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Stradivarius violins are renowned for their supposedly superior sound when compared to other instruments. This has resulted in numerous studies hunting for a scientific reason for why Strads sound so good. A number of these studies have focused on the chemical composition of the wood in violins made in Cremona by Antonio Stradivari in the 17th and 18th centuries. Others have considered the violins made by Stradivari's contemporary, Joseph Guarneri del Gesu, whose violins are widely considered to be just as good.
Research often looks at how the materials used in the construction of the instrument define its superior quality. For example, one study argued that a "little ice age" which affected Europe from 1645 to 1715, was responsible for the slow-growth wood used in the construction of the violins that gives them a particular quality. This type of wood would have been available to all violin makers in Europe so other work has looked at the particular varnish applied to Strads. But the most recent study on this showed that Stradivari finishes were also commonly used by other craftsmen and artists and were not particularly special.
Now a team of scientists from National Taiwan University have tried to uncover the secret of Stradivarius violins by analysing the chemistry of the wood they're made from. The researchers found that the aged and treated maple wood had very different properties from that used to make modern instruments. But is there really a secret to be found in the Stradivarius?
(Score: 5, Informative) by ikanreed on Wednesday December 21 2016, @07:28PM
1. Professional violinists cannot identify Stradis by sound beyond chance
2. Professional violinists cannot identify Stradis by how they are to play beyond chance
3. Professional violinists often prefer the sound of non-Stradis.
4. (not in that study, but an obvious caveat)Amateurs have never been able to tell the difference by ear
Studying what makes them different is pretty fucking irrelevant, when they're not meaningfully different. The only reason to get a Stradivarius is to show off how rich and cultured you are. It's like buying a celebrity's sweat pants because you know they've got to be more comfortable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @07:33PM
Except I would only buy a celebrity's *used* sweat pants. In fact, I wouldn't buy them. I would steal them.
Stradivarius isn't just a violin. It has a powerful effect on those who play it. Like the feeling of stealing a celebrity's used sweat pants and panties.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday December 21 2016, @07:51PM
Downside: they're Rosanne Barre's.
(Score: 4, Funny) by edIII on Wednesday December 21 2016, @08:13PM
So one size fits all?
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday December 22 2016, @03:07AM
People often ask how to sound like Eddie Van Halen or Eric Johnson when playing guitar. They think it's the guitar, the tone settings, the effects pedals. Those are an inconsequential part of sounding like a particular rockstar.
If you want to sound like a rockstar, you have to play like them, and there're a million different subtitles just in the touch technique alone -- width and speed of vibrato, when they prefer to pick and when they prefer to hammer-on, which scales and modes they like to use, do they jump in big intervals often and which intervals are frequently used, angle of the fingertips, sloppiness of the picking, upstrokes vs. downstrokes, do they pick from the wrist or elbow or even anchor with their pinky and play with the finger-joints (like Zappa). All that is much harder to learn, and much much harder to teach, compared to just setting up your tone and effects-pedals.
Back to the Eric Johnson example, you can see what I mean when he plays both Strats and ES-335's live and sounds exactly the same playing both.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @07:54PM
But would it sound warmer if I got a Monster Stradivarius with gold tuners?
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday December 21 2016, @08:43PM
It would sound warmer if you got Stradivarius sweat pants....
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @07:55PM
Coke v Pepsi.
In taste tests Pepsi usually beats Coke for taste. Yet coke outsells Pepsi by a wide margin. Why? Coke is a brand. Branding sells. Branding alone is not the whole thing though. As 'new coke' showed. It is a particular branding with a particular item. The same is probably true of the stradivarius.
My bet is the history of the Stradivarius is more important here than the actual physical composition. Why do people consider them better when under blind testing no one can really tell? I would probably say there was a bit of marketing going on by Stradivarius. He probably got someone famous to spout off some junk. Then on top of that he probably was competing against someone who was not as good? That would be a more likely explanation. Marketing can echo on long after the marketing campaign is well and over with. For example I know about burma shave. Yet have never used their products.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday December 21 2016, @08:05PM
Sure, there's a lot of things that can attract people to them, and it is more multifaceted than the simplification I gave.
But the purpose of my post wasn't to accurately identify why people like them, but to suggest that studying the details of why it sounds different is kinda irrelevant if you can't do a meaningful study that shows that it sounds different.
It's like putting a ton of effort into trying to determine the culture of Tau Ceti aliens when the question of whether there are Tau Ceti aliens is inconclusive at best.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22 2016, @02:01AM
So what you're saying is that only Tau Ceti aliens can identify a Stradivarius by its sound? Is that why they came here? To help us with our Stradivarius testing?
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday December 21 2016, @08:46PM
Coke is a brand.
So is Pepsi.
