Probing the Secrets of the Finest Fiddles

[Joe Gwinn]

Interesting article in Science magazine on violins and the ongoing effort to figure just what makes the famous instruments from the Italian masters great.

"Probing the Secrets of the Finest Fiddles", Adrian Cho, Science, Volume 328, 18 June 2010, pages 1468-1470.

Unfortunately, the article is behind a paywall, but here is the URL: Probing the Secrets of the Finest Fiddles -- Cho 328 (5985): 1468 -- Science.

Many libraries carry Science, so that may be the better alternative.

[JGundry]

I would be interested to know what this article says but I suspect that it is probably just another take existing research. The research is recycled every decade or so. Basically the research is modal analysis of the free plates, assembled body, neck, bridge and air chamber, pre varnish wood treatments, varnish formulations, construction techniques, dendrology, graduation patterns and construction geometry. You rarely see anything new about any of these subjects. Usually it just comes down to a new way of getting the same old data. Sam Lee Guy knows way more about this than me though.

The big secret of the great Italian masters is they made fiddles of a completely different construction than what they are today. Almost every one of these old fiddles has undergone major surgery to be able to play at modern concert pitch. Stradivari fiddles made the transition well. But a violin made by Stainer not so well even though the Stainer was evidently sought after for as a baroque instrument which is the era of music that all of these old fiddles were originally constructed to play.

[Joe Gwinn]

I would be interested to know what this article says but I suspect that it is probably just another take existing research. The research is recycled every decade or so. Basically the research is modal analysis of the free plates, assembled body, neck, bridge and air chamber, pre varnish wood treatments, varnish formulations, construction techniques, dendrology, graduation patterns and construction geometry. You rarely see anything new about any of these subjects. Usually it just comes down to a new way of getting the same old data. Sam Lee Guy knows way more about this than me though.

There are certainly a lot of new technologies being used to investigate, in many cases re-asking old questions, but this does yield new information as technology marches on.

The big secret of the great Italian masters is they made fiddles of a completely different construction than what they are today. Almost every one of these old fiddles has undergone major surgery to be able to play at modern concert pitch. Stradivari fiddles made the transition well. But a violin made by Stainer not so well even though the Stainer was evidently sought after for as a baroque instrument which is the era of music that all of these old fiddles were originally constructed to play.

The Vieuxtemps violin, the star of the article, shows no sign of having been modified (as seen using a CT scan), so there is at least one exception. Perhaps it only needed to be restringed and retuned.

Or, by "concert pitch", do you mean loudness?

[JGundry]

Modern concert pitch is 440 hz for A as a reference tone. Baroque concert pitch reference is 415 hz for A. All of these instruments were designed for the much lower string tension of 415hz. As a result the neck angle has been increased on all of these violins to handle the higher tension. This is usually done by constructing an entirely new, longer neck and grafting the old headstock onto the new neck for cosmetics. The necks on the original violins were nailed in place and the replacements are mortised in place at a much different angle. Also the original bass bar has to be removed and made much thicker to keep the top from imploding. In addition the original fingerboards had an ebony veneer over willow. These are replaced with longer solid ebony fingerboards. To top this all of the original bridges for these violins were wafer thin compared to the modern replacement bridge now in use. Each of these changes have a major effect on the tone.

Basically I think that most every testing technique has been in use since the 70's and the only thing that has really changed has been the quality of the graphic rendition of the results.. Things like CT scans etc. have been done as the resolution of those improves. All lot of these test can be done with a bare bones set up of a frequency counter and a lap top and the right microphones which is what I do in my home shop. But the masters could do the same thing with tapping, flexing the violin and blowing into the violin f holes. These research projects are usually interesting to read but after you have read enough of them you quickly see the repetition of themes and theories with them. Some seem valid and some seem totally wacky. What is the basic new information in this article from a scientific standpoint? I think the major thing that sets golden era Italian violins apart is their approach to the design and construction.

[Mike Sulzer]

JGundry,

I read the article and there is little that is new. It is a typical filler piece in Science, with the usual statement: "We can tell a good violin from a bad one, but we cannot tell a good one from a great one.

