
The Brilliance of a Stradivari Violin Might Rest Within Its Wood - leephillips
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/science/stradivari-violin-wood.html?module=WatchingPortal&region=c-column-middle-span-region&pgType=Homepage&action=click&mediaId=thumb_square&state=standard&contentPlacement=1&version=internal&contentCollection=www.nytimes.com&contentId=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2016%2F12%2F20%2Fscience%2Fstradivari-violin-wood.html&eventName=Watching-article-click
======
geebee
Does anyone know if the researchers have made an effort to quantify the
acoustics they are trying to recreate or explain?

The NYTimes article summarizes it this way: "For hundreds of years, the best
violin players have almost unanimously said they prefer a Stradivari or a
Guarneri instrument... Why nobody has been able to replicate that sound
remains one of the most enduring mysteries of instrument building.

Here's the thing, is there actually a notably different sound? I have read the
study that shows professional musicians don't necessarily prefer the sound of
a stradivarius over a high quality new instrument, that doesn't necessarily
mean they don't sound different. How good are they at telling the difference
between these instruments, is it something a non-musician could notice or be
trained to notice relatively easily.

Ideally, a researcher would be able to quantify the tone that is elusive.
Alternatively, a team of listeners who can clearly distinguish between the
two, reliable, would be useful. Because it sounds like the goal here isn't so
much to get a really nice sound, it's to figure out why these instruments
sound _different_ (if indeed they do!)

I read the abstract, and it sounds like they've analyzed the composition of
the violins and have found some notable chemical differences in the wood. It's
not an uninteresting result, but I still have to wonder if we're a few steps
ahead of ourselves here. First things first, do Stradivarius instruments, as a
group, have an identifiably different tone or acoustic quality that makes it
possible, either through acoustic measurements or trained human evaluation, to
reliably classify them apart from other instruments.

~~~
cpayne
My wife is a professional violinist. (In Australia at least) if you've watched
the news or a recent Australia movie, you would have heard her play.

She says you can ALWAYS tell the difference. But she also says, "better"
depends on the music. If you are playing a song on X-Factor or Australian Idol
or even Christmas carols, then you'll never notice. If you are playing a solo
for a classical piece (wedding or other ceremony), then it certainly sounds
"different".

Better is debatable, but different, yes

~~~
iheartmemcache
Eh, I'm going to question her ability to identify the difference between a
Strad and non-Strad based on this double blind study[1]. There's a lot of
fetishism in the community on the Strad, probably to the joy of Christie's
auctioneers worldwide. "The old growth trees in the region can't be sourced
anymore". "no, it's the varnish. Your resonance is affected by both the
chemical composition of the mix as well as the way it aged with the wood".

I'd imagine if 5 of the best sawyers with 5 of the best luthiers and sound
engineers in the world all sat down together with the goal of replicating the
Strad's sound with 100% accuracy I'm confident the 'unique' sound of the Strad
could be replicated. It might take a lot of time and maybe a few hundred k in
equipment (a dozen condenser mics placed strategically at a variety of places
within the room and near the instrument itself, some vibration analysis
equipment on the equipment, etc), but eventually the sawyer will choose the
right wood, the engineer would perform acoustic analysis and tell the luthier
"ok, that 43 micron chisel shave you just took just did __, 22 more and we
match the F# perfectly on the G string".

I think it's very similar to the whole audiophile thing, where at least some
of it is placebo. Those $30 monster cables aren't transmitting with any more
signal fidelity than your $5 ones (assuming equal gauge copper, proper ohmic
termination, blah blah), and I can sit down and prove it to anyone with $400
worth of spec-ans from the 1980s.

Now the "different" vs "better" \-- I love my record player but when
audiophiles say 'it sounds better' than the raw mix-down digital masters, in
terms of the amount of audible audio content objectively this isn't the case.
(Edit: See [4]) It sounds different from what you're used to. You like the
'warmth' that a belt drive record through a 1950s speaker produces. You like
the hisses and crackles and pops. It's an emotional connection you have. When
I was playing guitar with my crappy band, I'd run my digital content through a
Tascam quarter inch tape deck just to get that hiss in the tracks before we
sent it down for mastering (we didn't have those fancy plug-ins to do it for
us then).

