, will we resist such a conclusion?
The same could be asked of wine. In principle, a team of analytical chemists with the right equipment and no reverence for the past could characterize(and possibly, at some future time, economically duplicate) whatever vintage has the experts drooling this week.
for a long, long time now. every real violinmaker has a chunk of heavy old curly maple that was inherited from somewhere, in case they need it to repair a fine old instrument. they tap the wood to determine the density by the sound, like testing for the best watermelon in the bin.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
This was on discovery channel a couple years back. basically very slow growth from cold winters == denser wood.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I've played a Nagyvary viola, and I was considerably less than impressed. Although it had good volume, I think that was more attributable to its being a relatively large instrument, and it had a very unpleasant nasal, muted sound.
The man has some fascinating ideas about using centuries-submerged swamp wood, applying varnish with bugs and other impurities in it, and playing loud music at the instrument so the body's resonance speeds the development of micro-cracks in the varnish to simulate centuries of being played.
But at the end of the day, he's not (or at least wasn't at the time) producing instruments that sound that great.
There was a story several years ago about this. The region of Europe had experience a mini-ice age, aka a couple decades of unusually low temperatures, which caused reduced growth in the trees. Reduced growth means smaller rings. Smaller rings means finer grain and denser wood.
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
There was a big history channel special that suggested that unusually infrequent sunspot cycles could have contributed to the density of the wood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum
has more.
HAhh hahhh "He said wood density"
Yes, a trained professional can pick a Strad' out of a crowd of violins just by the tonal qualities. The resonances & harmonics have a distinctive gestalt.
Dito.
No, there is a difference that you can clearly see in the waveforms between a good instrument and a great instrument.
God no. Ignoring the sense of pacing, emotion, and the hundreds of details a violinist can put into a piece, a cheap violin sounds just that - cheap. Even on a bad day, a mastercrafted violin has a sense of warmth & a clarity of tone that a cheap instrument can't match. It's like saying a trashcan lid is just as good as a Zildian cymbal.
That being said, there is a diminishing return & once you get into those instruments that are made by the masters of their craft, then the differences become minute. The difference between an instrument hand crafted by a master of the art & any mass produced ones will be detectable.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
or had it....he broke the headstock off being a a rockstar one night.
It was heavy as hell and sounded like crapshitdoodypoop. Could have been the cheap electronics it had I suppose.
Although I admit that I am an old man now and mainly play acoustic, but I don't think that the wood selection of an electric instrument makes as much of a difference as one might think.
I'm not at all saying that you could make one out of plywood, just that I think the electronics have more to do with the tone than the wood does.
I own a Les Paul 1960 reissue, and a complete pos Aria pro 2 that I learned to play on. I replaced the pickup in the Aria and now they both make a tone that I am happy with.
Read the complete article here.
There's a reissue of the Ampeg/Dan Armstrong Clearbody out now. The original ones were OK with a pickup that slid from neck to bridge and were really cheap. The bass was a bit better than the guitar, the guitar had a plain boring tone. The reissue is way to expensive.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
Andy
old news, history channel covered this a couple years ago
Ah, but you want those resonance frequencies, or formants. Both for a particular sound color and also to cut through other sounds. The well known "singer's formant" centers around the highest F# on the piano. Opera singers train and train to punch up this harmonic across the actual range of sung notes. There is a hole in the sound frequencies of the entire orchestra that will allow the singer to be heard even while other "louder" instruments are playing.
Also the varnish may be as important as the source wood in trating the wood to get this evenness of density.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
...doesn't surprise me. Different vibrations are going to happen in different patterns (in terms of nodes & antinodes etc) across the body of the instrument. Over time, areas that are consistently antinode are going to become more flexible, due to localized micro-scale damage to the wood structure, while nodes will remain stiff. You can think of it as a (very) low-resolution hologram of every note the violin has ever played, that can leak out when you play it. Consequently, over time the high energy harmonics (which in a well made fiddle are the ones you want to hear) will become easier to play, while the low energy component will not. Something along the lines of multiplying the amplitude of the Fourier spectrum by itself, reinforcing the natural sound of the instrument. Presumably a crappy old instrument (or one consistently played out of tune) would get worse as it aged, while a good one gets better (especially when well played).
I have toyed with the idea of hooking up a new fiddle to a digital output and running it 24/7 through a range of notes to try to "burn" the ideal frequencies into it, but that's not something I've had time for yet. No idea how significant the effect would be either.
If anyone's tried anything like that (on fiddles, guitars, or other instruments) I'd love to hear about it - I have an ACCOUNT@gmail.com where ACCOUNT is "myutilityaccount"
Then you must live under a rock. This theory ( and several like it ) has been put out several times.
Tho this might be the first time they actually tried to verify it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"I, for one, prefer my Les Paul ..."
welcome to the guitarist's rumble! Sharks on the left, Jets on the right! Get dancing.
Just wait until the classic Strat guys show up.
I've got six guitars from six makers, and they're all great for something.
"I have played fiddle for 10 years, mostly bluegrass and Irish music."
