Fungivarius Beats $2 Million Stradivarius Violin

Fluffeh writes "Violins made by the Italian master Antonio Giacomo Stradivarius are regarded as being of unparalleled quality even today, with enthusiasts being prepared to pay millions for a single example. Stradivarius himself knew nothing of fungi which attack wood, but he received inadvertent help from the Little Ice Age which occurred from 1645 to 1715. During this period Central Europe suffered long winters and cool summers which caused trees to grow slowly and uniformly ideal conditions in fact for producing wood with excellent acoustic qualities. Now scientists are turning to fungi to recreate some of these amazing sounding instruments."

Comments

Re:Violins

[CannonballHead]

That's more of a fiddle player's song. No difference in the instrument, necessarily, but definitely a difference in the player/technique.

Re:The most beautiful sound

[Utini420]

The fact that you even wonder if it would be the same if it was "common" strikes a blow to your assessment that it actually sounded different. I'm sure good ones sound better than cheep ones, but all you convinced me of was that elitism has a note all its own.

Perhaps a placebo effect?

[LitelySalted]

I imagine there might be some of that Placebo effect taking place.

They did a study a while back where they gave cheap wine to ordinary people and labeled it as expensive wine. Then they did the opposite, labeling the expensive wine as cheap wine. When people were asked which wine they liked better, guess what? they liked the "cheap" wine labeled as expensive wine the best.

While I don't doubt that the Stradivari violins may be top notch, I doubt there is that much variance between a "modern" top notch violin and what he created.

Re:Perhaps a placebo effect?

[Maximum Prophet]

A listener might attribute "better" sound to a more expensive violin, *and* the player might play the more expensive violin with more care, resulting in a "better" sound.

A real double blind test would require a robot player that played each instrument exactly the same.

Re:Perhaps a placebo effect?

[jc42]

A listener might attribute "better" sound to a more expensive violin, *and* the player might play the more expensive violin with more care, resulting in a "better" sound. A real double blind test would require a robot player that played each instrument exactly the same.
Some years back, I read of an interesting "double blind" test that showed another interesting complication.

The test setup was a violinist hidden behind a screen, playing the same pieces of music on several instruments. The listeners were a bunch of professional musicians and educators. Neither the play nor the listeners had any information about the instruments, just a number.

The result was that the player reported a quick judgement of each instrument's "quality", usually within just a few notes, and was consistent in that judgement even when the experimenters renumbered the instruments.

However, the listeners were highly inconsistent in their ratings of the sounds of the various instruments. How good a given piece of music sounded was different for different listeners, and unrelated to the commercial "value" of the instruments. It was also not very well corellated with the player's opinion of the instrument's quality.

The main conclusion I drew from it is that the significant difference in an instrument's "quality" is how well it plays (and that could well be different for different musical styles). The quality of sound heard at a distance is primarily a function of the player, not the instrument.

It would be interesting to read about other well-done experiments. But most of them probably aren't too useful, because the players and/or listeners know something about the instruments that they're listening to.

I learned a similar lesson a couple of decades ago, when I was shopping for a violin bow. I decided to carefully avoid looking at the names or prices of bows before playing with them. It turned out that my judgement was uncorellated with the price, and I ended up buying one of the cheaper bows. The shop owner just grinned when I chose that one, and said that he played with that type too, because he liked the sound.

But it's well known among players of bowed instruments that the best bow depends on the instrument, the player, and the style of music. It's meaningless to ask which bows are best without that information.

Methodology

[hardburn]

The test was with 5 violins, which consisted of one Strad, two made recently by biotech, and two made recently in the traditional way. The audience had 180 members. If you were to guess at random, you'd have a 20% chance of picking the Strad, and a 40% chance of picking out one of the biotech productions.

Some comments on the methodology:

• The tested was done blind, but seemingly not double-blind. The player was behind a curtain, but could probably have picked out some visual differences between the instruments (a notch here, certain wood grain pattern there, etc.), which in turn could have affected his playing, consciously or unconsciously. It'd be preferable to get a pair of Strads on loan and have a master violinist play them without seeing them beforehand.
• 180 seems a small sample size to me, especially when you have a fairly high chance of guessing the Strad.
• Was the curtain acoustically transparent?

