Outside of pharmaceuticals, building construction, and safety devices there’s probably not a lot in the world that really needs testing.
I’ll grant that this is within the realm of truly useless tests, but if you’re a sound engineer scientist, you’ve got to do something with your time.
Wordman, the reason the PNAS experiments were important is that a lot of time and effort has gone into trying to explain why Stradivarius violins are superior to all or virtually all other fiddles out there. Now that we know that they belong to a set of the bestest - as you put it - rather than being the bestest, we can stop trying to explain something that was actually based on a flawed premise. The bottom line is that they are awesome because Stradivari was awesome, but Stradivari wasn’t really more awesome that the very best luthiers of today. Now, I think your analogy to the modern art is faulty. Paintings are an end to themselves. With violins, you don’t want to hear a violin, you want to hear a Bach Partita.
All good, and thank you for your patient explanation. I feel like my point is the same: it is based on a flawed premise. Hyping a specific make/model and achieving a top price is a business success but has nothing to do with *evaluating tools. * If you evaluate tools, you can qualify a grouping of superior tools, but that’s about it.
Strad’s belong in the grouping of superior tools. Their price is the result of successful marketing hype which differentiates them from comparable old, excellent violins.
I never raised the issue of price, and I don’t think it is relevant to the research question the PNAS papers were addressing.
Anyway, we’ll agree to disagree, which is half the fun of these discussions. As long as you don’t take issue with the part about the Bach Partitas! 
It seems odd, though, to defend “illusion” as a significant aesthetic. If even trained listeners can’t tell the difference…then is there a difference? If trained listeners find (perhaps to their chagrin) that they prefer the non-Strad violin, isn’t the concept of Strad preference demolished?
If the sense of preference can be evoked by lying about it, does it really exist?
“This is a Stradivarius.”
“Ooh, yes, it’s so much smoother!”
“And this is a cheap modern violin.”
“Clearly inferior in every way.”
“Gotcha!, sucka, I lied!”
“You dirty rat…”
Art is subjective…but preferences can be measured and tested objectively.
(If you don’t believe that, then have a bite of my new Sewing-Machine-Oil based hard candy!)
Hey. I missed this. Sorry.
Hmm. It really is hard to describe responsiveness. Ultimately, it boils down to the quality of feedback that you’re getting.
When you play music, your ultimate state is to be “in the moment” of the music. So deeply immersed in what you are saying musically, that you are making choices, as they emerge, to express your voice. Cool?
So, when you are in that moment, you don’t know where you’re going to go. And you want a tool that can go where you need it to. And you want it to: a) make it easy to play the thing you choose to do; and b) make it sound good; and c) feedback to you clearly that it is achieving what you want.
Does that help? I feel like I am dancing about architecture.
One anecdote: really old mahogany guitars have a thing. More than any other guitar I have played, old mahogany guitars vibrate like motherfuckers. When you have one tucked in close and you are playing a groove, you feel it in your gut, because you feel it in your gut. Nothing like it. You can’t help but pay attention to it and adjust your playing based on what you are feeling. That’s a responsive guitar.
The beauty of the four bowed instruments (violins, violas, cellos and bass) is that there is an incredible range of ways you can attack the strings in order to get subtleties of expression that are superior to any other instrument and surpassed only by the human voice.
[Chris Rock]
Yeah! I said it!
[/Chris Rock]
So the ability of bowed instrument to translate the actual attack into the intended sound is the responsiveness. I have heard first hand a professional violinist play incredibly beautifully on a garage-sale quality violin, but it took an incredible amount of energy for him to play that beautifully. On a superior instrument, the intended expressiveness comes out much, much easier.
My bolding.
Just for clarity, no one is arguing that a “cheap modern violin” is as good as a Stradivarius. The PNAS studies demonstrate that most skilled masters of today are making violins that are, in some cases, superior to the most skilled masters of the 17th and early 18th century.
Hey, let’s be clear about this: for the most part, musicians are a superstitious and cowardly lot. No, waitaminnit…
Musicians are all about headspace. Whatever gets them in a better place mentally for how they create music, so be it. Unfortunately, for many that involves drugs or other unhealthy behaviors. For others, it can be playing a specific instrument. A bit healthier.
Look, I have a 1930 Martin. I have no problem describing it as one of the finest guitars ever made. When I play it - which I do, often and vigorously - does the fact that it is a 1930 Martin factor into the equation? I love the fact that I don’t care while I am playing it. And that is all that matters.
You’ve never listened to Jeff Beck. He’s a vocalist.
Same with some of my favorite cellists. Miles Davis.
I’d put aircraft, motor vehicles, electronics and military equipment into that select group.
It was largely hyperbole anyway, but I was mostly attempting to rebut Half Man Half Wit’s contention that there isn’t any way to approach aesthetic issues objectively. Well, sure there is! Do a double-blind taste test! My specific example was poorly worded, but, then, it was also a caricature of a non double-blind test.
That’s all super with me. I have the utmost respect for the subjective elements of creativity. There’s a lovely old Edward Gorey book, “The Unstrung Harp,” where he depicts a novelist who always wears a particular sweater when he’s writing. If that gives comfort…may that sweater last forever!
All I was really taking aim at was the idea that there can be no objectivity in aesthetics. And…sure there can be.
Certainly not at the level of individual preferences. It’s silly to ask, “Butterscotch or Strawberry: Which Is Better?” But if you poll a bunch of people and find that 65% prefer Strawberry, you’ve learned something. If you find that this percentage drops in the winter and rises in the summer, you’ve learned something more, and rather fascinating.
(If you find that this percentage rises significantly after the test subjects have watched “The Caine Mutiny,” you’ve discovered something completely pointless!)