I don't know where you were going with that train of thought, but you derailed it right there.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @09:19PM
My point was the pepsi brand is not as strong as coke. Sorry if that was not clear. Pepsi has had a long history of not sticking the brand persuasion. They have a 'young hip' sort-o-ish kinda marketing going. It works to a point. Coke on the other hand has a better branding. With stronger colors. Its persuasion is better all around. They sell 2 cans of coke for every one can of pepsi. That is my point. They have a worse product that actually sells better.
My supposition was Stradivarius is better could be a marketing persuasion thing. When they are in reality no better than others out there.
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Wednesday December 21 2016, @10:31PM
They have a product some people feel is worse, not a worse product. I can't stand the taste of pepsi, but coke is acceptable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22 2016, @03:55AM
Coke = conservative (It's the Real Thing)
Pepsi = liberal (The choice of a New Generation)
Of course, that's all marketing. It's sugared water either way, but backed by the marketing, distribution, and financial might of two of the biggest corporations in the world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @11:58PM
I'll tell you why. Pepsi ads suck big time. They've had "pepsi generation" bullshit from the sixties. They have all these stupid ass slogans about how their drink is larger than life. It's just a drink. Coke has been more down to earth, although now they have the "taste the feeling"bullshit too.
I have a Pepsi vendolator, but i'm thinking of turning it into a coke machine, cause Pepsi ads are so retarted. I found some Pepsi ads from the 50's and 60's that are nice, but 99,9999% of ads after that are pure wastebin material.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday December 22 2016, @03:31AM
Coke had Max Headroom.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday December 22 2016, @04:23PM
Coke sells more soda because there are more people selling it; fast food joints are almost all coca cola, seldom pepsi. I prefer RC, but I haven't seen a bottle in years.
If you're talking fountain soda, they're all different even when they're all coke, and brand doesn;t matter.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 4, Insightful) by meustrus on Wednesday December 21 2016, @08:03PM
It is worth noting that Stradis are superior to most other instruments from the same time period, as well as many of the intervening years between them and now. There still exists the question of how such high quality instruments meeting current quality standards were created without the benefit of current tools and materials.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday December 21 2016, @08:47PM
It is worth noting that Stradis are superior to most other instruments from the same time period, as well as many of the intervening years between them and now.
Here a question, though -- how do we KNOW that? I'm not saying Stradivarius wasn't a great violin maker; obviously he was. And his instruments ranked highly even back when they were made.
But was he "the best" by some objective standard? Were all the "intervening years" makers demonstrably "worse," by some objective standard?
All we know is that Stradivarius violins have been declared to be the best by certain learned people, such as acclaimed performers and educated listeners. Except recent studies show that such people can't discern an objective "better" sound quality under blind conditions. When mixed in with other acclaimed 18th century makers (like Guaneri), there's no evidence that Stradivarius will always come up on top. (In the link I put in another post, a supposedly acclaimed Stradivarius violin was actually rejected the MOST out of 6 violins, including 3 new violins and an old Guaneri.)
I've heard 18th-century violins by other (much less known) makers played, some of which seem also to have extraordinary sound. I have no doubt that if you took a sampling of the best instruments made in the 19th century, you'd likely find many that could hold their own too (though luthier aesthetics had changed a bit by then, so it's a bit tough to make direct comparisons between an "amped up" Strad and many 19th century exemplars).
I imagine this will be the new refuge of the Stradivarius investment groups (and yes, some of the instruments have been purchased by groups of investors) -- they want to still claim some uniqueness within history or that "them darn computer acoustics software packages today!" are the only way modern makers could come up with something comparable. I fear this will just lead to another disappointing double-blind study of violins over the ages where Strads on average aren't consistently judged "better" than a Rocca from the 19th century or an Ornati or Fagnola from the early 20th or whatever.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @09:59PM
Despite the fact that people claim red wines and white wines taste very different, most experts are unable to tell red wines from white wines with red coloring.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22 2016, @02:22AM
The styles of red and white that I have drunk DO objectively taste different. Rioja, merlot, chardonnay, cabernets, etc. have distinct flavor profiles, so it's already more specific than "red wine flavor" or "white wine flavor."
If you think they "all taste the same", you've not got any taste buds--the differences are quite pronounced.
I'd like the see the details of the study you mentioned. Did they pick styles of red and white wine that tasted close to each other?
(Score: 2) by termigator on Thursday December 22 2016, @06:50PM
Visual stimuli can affect one's taste perception.
To truly verify if red and white wines have distinctive taste charateristics, all tasters have to be blind folded with them stating if they are sampling a red or white wine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @04:42AM
Here is a quick article about some of the studies, but not the exact one I was looking for: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/10/you-are-not-so-smart-why-we-cant-tell-good-wine-from-bad/247240/ [theatlantic.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by meustrus on Wednesday December 21 2016, @10:51PM
This is something I take issue with. Because people now have a solely financial incentive in the instrument, we have to devote all this time to discerning whether it's really worth what they want it to be worth. On top of that, unless they are loaning the instrument out to musicians (which would be bad fiscal policy due at least to the chance of theft) they are actively taking some of "the best violins ever made" out of circulation of actually being heard. Perhaps the only silver lining is that when they do loan out the violins, it's done presumably based on merit rather than finances, but this still places a bunch of investors in charge of determining what constitutes enough merit.
