The latter - and it doesn’t “not matter at all”, rather its effect is minor.
Its vibrational and radiative properties, which are largely determined by the piece of wood you use for the top plate.
So you say all they learned is choosing the righ pieces of wood?
Which ornamentation to you speak off?
I think for you to find out and to see how hollow and ubelievable all of this sounds in the ears of vioinists (and then I don’t even speak of violinbuilders) the only way is to build a violin yourself. Why don’t you try it?
And I don’t believe that wood does not undergo changes while aging, let alone that it would not undergo change while aging under circumstances a violin that is regularly played on ages.
I have here in front of me an almost black piece of wood shaped in the form of a Buddha somewhere in the 17the century.
I definitely underwent changes while aging; It shows clearly when you take it and study the top of the head where little cracks appear. It is even more visible when you turn it upside down. There is a crack of almost 10 mm wide crossing the whole surface and mounting even a little upwarts on the back of the figure where it narrows and ends.
I have some theory - which you probably will call an unscientific myth - that whenever a violin is not played regularly keeping the wood “alive” because it vibrates, it dries out and risks to crack, just like the Budha statue shows to have cracks due to the aging (= drying out) of the wood.
Salaam. A
So you’re saying that anybody with a modicum of violin-making skills, who happened upon the right piece of wood, would create something that sounds like a Strad?
I’m getting we are really talking at cross-purposes. It seems we have the old joke about a mathematician being unable to see the difference between a donut and a coffee cup.
It may well be that there are from an acoustic viewpoint no great perceptible differences: the way the sound is modified/amplified/propagated may be rather similar in all cases. That doesn’t surprise us, as we’re talking about violins which are supposed to be largely alike, as they form a single class of instruments.
However, the differences that exist, and the result in playability/auditory experience do matter a lot to humans. That the instruments only show a tiny difference is no reason to disregard that, unless you want to pass a law to say that the acoustic measurements are the proper measure for aesthetical experience. In the same way the mathematician could try to say we are in error to distinguish between a donut and a coffee cup. (or a chemical engineer might say that two dishes should taste the same as they contain largely the same ingredients)
I notice in your statements a continuous elision between no difference and no large difference. Only the first statement might be interesting and could support your conclusions to some extent; the second statement is pretty meaningless for the musical experience. As long as there is a difference, that shows that indeed people do differentiate on actual differences. The valuation of that experience is not the domain of the acoustician, and you shouldn’t try to appropriate that.
Again, not all they learned, but it is perhaps the most important thing to learn.
The traditional and beautiful shape (along with stuff like the scrolled headstock).
I am not impugning the vast skill necessary to make a top quality violin. I am explaining it.
Yes, I would call that a myth. If a violin’s storage conditions are as inappropriate as that Buddha’s clearly were, such that cracks and other indisputable damage occured, the properties would change for the worse.
Yes. (Although one arguably simply could not “happen” across it - the selection process is absolutely essential to the master violin builder’s skill).
Yet again, I remind you that I am a semi-professional musician as well.
And those differences can be picked up by eg. acoustic impedance and sound pressure measurements.
Of course, and I do no such thing. I ask only whether you really can perceive a particular difference.
A pretty damn good single blind test and a $5m Strad is found to be no better than a copy built within the last month or so.
Oh yes, there will be nitpicks. It would have been different if different pieces wer played, the player had something against Strads, the audience weren’t well qualified enough (never mind that they were), the sky was the wrong shade of puce. Whatever.
But those nitpicks are nothing even close to the glaring unreliability of non-blinded subjective opinions upon which many in this thread seem to rely IMHO.
Yes but you are applying one standard to one thing and one standard to another. You are saying that objective testing is useless unless it is perfect, but subjective opinions are fine although they are utterly imperfect.
Or in other words, you need to acknowledge the basic contradiction inherent in saying that it is entirely logistically possible for a violinist to play CAI’s and ME’s well enough and often enough to arrive at a valuable (to you) subjective opinion, while refusing to acknowledge that it must therefore be logistically possible to conduct a pretty damn good (if not perfect) blind test to arrive at an objective (and therefore massively more valuable) result.
Maybe some have been. But you have stated in black and white that CAI’s are audibly better than ME’s. Live with it or withdraw your comment, but don’t pretend that your position is neutral when it is not.
GorillaMan, either you are just not getting it or you are being disingenous. Nothing that I or anyone else has said contradicts this utter strawman. Nothing in the test I have proposed requires any understanding at all of the physical behaviour of the violin.
Repeat yourself? Earlier you were saying they were audibly better. Do you resile from that now? If so, what are we arguing about that is relevant to the OP?
Finally, you said earlier that it took months and years of playing a new instrument to get good on it. Note that in the blind test cited in my last post, the violinist had played the Strad before but had had one day to play the newly built instrument (less than a month old). So the test was heavily biased to the Strad, and yet the conclusion was at best a draw.
I have no quarrel with that cite. At best it shows that a modern violin builder can build a violin of equal quality, which no-one (at least not me) disputed.