The same thing happened with film.[2] TV is generally shot at 30fps, film at
24fps[3]. When the FPS rate increased with the advent of more modern
technology and higher sampling rates, people would claim that cinema didn't
look 'cinematic'. The motion blur of the analog film experience we grew up
with (well, those of us over 25) is something we mentally associated with the
experience of going to the cinema. You saw a bunch of people comment on this
with the Hobbit being distributed and shown at theatres at 48 FPS. "It just
doesn't look _right_ ".

\--

[1][http://www.thestrad.com/blind-tested-soloists-unable-to-
tell...](http://www.thestrad.com/blind-tested-soloists-unable-to-tell-
stradivarius-violins-from-modern-instruments/)

[2] I'm sorry I don't have a source on this study, but the phenomenon was
pretty widespread. Cinema isn't something I've delved too far into but the
cinematographer forums have thousands (literally) of threads on FPS
discussion.

[3] That's just historically how things broke down -- 24 was a convenient
number to match up with actual seconds due to it's easy factorability, so you
could get half a second at 12 frames, a quarter at 6, etc. This made it easy
back in the day when post-processing involved actually involving cutting
nitrate-based film and sound syncing to the video involved physically matching
the snap of the clapper on your audio track to the visual of the actual frame
of when the hinge closed.

RE: 30 fps, I'm not sure, but I'd guess it had to do with the fact that we're
at 60 hertz in the US so you could interlace half a frame a cycle (ie. trigger
on the peak of every AC cycle to update the set of horizontal lines modulo
two, so the electron gun presumably only had to hit half the lines within that
time constraint) Other parts of the world operate at 50hz, which is why I'd
imagine you have the PAL standard and 25 fps in those locales. (Pure
speculation though, someone who's knows for sure, jump in.)

[4] Operating under the assumption that that they were pressed from the same
master source.. I'm limited only to the records I bought which were from bands
with too small of a budget to afford two separate masters. (I.e., That mid-90s
emo 200 run EP by Knapsack didn't have two masters, hell on tour they were
lucky to have a floor to crash on.) Still, poster beneath me makes a very
valid point that should be taken into consideration (Though I'm sure you're
already aware of whether or not the band had a separate master DAT/master
plate made if you like the band enough to care about the nuanced differences
between two masters.)

~~~
dcsommer
The study in [1] has a sample size of 10 in Paris, in one setting. I'd hardly
call that conclusive or ruling out all the possible confounding variables.

~~~
ubernostrum
Also known as "I am convinced this false thing is true, and will selectively
demand higher levels of rigor from anything opposing my view than I ever have
from anything supporting my view".

I've read quite a bit about the blind violin studies, and don't see a way to
dismiss it -- people were claiming instantly recognizable, impossible-to-miss
massive differences in quality for the older violins. Yet nobody has been able
to back up those claims with results; all results so far indicate that when
the age and maker are obscured, identification by sound alone is no better
than chance.

~~~
dcsommer
Personally, I do tend to think the difference is much harder to distinguish
than tradition would dictate. These studies are evidence in that direction, in
fact. But simply sampling 10 people is about as good as 10 anecdotes.

> Also known as ...

Please. What I've just written makes the rest of that sentence silly. There is
no need to jump to conclusions.

~~~
owenversteeg
I agree with your point, and to make it worse some of those 10 people were
from a previous, discredited study by the same authors.

Funny enough two comments I made - on this thread, now dead - went from +2 to
-4 very quickly. Another comment went from +5 to +2.

I've got a pretty strong feeling that people love telling this anecdote about
"science over art!" and ironically don't like it when it turns out the science
is actually bad science. As a result, they're banding together and simply
mass-downvoting things.

There's an interesting debate to be had here, on the merits of the sounds of
different instruments, and the linked NYT article is fascinating.
Unfortunately, people seem to be caught up in a frenzy of linking bad science
to each other instead of actually discussing violins, which are a personal
passion of mine.