Good heavens, man. Don't open a complex mathematical analysis with, "One time I put eight apples with four apples and I counted them up - and there were 12 apples!"
Kidding. I just thought I'd get the fiddle joke over with.
I suspect that what makes a Stradivarius better than other violins is the same thing that makes audiophile equipment better than other equipment: the will to believe.
Higher quality makes a difference, but beyond a certain point the extra quality is all imaginary. I greatly suspect that the reputation of Stradivarius is simply due to high quality construction and craftsmanship. Beyond a certain point that reputation is name only. Trying to find secrets in the wood is pointless, in my opinion.
But what the eff do I know? I can't tell the difference between $499 and $4.99 cables either.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Ahh...but could he/she also "bring out the best" if they were told it was a Stradivarius but it was actually a "placebo" violin? Double-blind testing means that not just the subject (in this case, the listener) but also the tester (in this case, the musician) does not know the true conditions of the test.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
It's not quartz, but I have a friend with a guitar that has a glass body. It's heavy and solid, but it sounds 'harsh'. It's easily one of the worst sounding guitars I've heard, so I'm pretty sure weight isn't the only consideration.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
That Arkansas is where all the great violin makers hail from.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
You want an old spruce tree that's been growing in the shade in a mineral-rich soil. Our "renewable" forests don't provide this wood. The wood is so rare, that it's profitable to dredge rivers for sunken logs lost during the gold rush and sell them to luthiers (guitar makers). --edfardos
Actual blind tests have proven otherwise to your claims...
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2007/1970688.htm
empa in switzerland is doing some interesting research on this topic. they are artificially improving the wood with a certain kind of fungi which decompose parts of the wood. http://www.empa.ch/plugin/template/empa/*/40307/---/l=1
Harmonics of a frequency are its integer multiples. For example, if you're talking about a frequency of 1kHz, then 2kHz, 3kHz, 4kHz, etc. are its harmonics.
Am I missing something here?
The question why Stradivarys sound better than most other strings has been sufficiently answered throughout the last few decades allready:
1) He was into mass production/manufacuring and destroyed all violins and chellos that sounded bad (he burned them)
2) He used ship-builders wood that was submerged in salt water for a few years before put to use.The salt crystals in the wood grain are the prime reason for it's even density. Japanese scientist discovered this more that 10 years ago. It's a nearly trivial task to emulate the same effect nowadays. It's for the stupidity of instrument builders that it isn't done (see below)
3) His string instruments all have astonishingly flat body covers, despite the tradition of glueing them together out of slanted wedges of raw wood. There weren't the possibilities to build plywood back then, which Stradivary most certainly would have used. As that was what he aimed for by making the bodies as flat as possible with the methods of his day.
String instrument builders are so afixed to tradition, it's bizar. I know of a eleventh-grade girl who had to fight her teacher in woodworks to be allowed to ditch the wedge method and use simple thin modern boards and zargs with the grain pointing from cover to cover rather than going around, as it's usually done (and Stradivary did himself). The instrument builder/woodwork teacher has since only built copies of the resultung chello. A boxy looking thing with corners rather than roundings which in most cases sounds at least as good as a top-notch regular chello. And can be built by an amature instrument builder without much of a hassle.
The simple fact that string builders won't even drop the habbit of having the grain of zargs run along the strain instead of vertical, thus resulting in less giving-room for the instrument and a generally screechier (worse) sound shows how uptight and short-sighted they are. Most of them follow traditions that are hundreds of years old and don't give squat about advanced production methods and modern insights into wookworking.
There are quite a few people who can build strings that come close to what Stradivary did and - believe it or not - sound even better. Allthough that admittedly, is also a matter of taste. You will, however, never see such an instrument in a regular orchestra, as it would be percieved as a major heresy.
Bottom line:
A team of engineers with a good workshop and modern materials, tools and woodwork/crafting methods could come up with a string that beats a Stradivary at any time within a few months the latest. Or emulates it's sound exactly. And it would be considerably cheaper. It's only that no one really cares. Especially not those owning a Stradivary.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Try sneaking that subject line through a spam filter.
BTW, it's called Stradivari, from the builder's surname. That's Italian, not Latin.
You are throwing straw-man arguments at me. I neither stated that wood density has no effect, or that the density is an implausible reason for the particular sound quality.
I stated that the density is no MORE plausible that other theories I have read about. That is all.
Why are you trying to argue with me about things I did not even imply, much less write? Please go find people who DID say those things, and argue with them.
Q: What's the difference between a violin and a fiddle?
A: The nut holding the bow.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Nagyvary does not make violins so it is impossible for "his" to sound better. Nagyvary varnishes someone else's violin and since there is nothing to suggest that his varnish ruins a great violin, it is possible that he can luck into a decent sounding instrument. Nagyvary is known to produce violins that are ultimately considered kindling just as often as anything good. He's a fool.
The article certainly didn't say that the density of the wood influenced the sound. Did you read it?