We’re discussing right now (which was also the OP’s question) whether there is a significant difference between the cheapest violin (or even a wooden shoe-box) and a top-class violin. I would kindly ask you to check this website where a scientist shows two samples of two different quality violins. The responses are indeed different, as his graphs shows. If you listen to the samples there is a significant difference in sound. If you can’t hear the difference, I’m afraid that you do not have a musical ear.
Also, look at your own link. You see a clear difference in between the frequency spectra. Apparently those two spectra are both perceived by many people as being ‘good’ violins (yes, I realize there are more relevant aspects).
Those links show that there are indeed objectively measurable differences between different violins. How these are valued, is an altogether different question. It may indeed be the case that a lot of people don’t like a Stradivarius; there are famous violinst who prefer other instruments. But again, that was not the OP’s question.
SentienMeat fails to go into my argument, that there is a small difference in objective parameters which to musicians lead to a significant intersubjective difference in perceived musical quality.
Rereading the previous posts, I realize I may sound a bit harsher than I should be.
Princhester, thanks for your link, as that is an interesting experiment. I must admit that this gives me reason to reconsider my previous opinion that a violin has to be ‘played in’. I wonder whether that is the experience of violin builders in general, then, and why that wasn’t more generally know. Maybe there is a bit of mysticism.
SentientMeat, I again think we may be talking at cross-purposes. I agree with you (or rather, accept your statement on the strength of your experience) that the material is the main influence on acoustics. A tin box will sound vastly different from a spruce box, and a spruce box and a violin will sound much more alike.
But we’re not talking about those differences, we’re talking about differences between spruce boxes. Do you allow that there are preceptible differences between different spruce boxes? If so, our standpoints may be quite compatible.
Calm down. After my first reply in the thread (which said ‘nobody does’ specifically in response to a single part of the OP), I’ve acknowledged that it would be possible for a modern violin to be considered better, and you’ve found an example where this was the case.
More importantly, I’ve at no point said that “they are audibly better”. I’ve said that they are considered to be audibly better, subjectively. I keep on having to emphasise that we’re talking about perception, and that whatever qualities the wooden box has, there’s NOTHING objective about the music produced.
The test I dismissed as logistically-impossible was one to proved that Strads (plural) are no better than good modern violins (plural). I didn’t say it was useless, just that it could never take place.
The test you’ve linked to was different. It was to test a single modern violin against a single Strad. It doesn’t prove that it’s ‘better’ than all Strads.
And in case you hadn’t noticed, ‘perfect subjectivity’ is contradictory. So to criticise me for accepting imperfect subjectivity is just silly.
Have you any evidence that this is considered the case by good violin makers?
I agree with this absolutely.
Absolutely. Sorry to keep harping on about that Colin Gough article, but it really does explain what I am saying and what I’m not even though it goes into a fair bit of technical detail which is a little (ahem) fiddly.
It’s worth noting that there is just as much measurable difference between Strads as that between a Strad and a non-Strad. Strads are undoubtedly excellent instruments, but I’m not sure one can say there’s a Strad ‘sound’.
Absolutely - I had the pleasure of meeting many of the most admired makers in the world at various conferences. All will tell you that the selection of the piece of spruce from which you will make the top plate is the most important element in the entire process.
For me the most interesting thing about this test Princhester describes is that it is about comparing a Stradivarius with a copy, an attempt to make as good a copy as possible with the help of today’s techniques.
The builder has a website which gives some information about how he works (made me very curious about how his creations sound “live”).
The story brings me back to my earlier comment that it would be interesting having the possibility to hear Cremona instruments when they were newly build. I am inclined to think that tests like this (if done with other instruments and over a period of time, results confirming the first one and eachother) can give us an idea.
It is however not such a given that the Stradivarius used in this test can be classified among the best, or is more like the violin I heard last year and that was disappointing (to me).
**SentientMeat **
I agree that by building a violin the wood is of course the first important thing to decide about (can you explain “spruce” because all this time I am in the dark about this). Yet in my opinion the difficulty when you found a piece of wood with excellent possibilities, is to find out and decide on how to shape it to make it produce the maximum one possibly can get out of it. That, in addition to their knowledge to test wood before it was shaped, is what in my view made the distinction between builders.
For as far as I understand this copyist does the same, measuring everything with the use of modern techniques using the craftmanship of the Cremona builders as his example, guidance and teaching. Does not mean he has no technique or craftsmanship. Neither means that his products can’t become compatible with their examples. He makes them for the sake of being compatible. If they really are and stay stable or get even better with aging, this can only be a very good news for violinists all over the world.
Maybe I’m not clear in my wording of what I wished to describe.
Many bad conditions occurred in which violins as old as we are talking about were stored. Having the possibility of closely monitored storage conditions is a recent development.
Storage is however not what I refer to. The “cracks” in the statue come from within the block of wood itself. Nobody hacked on it, dropped it or whatever to give it the cracks it shows (maybe “cracks” is not the right word, but I don’t know how else to describe it) = there is no human intervention involved.
Salaam. A
Actually, the subjective qualifier is something you have added in this post. But in any event, I have always said that what should be tested is merely what people subjectively perceive to be better when they can’t see what instrument is being played. I really don’t know why are you are fighting this notion so hard, unless that burning smell is sacred cow steak.