I went into more detail on the bad science in my other comment here, which is
going negative now:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13233977](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13233977)

------
Fezzik
FWIW, it seems like even professionals cannot distinguish between a Stradivari
and a new violin... and may even prefer the latter.

"When the researchers totaled up the results, there was no evidence the
players could reliably pick old from new. And when players were asked to pick
their favorite instrument, the winner was a modern, freshly made violin."

[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/05/16/313099219/is-a-...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/05/16/313099219/is-
a-stradivarius-just-a-violin)

~~~
laurentdc
Reminds me of those audiophile A/B/X tests that always end up in a tie between
whatever equipment.

------
chillingeffect
Stradivarius was ahead of his time, but all of his violins have been updated
and modified since they were built, such as adding Bass Bars [1].

Since then, his results have been duplicated and/or improved. The name
Stradivarius still carries an amazing amount of weight. Researchers have shown
musicians can't actually differentiate between newly built violins and
Stradivarius:

"The duo asked professional violinists to play new violins, and old ones by
Stradivari and Guarneri. They couldn’t tell the difference between the two
groups. One of the new violins even emerged as the most commonly preferred
instrument." [ 2 ]

Therefore when TFA from NYT makes this vague, unsubstantiated claim "For
hundreds of years, the best violin players have almost unanimously said they
prefer a Stradivari or a Guarneri instrument," take it with a grain of salt or
preferably evidence that mainstream media benefits by perpetuating mysterious
illusions for the emotional allure.

[ 1 ]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bass_bar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bass_bar)

[ 2 ]
[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/01/0...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/01/02/violinists-
cant-tell-the-difference-between-stradivarius-violins-and-new-ones/)

~~~
onion2k
I can't even imagine the amount of fear I'd feel if someone asked me to make
some modifications to an antique violin worth millions of dollars. It'd be
like deploying an update on a Friday afternoon.

~~~
owenversteeg
Hah, I can't compare to that, but I do some minor violin-fixing stuff as a
hobby. Recently I spent a decent amount of time repairing a 100 year old
German violin, and (at first) it's exactly like you describe: you feel like
you're going to destroy everything. Like you're playing football with a Prince
Rupert's Drop. But then you get into a bit of a pattern with the instrument,
and you start to feel more confident... which funny enough isn't a good thing,
cause that's when you screw up.

Make no mistake, I love it though, and the finished product is absolutely
gorgeous.

~~~
elihu
I've repaired a few violins, none of them expensive or valuable. One of them I
had gotten at Goodwill for $20 or so with a couple cracks in the top.

Popping the top off of the violin was a little nerve-wracking, but that
cracking-hide-glue sound is also satisfying. It went back together nicely (I
even used the opportunity to glue a piezo-film transducer to the inside of the
soundboard).

Now I don't feel quite so much like the violin I'm holding is going to shatter
into a million pieces if I twist too hard on a tuning peg.

------
jwatte
Blind tests suggest that most of the brilliance today comes from the brain
knowing it's a Strad, because great modern violins sound just as good or
better.

(The other brilliance was being 200 years or more ahead of everyone else at
the time!)

~~~
astrodust
These blind tests, again and again, conclusively prove that those listening to
the music cannot tell a Yamaha from a Strad. They'll describe the Yamaha in
glowing terms until they realize it's a violin made last year, then
immediately shit all over it.

It's like wine people who are easily duped by a fancy looking bottle. A true
sommelier can identify different wines by taste alone, but for every one of
those there's a dozen frauds who pretend they know what they're doing, just
parroting stuff they've memorized.

The other troubling thing is the gender of performers is very hard to discern
from a blind performance, but when the performer is visible the judges skew
very heavily towards men. It's absurd. [https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-
leadership/2013/oct/14/...](https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-
leadership/2013/oct/14/blind-auditions-orchestras-gender-bias)

~~~
beat
Listening is different from playing. Or perhaps more precisely, the experience
of passively listening is different from the experience of actively listening
to the instrument you're creating music on.

As a guitarist, I do a lot of experimentation with picks. I can easily tell
the difference between different kinds of picks by sound _when I 'm playing_.
But I can listen to old recordings of myself where I couldn't even tell you
which guitar I played! Interestingly, a drummer I play with regularly can
usually tell when I've switched picks, and has opinions about what picks I
should be using. Such is the closeness of musicians working together.