As it happens, one of the biotech productions got 50% of the vote for the best sounding one, and 63% thought it was the Strad. That beats random guessing by a good margin, but I think this could have been done better.

Hmm.

[Trayal]

This would be rather more convincing to me if the listeners were not part of a group where they could possibly confer with each other (groups of people discussing a subjective subject are likely to come to the same conclusion), and/or if the results have been shown to be consistently repeatable.

Still an interesting start, though. Definitely merits further investigation.

Re:Blind Sound Test.

[Fujisawa Sensei]

They did it with the monster cables vs a coat hanger. You could probably just grab a $500 violin and pit it against one of these 2 million dollar ones and see. The only problem is that the cost of $2m and $500 vs $150 and a coat hanger is a much bigger monetary difference.

But in 10 years that monster cable will be worth the price of scrap copper and the Strad will probably go from $2M to $5M.

Eye of the Beholder

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Give me six months and a soundboard and I'll reproduce and then better the best violin you've ever heard. Only problem is, you'll never accept the results.

You want to know why Stradivarius violins are regarded as being of unparalleled? It's because they are regarded as being unparalleled. Do you seriously think that in over 300 years of violin making that noone has yet beaten what must be by now ancient and squeaky artifacts?

This kind of "Golden Age" worship is not based on any objective assessment of quality or sound harmonics or anything else. When violins are so good that there is no realistic way to tell the difference, people need to make up myths and stick to accepted scripts in order to be accepted as "knowladgeable". It's like how in blind tastings no-one can tell the difference between cheap and expensive wines. Blind test it and I guarantee you that 99.99% of professional music lovers wouldn't be able to tell a Stradivarius from a cubase.

You're telling me that one guy in the 1600 managed to get his hands on all the fungus infested trees in Europe brought on by the cold and "that's" what's making these things sound so good? When people have to resort to such Grade A bullshit like that, you know they're getting desperate. I find it far more plausible that the Emperor has no clothes, and that violins can only approach a theoretical limit of sound quality before physical forces, feedback, etc become dominant over the diminishing returns.

There's no secret to Stradivarius violins. If people want to throw money away on mythical violins, let them. The ones from your local dealer will sound just as good, and in any case, violins don't have any effect on human penis size.

Re:Eye of the Beholder

[ZekoMal]

The digital age hath clouded thine judgment.

Mass produced violins will tend to sound tinny due to their mass-production. Placing immense care into an instrument that'll be in the hands of a 6th grader who really wants to skip school to smoke pot would be a waste of time, so they churn out low quality instruments.

Individually built violins have a warmer tone, as more care is put into them. But that's just on the outer rim of effort put in. The type of wood, the location of the tree it was cut from, how it was cut, weather it withstood, and so on...those all contribute to the sound.

Unlike say, a synthesizer, which can improve its sound exponentially with every additional advancement in computer technology.

You could no doubt improve a violin with digital enhancement, but only for digital distribution. For a live performance, while your digital diva would be setting up hundreds of wires, a simple bow is the only tool a violinist needs to play just as good.

Or, in simpler terms: when you get something right, you don't need to tack on a computer to make it better. Violins are very much so physical, and there is currently no known method to mechanically produce timber that is better than the Strad's timber. Nor is there a particular need to; with people like you saying that all violins sound the same, it seems a damn waste of time to even try.

Re:Eye of the Beholder

[badasscat]

Old Strats are popular for a reason, too.

Was gonna say the same thing.

I'm inclined to believe the "nobody has made a better violin in 300 years" argument because I know from my own personal experience that nobody has made a better electric guitar than those early Fenders in 50 years either.

Actually, strike that - I'm sure that both arguments are overly broad, and not really what any of these people actually mean... 1950's and 60's Fender guitars all have a particular tone to them that just can't be precisely duplicated anymore (be it a Strat, Jazzmaster, or whatever). That doesn't mean that the current ones suck, or that you can't get really, really close to that old tone if you try really hard, but if you do want *that* specific tone, then the easiest way to get it is to just buy an original Fender.