[Sam Lee Guy]

I have to agree with everything JGundry says, with the exception that it was viola and Cello boards that were willow or poplar and violin boards were maple with ebony veneer. (I know Sacconi etc... say otherwise but all extant baroque Creomonese violin boards are maple)
The necks were reconfigured not only for increased tension but to allow a thinner neck in the high positions required for the music of the time.
The 1741 Vieuxtemps (currently for sale at a record breaking price) although in relatively fine condition has a number of repairs. The neck was first lengthened and reset by J.B. Vuillaume in 1858 and has since been replaced a couple of times along with the the bass bar, fingerboard and all the fittings. The peg holes have been bushed twice
and an ebony crown has been fitted to the button. This is just for starters and I'll stop here but Joe Gwinn's supposition that it only needed to be restringed and retuned is completely false and a simple visual inspection reveals all the above repair work and more, as would be expected of a violin of this age.

[Mark Hammer]

There was an article in Scientific American some 25-30 years ago which examined the wood of the great Cremona violins, rather than the physics, as seems to be the topic here. The article was chock full of electron-microscope pictures and information about the soaking of tone woods in particular ways. I wish I could remember the details. Suffice to say that this article is likely findable via the appropriate search engine at a public library.

[Joe Gwinn]

Modern concert pitch is 440 hz for A as a reference tone. Baroque concert pitch reference is 415 hz for A. All of these instruments were designed for the much lower string tension of 415hz. As a result the neck angle has been increased on all of these violins to handle the higher tension. This is usually done by constructing an entirely new, longer neck and grafting the old headstock onto the new neck for cosmetics. The necks on the original violins were nailed in place and the replacements are mortised in place at a much different angle. Also the original bass bar has to be removed and made much thicker to keep the top from imploding. In addition the original fingerboards had an ebony veneer over willow. These are replaced with longer solid ebony fingerboards. To top this all of the original bridges for these violins were wafer thin compared to the modern replacement bridge now in use. Each of these changes have a major effect on the tone.

OK. I know very little about violin construction, and was going by what the article said. They did not mention neck replacement. The focus was on the body only. I gather this is a major omission.

Basically I think that most every testing technique has been in use since the 70's and the only thing that has really changed has been the quality of the graphic rendition of the results.. Things like CT scans etc. have been done as the resolution of those improves. All lot of these test can be done with a bare bones set up of a frequency counter and a lap top and the right microphones which is what I do in my home shop. But the masters could do the same thing with tapping, flexing the violin and blowing into the violin f holes. These research projects are usually interesting to read but after you have read enough of them you quickly see the repetition of themes and theories with them. Some seem valid and some seem totally wacky.

I guess a better question is why people keep trying. But the answer is obvious - it would be really nice if we could replicate the violins of the Italian Masters. It's still an open problem to be sure, but someday someone will figure it out.

What is the basic new information in this article from a scientific standpoint? I think the major thing that sets golden era Italian violins apart is their approach to the design and construction.

I have no idea what's new, although I suspect that it's only the use of more modern technology. In one sense, violins are very simple, which is probably why our inability to replicate the old masters bothers people so.

More generally, what seems to be happening is the constraining of theories by exclusion. If one can prove that X does not matter, it eliminates all X-dependent theories, a great simplification.

[Joe Gwinn]

I have to agree with everything JGundry says, with the exception that it was viola and Cello boards that were willow or poplar and violin boards were maple with ebony veneer. (I know Sacconi etc... say otherwise but all extant baroque Creomonese violin boards are maple)
The necks were reconfigured not only for increased tension but to allow a thinner neck in the high positions required for the music of the time.
The 1741 Vieuxtemps (currently for sale at a record breaking price) although in relatively fine condition has a number of repairs. The neck was first lengthened and reset by J.B. Vuillaume in 1858 and has since been replaced a couple of times along with the the bass bar, fingerboard and all the fittings. The peg holes have been bushed twice and an ebony crown has been fitted to the button. This is just for starters and I'll stop here but Joe Gwinn's supposition that it only needed to be restringed and retuned is completely false and a simple visual inspection reveals all the above repair work and more, as would be expected of a violin of this age.

Uncle! Perhaps you should write a letter to the Editor of Science.

