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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."
Any time I see someone playing a violin I ask if they can play "Devil Went Down to Georgia." I usually don't get positive responses...
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
When I was much much younger I was purchasing a violin. While at this shop the owner had a 'cheap' Stradivarius. After I had selected the instrument I wanted (this had been going on for weeks of trying them) the owner let me hold, and play, his 'cheap' Stradivarius.
The sound that effused out of that instrument can not be put into words to hear and feel... it made the one I selected sound as if it were a cheap knockoff made of plastic. The tones could not even be compared in the same room- one was transmitted through steel cups and a string, the other was singing in front of you.
To this day that is one of the more emotional feelings of music I have ever felt.
To have that sacred sound reproduced for everyone to have access to- I don't know. It is such a beautiful instrument that, currently, only the elite can have and play (most instruments are endowed to players- on 'loan'). Should everyone have access... would it be the same?
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.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
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.
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:
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.
Not a typewriter
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.
May the Maths Be with you!
Nonetheless, this is promising work. A modern violin by the best makers is typically a $25,000 instrument, while professional players in major orchestras are expected to spend several times that for an older instrument. It's like having an extra house payment. If the quality of the modern instruments starts to rival and surpass those of lesser makers in antiquity, it will help young players immensely as well as giving speculators in such instruments a well-deserved comeuppance.
I'm old enough to have seen that a breathless "the real secret to Stradivarius's violins discovered!!!" story comes up about once ever ten years, then fades away, making way for the next iteration.
When I was in high school it was that the wood he used was floated down rivers before it got to him, and therefore picked up minerals - which a modern maker claimed to have duplicated by boiling the wood in a broth made from shrimp shells. (I'm not making this up.) Earlier, it was something to do with the exact composition of the varnish. And no doubt numerous others that I never heard of.
Somehow, through it all, Strads are still prized above all other instruments, and keep increasing in value each year.
I listened to quite a bit of classical music when I was a kid, but during high school I switch to rock. During college I rekindled my interest in it when I found that classical had the same-- if not better-- calming effect on my brain that some kinds of metal music had. In particular, almost everything by J.S. Bach and Girolamo Frescobaldi. I especially like Glenn Gould's Bach recordings (piano) and Colin Tilney's Frescobaldi recordings (harpischord).
I've found that the structure and depth of much classical music is much more complex and satisfying than most contemporary music. Don't get me wrong, I still listen to rock music, rap, folk, and electronica music, and I do like a good amount of what I hear-- but I think for many "artists", making a living is more important to them than making art, and this is really where a lot of the old masters excel.
Here are some good "beginner" pieces to listen to. They're accessible, and have catchy tunes, and they run the whole spectrum of expression. They're not dull at all!
Anyhow, give it an honest try. You might like it.
I wonder who can actually tell if a strad is better than a good modern violin. Is anyone aware of this sort of testing ever happening?
Wikipedia cites this book by James Beament of Oxford as a source of blind tests and audio analysis that concludes there is no observable difference. The money quote:
there appear to be no characterizing differences between the perceived sound from well-made orthodox instruments on any age when played by a skilled player
The audiophile phenomenon is neither new nor isolated to electronics and turntables. Instruments are shiny and expensive and often rarefied; it is inevitable that a mystique emerges that lead to claims of dramatically superior audio quality. Never expect that the existence of actual evidence will dissuade the audiophiles; for every one tester there are a thousand bullshit artists and a million fools that want to believe them.
Unleash the anecdotes!
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
The "unparalleled" sound of Stradivarii is probably mostly the placebo effect---the Stradivarius myth.
Here's a quote from the wikipedia article:
Above all, these instruments are famous for the quality of sound they produce. However, the many blind tests from 1817 to the present (as of 2000) have never found any difference in sound between Stradivarii and high-quality violins in comparable style of other makers and periods, nor has acoustic analysis.[2] In a particularly famous test on a BBC Radio 3 program in 1977, the great violinists Isaac Stern and Pinchas Zukerman and the violin expert and dealer Charles Beare tried to distinguish among the "Chaconne" Stradivarius, a 1739 Guarneri del GesÃ, an 1846 Vuillaume, and a 1976 British violin played behind a screen by a professional soloist. The two violinists were allowed to play all the instruments first. None of the listeners identified more than two of the four instruments; two of the listeners identified the 20th-century violin as the Stradivarius.[3]
The $500 violin would fail. Miserably.
source
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.
I’m really a trumpeter...the computer thing is just to pay the bills.
Last night at a rehearsal, for an incredibly stupid reason (I mean, really, how do you walk out the door without grabbing that big yellow Pelican case?) I had to borrow an instrument.
The one I would have been playing on was owned by both Harry Glantz and Bill Vacchiano, perhaps the two greatest trumpeters ever to play with the New York Philharmonic. It’s a magical instrument, and the only C trumpet I ever want to play on again. Not perfect — it has its quirks — but it’s perfect for me.
The instrument I played on last night was barely adequate, and the mouthpiece was the polar opposite of mine.
It only took a measure or two for me to produce a sound that I considered acceptable. By the end of the first piece, only a trained musician who knows my playing very well would have been able to tell that I wasn’t using my own equipment.
Of course, I had to work a lot harder than normal to get to that point, and I still wasn’t achieving the results I consider optimal. But very, very few people reading these words would be able to tell that.
I learned that lesson decades ago at a master class with Charlie Schlueter, the principal trumpeter of the Boston Symphony. He wanted to demonstrate something but had left his horns at the hotel. So, he picked up whatever was closest, played a couple phrases, looked askance at the trumpet, set it down, and continued with the class. Everybody’s jaw dropped; the horn was the worst piece of shit I’ve ever played on — it leaked, sounded awful, and you couldn’t play it in tune to save your life. But Charlie still sounded like Charlie when he played it.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
there appear to be no characterizing differences between the perceived sound from well-made orthodox instruments on any age when played by a skilled player
That's because they used the wrong speaker cables and missed out on the warm sound only pure gold provides.
Also keep in mind consumers of classical music prefer the sound of a modern violin. the tension of the strings has increased meaningfully over the centuries and so has the pitch. So a Stradivarius isn't really built to handle the tension or modern strings.
This isn't exactly true. Nearly all 18th-century violins have been radically overhauled to meet 19th-century standards for sound projection. The neck was re-cut to bend back to allow for greater string tension, which also had to be absorbed by a heavier bass-bar under the left foot of the bridge.
But this aside, the majority of violin players still tend to use gut strings (usually wound with silver) by preference. Synthetic strings can work well on some instruments, but YMMV. On my own instruments, I have had some success with synthetics on the middle strings.
Especially because if you actually own a Denon device with Denon Link (I do) it tells you straight out that all you need is twisted pair cable. However my guess is that some audiophile types whined that they couldn't buy "audiophile grade" Cat-5 to Denon. Denon then decided they'd more than happily put a hose in their pockets and suck the money out.
I still think I'd rather watch Kill Bill then listen to classical music.
So, which classical pieces do you intend to listen to after you've watched Kill Bill?
A Strad is the best available. If you've got a Strad you can relax and stop worrying whether your neighbor's violin might be better.
No sig today...