WordMan and D18, thanks for those explanations about responsive musical instruments. I get what both of you are saying. WordMan, your anecdote about mahogany guitars was just as helpful as what you said about wanting a tool that can go where you need it to.
D18, your comment about the ability of a bowed instrument to translate the actual attack into the intended sound really resonated (heh) with me. I’ve seen Edgar Meyer perform several times and the variety of sounds he gets out of his (somewhat modified) double bass* is mind-boggling.
*Check out the fingerboard that reaches almost to the bridge.
I had to look it up, but that’s a 1769 Giovanni Battista Gabrielli contrabass that Meyer plays.
All these discussions about subjective things that were once thought to be objectively better but then get proven not to be go the same way.
Sooner or later, the defenders of the myth come up with some alleged quality that is so vague as to be untestable, and then they tell you that is what makes their hero-object better than the rest.
They tend to do this after controlled testing has blown their position away. Not before.
“Responsiveness” can’t mean too much if those listening can’t tell that it is producing a better result.
Sounds like a test of a $10,000 bottle of wine and a $100 bottle of wine. The price *influences *perception.
Well, art is contextual. Your enjoyment of some piece of art, its aesthetic appeal, is not contained in the artwork in any sense—it’s something created out of the interaction between the artwork and the recipient (and perhaps, by proxy—more so in the performance arts—the artist). Your state at the time is always going to influence your appraisal of a work of art. If you attend a museum after having been booted from your job, perhaps it’ll all seem like pointless crap; if you attend the same exhibition after falling in love, it might seem like the most sublime experience ever.
The thing is that none of these experiences is in any sense objectively more right than any other—both are quite validly your experience of some works of art. And there is no ‘pure’ art experience without these influencing factors; ultimately, it might boil to whether there’s some extra dose of endorphins in your system thanks to the extra spoon of sugar in your coffee this morning, or whether your dopaminergic system is underperforming, or whatever. Art is always perceived through the filter of everybody’s subjective situation, and there is no art apart from that.
This doesn’t open up the doors to any full-blown relativism—due to things like certain wiring biases in our nervous systems (e.g. preferences for certain intervals in music over others), there are factors that contribute to some piece of art being more likely to receive a positive feedback from the average audience than others—think about the way the early impressionists essentially intuited those factors of the human form that tend to elicit strong responses before our neurology was up to the task of explaining why those features do produce these responses.
Also, art exists in a social sphere, and its reception is part of the construction of this sphere—thus, how art is received influences how it will be received, in a sort of recursive dynamics. This is a social construct, but again, this doesn’t mean it isn’t valid.
If you were to take away all subjective features, reduce it to the purely objective, then there just wouldn’t be any art left.
Why? Why is the climate any more of a legitimate influence on enjoyment than other factors altering the subjective state of the recipient?
It was just a dumb joke on the “Strawberries” riff in the court-martial scene in the movie. “Ah, but the strawberries! That’s where I had them!”
Otherwise, I mostly agree with you, and certainly wouldn’t want to claim that aesthetics can be entirely – or even mostly – reduced to scientific principles. I just think there are some objective approaches that are of value. Double-blind taste tests are certainly valuable to marketers!
(Even if it did lead to “New Coke.” Oops!)
Ah, sorry, that whooshed right past me. 
Well, and I don’t want to say they’re entirely worthless, either. But in a sense, I’m not sure what exactly objectivity even means in this context—how do you decide which violin objectively sounds better, for instance? When you’re in the realm of better or worse, good or bad, you’re already in the realm of the subjective. It’s an example of the naturalistic fallacy to try and pinpoint such normative properties using physical qualitites—if you’d try and claim that a violin with a particularly broad spectrum is better than one with a narrower one, you’d still have to explain why broader is better than narrow—and this is ultimately merely a value judgment that might as well be reversed (the example is hypothetical, of course; I wouldn’t have the first idea regarding what spectral qualities make a ‘good’ violin).
Or take the following:
Something like this may well be true, but how else would you pinpoint what a violin should sound like? There is no objective standard of good violin sound, and if there were, it would necessarily be an arbitrary one, dictated perhaps by habit and chance details of human neuroanatomy. What good would appealing to such a standard do?
If those chance details, for instance, were to change, by some mutation, such that what we find pleasant, those carrying the mutation would consider dissonant—in what sense is our aesthetic judgment superior to theirs? And if, by conferring some unrelated survival advantage, or just due to random genetic drift, that mutation became dominant among the population some sufficient number of generations hence, would you then consider those future human’s aesthetics to be wrong because they disagree with ours? But if not, then what’s the import of objective measures?
True, but what’s being tested for there is not aesthetic value, but mass appeal, which can be objectively—if statistically—quantified. But merely noting that something has the greatest mass appeal does not imply that it is aesthetically superior (indeed, many of those with ‘refined’ tastes—from oenophiles to hipsters—would probably argue just the opposite).
I agree with much of what you say, Half Man Half Wit, but it’s mostly a red herring in this context.
Right up until blinded tests of Stradivarius occurred (and even now) the claim was never that people just enjoyed listening to them because they were old or famous. The claim was that Strads produced more enjoyable sounds than comparable modern instruments. Indeed the discussion in this thread (and several others like it) revolved in substantial part around what physical features of Strads are responsible for their sound; an irrelevant consideration if the contention is merely that the mood they evoke (and similar subjective considerations) are the reason people enjoy listening to them.
You say you’re not sure what exactly objectivity even means in this context and ask how one decides which violin objectively sounds better. But you are missing the point; no one is suggesting that it is possible to say which violin objectively sounds better. They are saying it is objectively possible to say which violin more people will like the sound of better.