I read somewheres that the master violin makers knew how to isolate and magnify certain harmonics. Other than that, I have a love/hate relationship with the violin. I love it because it can craft a wicked jig or folk tune that takes you away to another place and time. It can be sensuous, evil, bewitching, and enchanting all at the same time. I hate it because most of its proponents and players are stuffy and pretentious and absolutely refuse to budge from their 300 year-old traditions. I recall one time I was shredding the hell out of my ebay violin at a Celtic festival. I had an admirer walk up to me and ask about my instrument, that its sound paralleled $4,000 violins that he'd heard. I explained that I purchased it on ebay for $20, and that it's not the instrument that matters, it's the player. People don't realize that the violin is very much an art, and an instrument so expressive that it's too radical for stuffy academia that it's normally classified under.
this is old news,
i read this in the science encyclopedia about 12 years ago
I seem to recall a study years ago that showed that the tone was nearly all due to the laquer, not the wood.
I don't know about anybody else, but I am getting tired of random speculation about what makes instruments "sound good" (whatever that is supposed to mean). I have play music for many years (and I am a computer programmer also) and I can tell you it is completely possible to make ANY instrument sound bad. I say we use a powerful supercomputer and do simulations of the Stradivarius instruments to find out what makes them work. It is completely within the realm of current computing power, and it may help design better musical instruments.
Wood Density May Explain Stradivarius Secret
Did you read THAT?
What about THAT? Well?
What about THAT? It was in the article you claimed didn't say it in case you were trying to find it.
Where do you people come from? Is there a population of you just sitting around with a mouse in your hand thinking "I know, I'll show the entire internet I'm a moron today".
In the future, if you choose to accuse someone of not reading the article, don't make the mistake of saying the article doesn't say something when it obviously says it several times.
Now go troll someone else, boy.
Maybe I'm just prescient, but didn't we already know this as fact ? Luthiers are a weird bunch, but it's pretty well accepted that what makes certain classic instruments sound so unique is the special attributes of the wood - heavy, dense, and often doped with crude chemicals of the era to make them even richer.
If people today were to make instruments like they did back then, they would probably sound very similar. Problem is, there's a whole lot more money in mass-producing pine bodies in 1/4000th of the time.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
If we could count the number of people who have "found the secret of Stradivari" - and had a dollar - we'd not have to worry about the price of gas.
Catgut Acoustical Society has lots of words on this subject. So does the Guild of American Luthiers.
People are actually getting pretty good at making "tonal copies" of older instruments, based on rules of thumb & science.
It would be news if a couple of months went by & somebody declared "we have no clue how Stradivari did it - and never will" ;-)
Well, no, Luthiers are a unique bunch. Alot more weirdness going on in the world than somebody trying to make a piece of wood into an instrument.
And, well, no, that's not pretty well accepted that wood & doping are what makes instruments.
What makes an instrument is the materials used, and the maker's skill. Then the aging process kicks in, and its played rebuilt/played over a span of time. That's what makes an instrument.
If people today were to make instruments the way they did back then .. the people (not the instruments) wouldn't live that long.
Crude chemicals; non-existent safety practices; draconian labour conditions.
Mass production isn't new to stringed instruments - there was the equivalent of mass production in the previous century for stringed instruments - we'd call them "sweatshops" today.
Pine ? spruce please.
And .. ironically .. decent middle-of-the-road instruments today come out of Asia (labor costs are cheap there). Cheap instruments open up the chance to play for alot more people .. which is a good thing.
Ed the Luthier.
The simple inclusion of a question mark does not actually make a question out of something that was basically worded as a statement, not a question. Your questions were actually worded as accusatory statements, and punctuation does not make it "not so".
Regardless, my subject line was "no, to both". Did YOU not read that? If you did, how can you accuse me of not answering? If you didn't, then you had no place writing this, did you?
I say again: stop trying to make an argument out of nothing. And THEN accusing me of being an "asshole" because I don't appreciate it. Look to your own behavior first, before accusing others.
The fact is that your original "questions" were accusatory and not even about anything I wrote. As for the rest of this "discussion", I believe the quality of your comments speak for themselves.
You are welcome to pretend I don't exist; but in order for you to do that, you would first have to stop writing this garbage.
This is getting to be pretty funny. I am not going to answer you again, but I thought you might like to know just how amusing this has been.
You are a liar. You accused me of using straw men when I did not, it is demonstrable as it is right there in text. The fact that YOU aren't smart enough to tell the difference between an interrogatory and a declarative changes nothing. You are lying.
I agree, watching you contort yourself in an attempt to avoid admitting you are a liar and an asshole has been fun, although I can't imagine why you'd be so amused about demonstrating that you're an idiot to the entire internet.
... in which I am a "liar" is that I wrote that I would not answer you again. And even then, I did not actually lie, but I have changed my mind.
One more time, in an attempt to get you to understand: your "questions" were worded as statements that constituted straw-man arguments against what I had written. Adding a question mark at the end does not change that. Nor do your repeated claims that I am an idiot and a liar make it so.
I have no fear of stating my opinions here. As it happens, I have made sure that lots of other people have seen this exchange, and many of them did indeed find it amusing. But I was not the one at whom they were laughing.
Have a nice day. You can continue to answer again here all you want but in effect you would be talking to yourself.
portrait of a troll.