[Bruce Johnson]

I read that Stradavarius soaked his pickup bobbins in a stream that was infested with bacteria.

[frankfalbo]

Modern concert pitch is 440 hz for A as a reference tone. Baroque concert pitch reference is 415 hz for A

Whaita minute...Are you saying Baroque players were pulling a Hendrix? Hendrix, SRV, Van Halen, they were all just ripping off the old violin players?!

The necks were reconfigured...to allow a thinner neck in the high positions required for the music of the time.

Mark my words, that's going to be a direct quote in the year 3260 by a bunch of "hologram forum" nerds discussing the 1987 Ibanez RG.

Meanwhile everyone is busy trying to figure out the secrets of the Italians. Oh the more things change the more they stay the same...

[David Schwab]

Modern concert pitch is 440 hz for A as a reference tone. Baroque concert pitch reference is 415 hz for A.

Actually there was no standard concert A pitch until 1885 in Austria, which was 435Hz, and then in 1926 440Hz was used in the US. In 1936, the American Standards Association set 440 as standard A over middle C.

Modern baroque pitch is 415 Hz. But yes, it has been all over the map, and was usually lower than 440Hz.

From Wikipedia:

Concert pitch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pre-19th century
Until the 19th century there was no concerted effort to standardize musical pitch, and the levels across Europe varied widely. Pitches did not just vary from place to place, or over time—pitch levels could vary even within the same city. The pitch used for an English cathedral organ in the 17th century, for example, could be as much as five semitones lower than that used for a domestic keyboard instrument in the same city.
Even within one church, the pitch used could vary over time because of the way organs were tuned. Generally, the end of an organ pipe would be hammered inwards to a cone, or flared outwards, to raise or lower the pitch. When the pipe ends became frayed by this constant process they were all trimmed down, thus raising the overall pitch of the organ.

Some idea of the variance in pitches can be gained by examining old pitchpipes, organ pipes and other sources. For example, an English pitchpipe from 1720 plays the A above middle C at 380 Hz, while the organs played by Johann Sebastian Bach in Hamburg, Leipzig and Weimar were pitched at A = 480 Hz, a difference of around four semitones. In other words, the A produced by the 1720 pitchpipe would have been at the same frequency as the F on one of Bach's organs.

From the early 18th century, pitch could be also controlled with the use of tuning forks (invented in 1711), although again there was variation. For example, a tuning fork associated with Handel, dating from 1740, is pitched at A = 422.5 Hz, while a later one from 1780 is pitched at A = 409 Hz, almost a semitone lower. Nonetheless, there was a tendency towards the end of the 18th century for the frequency of the A above middle C to be in the range of 400 to 450 Hz.

The frequencies quoted here are based on modern measurements and would not have been precisely known to musicians of the day. Although Mersenne had made a rough determination of sound frequencies as early as the 1600s, such measurements did not become scientifically accurate until the 19th century, beginning with the work of German physicist Johann Scheibler in the 1830s. The unit hertz (Hz), replacing cycles per second (cps), was not introduced until the twentieth century.

[David Schwab]

Does anyone know if they changed the scale length of violins over the years? That would surely affect the tone.

I played what was said to be a Strad once, although I'm not proficient on violin and only managed to get the owners cat to want to hump my leg (which it did when someone played it)! The owner had inherited the violin.

[Musiclogic]

I read that Stradavarius soaked his pickup bobbins in a stream that was infested with bacteria.

Stradivarius maybe, but Antonio Stradivari did no such thing...LMAO

[fieldwrangler]

Once upon a time in the early 90's I went over to the main big-time violin dealer here in Chicago to lend an ear to a very good violinist I know who was looking for a new axe. To calibrate my ear I had them bring out the best Strad they had around at the time and compared it with something else (maybe a Vuillume?(sp?))
In the "dry room" (with carpet & drapes) the Strad sounded strident and just plain too bright to me. However, in their recital hall, (where the wet room served as another box in the system,) the high end translated to projection, and the whole sound was really quite impressive. I recently heard a recording of another highly regarded Strad and was aware of a really active "searing" quality, almost a sizzle, combined with a sense of a full extension of overtones that seemed to agree with themselves...

Bob Palmieri