I would doubt very much that classical music aficionados really consider the Strad the only violin worth listening to, more that they associate it with a particular tone that they like and that's very hard to duplicate today. Ditto for electric guitars - there are some great-sounding modern guitars on the market today making some great music, they just don't sound like guitars of yesteryear and that happens to be the sound a lot of people want to duplicate because that's the sound most associated with the kind of music they want to play. Rock bands of the 1960's were using guitars made in the 1950's and 1960's. Classical musicians in the 1600's and 1700's were using violins made in the 1600's and 1700's. So I think a lot of it is just trying to duplicate what people consider an "authentic" sound for a particular type of music, it's not that one instrument or another is the "best" or that you aren't perfectly valid in preferring something else.

But different instruments are better or worse for different things, and just like trying to play the Beatles with a Schecter Hellraiser is not going to sound quite right, I would imagine the same is probably true for some people when talking modern violins and certain types of classical music.

That's becaues it's more mythology than reality

[Sycraft-fu]

There's no question, the man made great violins. However, they are not some amazing, "Oh my god you can hear a huge difference no matter what," kind of thing. High quality modern instruments. It isn't as though there haven't been blind tests and acoustic analysis done, and they haven't shown any difference between high quality current instruments and Stradivarius.

It basically is just a sort of self sustaining mythology, and thus is likely to continue. Even if we produced a violin with nanotechnology that was provably atom-for-atom identical, people would claim the Stradivarius sounded better.

You see this in other high end audio all the time. Cables would be the best example. You can, and people do, pay prices like $50,000 for speaker cables. However there is no research anywhere that shows that they do anything for sound. Yet people claim they can hear the difference, despite none being measurable, and shell out the money.

Also there's simply the status symbol. Stradivarius instruments aren't something everyone can own. As such owning one is a massive status symbol. This will remain true, no matter what replicas are produced.

So it won't matter. They'll be "the gold standard" forever, however in reality we've already matched them acoustically.

Re:The most beautiful sound

[MBGMorden]

I don't think the actual quality was being called into question, but rather the fact that the original poster specificed wondered if the sound would be as good if it was common.

That itself basically states that to some degree, the poster was prizing not the actual sound (which should be good aside from rarity), but rather the fact that he was hearing what was described as a rare instrument.

Personally, I agree on the quality issue, but I've never been much for "rarity" alone making something sound better. As someone also really into (electric) guitars, aside from pure collectors value, from a tonal standpoint I don't see the advantage in paying some ungodly sum for say, an original 1958 Gibon Les Paul Standard, versus any decent modern guitar for $500 and throwing a pair of Seymour Duncan Antiquity pickups in it. One might a lot more "rare", but if the commonly available one sounds as good for a lower cost, then I'll not be a snob.

Re:Reminds me of

[amplt1337]

when I found that classical had the same-- if not better-- calming effect on my brain that some kinds of metal music had.

I suspect that many people who don't listen to much metal would not find this statement surprising. (That's their oversight, of course.)

Music is music

[Riddler Sensei]

It's honestly REALLY fun to read dozens of people trying to rationalize the appeal of Stradivarius violins as being some sort of grand, elitist, social experiment. They're fantastic instruments, they're old, they're relatively rare, and they have a lot of history and legends behind them. Music is the full emotional effect. You can make an instrument that sounds as a good as a Stradivarius, but there are plenty of people that are swept away by the romanticism and mysticism of the original.

Re:A few million of VC should do it.

[Brett Johnson]

The only problem is "a few years" is like 150-250 years.

Re:Blind Sound Test.

[badasscat]

That's your blind test, right there.

Wasn't double-blind, though, which can make all the difference in a test of the tonality of a musical instrument. Much of an instrument's tone comes from the player, not the instrument. And a lot of what we perceive as "tone" isn't tone at all anyway - all a musician would need to do was play an instrument louder and a sizable number of people will think that makes it sound "better".

What's really needed is for a robot to play these instruments - that's the only way to ensure they'd all be played the exact same way every time.

Not Idle

[XLR8DST8]

this is actually informative scientific news. don't see why it's in the Idle section.

Re:Blind Sound Test.

[profplump]

That article says both:
A) Most people probably couldn't tell the different between a high-end modern instrument and a Strad.
B) That they didn't actually do any tests on any instruments, but they think (pure conjecture) that many people could tell the difference between a modern, mass-produced violin and a Strad.