You’re laying on the qualifications thick and fast now but you didn’t before. You said “they” were better. Not that some were.
Spruce is a kind of pine tree used in making musical instruments. It is considered the best wood to use because it is the stiffest, lightest kind of wood in nature (except balsa wood, which is unfortunately too weak to withstand the tension from the strings). The very stiffest, lightest pieces of spruce come from the very slow-growing trees at the tops of mountains (or in the cold conditions of the early 1700’s).
Of course, metal plates even stiffer and lighter still, but there is a problem with the lack of damping: the resonances would be so resonant that Wolf tones would occur all over the place, leading to horribly dissonant notes. There is only one material which could possibly be better than spruce for making violins and guitars: diamond. Should they ever be able to grow diamond plates into a violin shape, it might produce a heck of a good sound as well as looking absolutely stunning!
Of course, I repeat that I am explaining, not impugning.
Agreed. Stradivarius undoubtedly made beautiful instruments of high quality, but today’s violinists must must give modern instruments a chance also, and violinists who bravely express a preference for modern instruments must be taken seriously. There is an element of de Beers-like price fixing regarding antique violins, IMO.
Well, a wooden Buddha is different in all kinds of ways - those cracks might have been present in the wood before it was carved (and a violin maker would simply not select such a piece of wood), it might have spent years or decades in direct sunlight or near a fireplace, and it might simply be made of a wood which, unlike spruce, is prone to such cracks.
Nonsense. And (I think) this is the first mention of the value of the instruments. Which is almost completely independent of the musical qualities. But there’s no ‘fixing’ going on - it’s pure market economics. They’re a highly-sought-after item, with very low availability. So people pay a lot for them.
No, I brough it up in post #11.
Oh, look, I dealt with that in post #11, too.
:rolleyes:
Yes, like De Beers diamonds. My opinion is that the reputation of those antique violins are articficially elevated to some extent compared to their modern counterparts, since those who have paid such vast sums for them have an interest in keeping them so. I don’t think their antique nature explains the multi-million dollar price tags - after all, furniture from that period is not inflated to such an extent. Can you imagine the effect on those who have made such an enormous investment if the acoustical superiority of those instruments became widely questioned? They would still be valuable antiques, but their value compared to right now woudl plummet.
How can they be ‘artificially’ inflated? If nobody wants to spend a million quid on one when it’s at Sotherbys, nobody’s putting a gun to anybody’s head forcing them to bid. And it makes far more sense to compare them to the prices paid for paintings, in which context they seem like a bargain!
Of course, but that million quid price tag is absed partly on the reputation of that instrument as being musically and acoustically superior to the five grand one in the music shop next door - based on aesthetics, age, rarity and craftsmanship alone I would expect prices to be more like those of anitque Chippendales or the like (or, indeed, other musical instruments of the time like those old guitars I mentioned).
I merely suspect that if prominent violinists worldwide were to become convinced that modern violins were comparable to Strads, those valuations would decrease, in some cases quite dramatically. That’s just a personal opnion, mind you - perhaps not suitable for GQ.
Well you could be very wrong in that. It is the same as with paintings: nobody wants to pay the same price for a copy as for a genuine masterpiece.
I could do something about crazy prices some collectors - merely taking such an instrument as an investment issue - now want to pay, but I doubt there would not be the same want for them among the musicians. Every musician (and especially those with repertoire connecting with the Cremona period) still would feel like wanting to hold one of these great violins, let alone having one to play on. If not for public performance (because it could eventually become possible to make even better instruments in the future) then most certainly for the “connection” with the history of the musical period, with the makers of these great instruments and in addition with the great instrumentalists who had the instrument before.
I think you can bet on it that everyone who plays Paganini would like to do that on his Guarnerius, if only once.
About the Buddha: It is Chinese and I think made of walnut wood (or cherry wood, I can look that up if you want). The “cracks” were most certainly not in the block of wood when it was carved. At the head it is merely visible, at the bottom I guess it could become worrysome for the preservation of the piece (I take a guess that this shall take an other century).
Thank you for explaining “spruce”. I merely play on violins, I have no clue about the wood that is sorted out to make them. If they are all “spruce” wood and the varnish is transparant, what causes the different colour tones and shades in the tones? You have a wide range of shades, even within the same instrument.
Salaam. A
I suppose, but I still think that furniture is a better comparison than paintings, and genuine high quality 1700’s furniture simply does not command such vast prices even though it is rare, old and beautiful. However, you make a good point that musical instruments might be a special case in that one can interact with them in what might be an emotionally profound experience.
The back plate is usually made of maple, and western red cedar is sometimes (rarely) used on the top plate: it is considered to have a ‘warmer’ tone, perhaps because it is a little heavier than spruce and so can’t be accelerated as quickly by the same force (ie. the high frequencies are reduced a little). And the wood is stained by the varnish - indeed, research suggests that Stradivarius just used standard high quality furniture varnish from the contemporary pharmacists: I’m pretty convinced that Joseph Nagyvary’s research into ‘secret’ varnish is a red herring.