Any of these A/B blind test experiments strongly need to be live. A recording
isn't a measure of a violin... it's a measure of the violin, the microphone,
the mixing board, the mastering process, the amplifier, and the speaker.

~~~
scott_s
The tests are live. The researchers have really bent over backwards to create
fair tests, I think. Someone else in this thread linked to a good summary:
[http://www.thestrad.com/blind-tested-soloists-unable-to-
tell...](http://www.thestrad.com/blind-tested-soloists-unable-to-tell-
stradivarius-violins-from-modern-instruments/)

~~~
edbaskerville
In case you read this thread without clicking the link: astrodust's comment
might lead you to believe that professional violinists can't tell the
difference between factory-made Yamaha instruments and a Strad.

The instruments in this test are _not_ factory-made Yamahas. They're hand-
crafted instruments made by top masters. In other words, the best instruments
now are finally catching up to the best instruments of a few hundred years
ago.

As for casual listeners, I'd believe that some of them can't tell the
difference between a Yamaha and a Strad. But professional violinists
absolutely can--both when playing and listening.

~~~
astrodust
Blind tests seem to disagree. New but very high quality instruments vs. those
considered exceptional and unmatched.

------
tsm
Since everyone's talking about the double-blind study again and as one of the
(probably) few people on HN who's seriously played a Strad, I feel obligated
to link to my previous comment on the matter:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12095164](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12095164)

TL;DR—fine antique violins seems to have a wider range of good tone colors
available than modern instruments, but these tone colors take significant
practice with the instrument (months, not minutes) to discover.

------
WhitneyLand
As many have pointed out the entire premise is flawed, with double blind
testing showing no objective advantage in the first place (inspirational value
withstanding).

Then another study found competitions are biased as well, with judges rating
people differently based on physical appearance and the amount of body english
they use while playing.

------
davidgerard
We already know where the brilliance of a Stradivarius rests: in the
listener's imagination.

[http://www.thestrad.com/blind-tested-soloists-unable-to-
tell...](http://www.thestrad.com/blind-tested-soloists-unable-to-tell-
stradivarius-violins-from-modern-instruments/)

------
edblarney
My grandfather made violins as a hobby.

He would wear 20 year old pants, never _ever_ eat out, grew most of his
veggies in a garden.

He would think nothing of spending $100's on a tiny piece of wood from god
knows where.

~~~
dahart
Hahaha! My father makes violins as a profession. He also thinks nothing of
spending hundreds on small pieces of wood from strange places. He recently
flew to Lithuania and gave some strangers several tens of thousands of dollars
for a few piles of wood. My dad does eat out and buy new pants every now and
then, though. :P

------
delecti
I thought at least part of this was already known.

The story as I've heard it is that there was a rather dry period preceding
Stadivari's violin making, which led to particularly dry and hard wood, both
good things for a violin.

------
TwoBit
The primary reason professionals prefer Stradivaris is that it increases their
profile and not because they sound better. Time and time again blind studies
show that professionals can't tell the difference or even prefer the modern
instruments. But when your resume states that you own a Stradivarius, you will
be more highly regarded.

------
aczerepinski
Most people can't discern between a violin and a viola, or an alto and tenor
saxophone. The percentage of people who have the refined ears to detect
differences between a Strad and other great violins must be unbelievably
small.

~~~
kasey_junk
Sure, but the population of people who are involved in the industry where this
matters is a much more interesting population.

The population of people that can recognize good sql vs great sql is tiny as
well...

------
iammyIP
The brilliance of the stradivary is aging over centuries on a base of very
good craftmanship. Why does the old stuff taste better than the new? Because
it has aged well on a good base.

That means today we can build much more excellent violins with machines, but
music is traditional, thus prefers the hand made things first. New machine
made violin can never sing as beautiful as old mystery thing of ancient music
rituals.

~~~
iammyIP
Yes, and in the actual a/b tests nobody could single out the stradivari with
any significance. The human performer turned out to be the most deciding
factor by several magnitudes.