Meanwhile, all that investment money is locked up in an object with near-zero economic impact instead of "making jobs" or whatever it is that supply-side economists claim investment is supposed to do.
There's no sane way to discourage this kind of investment short of preventing people from getting that rich. And if there was nobody rich enough to pay the current asking price for a real Stradivarius, maybe the price would come down to a point where a real musician could actually afford one.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday December 21 2016, @08:13PM
Agree completely. Just because the study you reference may be paywalled, here's a link [nationalgeographic.com] to a detailed account of the study that pretty much definitively debunked the Stradivarius myth. It took into account all sorts of criticisms of previous studies (non professionals, too little time for evaluation, not blind, tested in small room rather than concert hall, etc.).
This study had 12 violins (6 old, 6 new) and 10 internationally renowned violin soloists. They were each given an hour with the violins to choose their favorites. They did it in a (dim) concert hall with good acoustics -- I believe in addition to the darkened hall, the soloists wore dark glasses (effectively a double-blind test), they could do things like ask for piano accompaniment, or even have the instrument played by someone else to hear its sound from the back of the hall. The results?
Basically, the top two violins were new violins, with a Stradivarius in third place. And overall the newer violins as a group did much better than the old ones. Subsequent studies played instruments for educated audiences in concert halls, and they couldn't hear a major difference either.
(Note that this doesn't mean "any violin" is just as good, obviously. But there's nothing particularly special about the "old masters" and their violins compared to today's good violins.)
From my perspective, the sad thing is that most of these "Stradivarius violins" are far from the original instruments -- they're essentially odd "Frankenstein" creations that have mostly been rebuilt significantly to take the tension of modern strings, hold modern pitch, etc. If they tried to play an unmodified one like a normal "modern" instrument in a modern orchestra, they'd probably snap the thing to pieces. (In the process, they often get "amped up" a bit; concerts in the 18th century were generally small private affairs, but a modern violin needs to be able sound in a huge concert hall.) So, we've not only created this bizarre fetish around a "distinctive sound" that doesn't really exist, but in the process, we've distorted these cool historical artifacts by trying to keep them playable to modern standards.
It's all just weird. And I agree that ongoing research to try to identify their "uniqueness" is nonsense. If people want to continue to study them for general historical interest, sure. My guess is that some of this research comes out of prodding from folks who still want to believe the old myths -- and perhaps keep their investments alive. (Many of these violins are worth millions of dollars, and some owners charge fees for their use in concerts. Most actual violinists -- even internationally renowned soloists -- aren't rich enough to actually own one of these old instruments; they are generally just loaned one by a benefactor.)
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Wednesday December 21 2016, @11:09PM
My take on them is that they're effectively the same as guitars like the '57 Les Paul. It's an excellent sounding guitar and a serious collector's item ... but sound-wise you'd be just as well off with a brand new one. People want them because of the history, the status, and the 'mojo'.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday December 22 2016, @01:58PM
I would rather keep the small room test and ditch the concert hall test. Reflections and harmonics = interference. It is like judging two cameras taking photos and looking them at a distance through a dirty mirror. RLY?
If you want a real test get rid of humans and analyze the sound in audible and some ultrasound range, anechoic chamber, good mics. That data would also help physical modelling plugin for violin sound.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday December 22 2016, @06:16PM
If you want a real test get rid of humans and analyze the sound in audible and some ultrasound range, anechoic chamber, good mics.
Actually, plenty of those studies have already been done over the years -- the acousticians were always struggling to figure out what made the "Stradivarius sound" unique, because they couldn't identify a single objective set of measurements that seemed to determine it.
But afficionados still kept claiming there was something special -- so the only way to disprove something that subjective was to do a test with those afficionados as "subjects."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @08:29PM
shhhhh, you are ruining my profits. If you keep it up, I'll expose Mongo.node.js.etc++ as the fad-ware it is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @11:04PM
By and large were made by underlings at Stradivarius' company. Every one of them has been repaired by dozens of other Luthiers over the years. And very few of them internally resemble what a stock Stradi must have looked like.
Had a whole discussion with my dad on this who is a luthier (not of violins.)
Furthermore there were a couple of studies a few years back that found there *WASN'T* any difference and the ones people actually found appealing were ones that had been modified, tuned, and fixed by later luthiers, not 'originals'. Additionally 'clone stradis' were indistinguishable from 'real' ones after some acoustic modelling tests were done.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday December 22 2016, @04:19PM
I've never played violin, but being a stringed instrument it's probably similar to guitar, and a guitarist can tell a good guitar from a junk guitar. Good ones are easier to play and sound better, so I can't take your statement at face value without a citation.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday December 22 2016, @04:57PM
The citation is linked right there in the summary.