6 ms·

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 thi

by geebee 10y ago

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.

davesque 10y ago
I've wondered this myself. I majored in music and I know that musicians love their legends. They love to agree that this or that historical figure was a genius or a jerk (but usually nowhere in between) and the same sentiment carries over to instruments. It's basically a perfect setup for bias to come into play.
- icantdrive55 10y ago
  Yea, I used to worship old Martin guitars. I then happened to see this guy on YouTube sample three guitars. A Martin, a Yamaha, and the Ibanex. I figured my Ibanex would come in dead last. It came in first? That said, I have an old Dobro guitar, and it does sound better than any guitar I have owned? The more I think about it, I think my Dobro's nut is just set high--making my terrible fret work sound better? (There's even debate about old vs. new Dobros. New Dobros supposedly sound better. This thinking also popped up when old Dobros were getting hard to find.)
cpayne 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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-stradivarius-violins-from-modern-instruments/ http://www.thestrad.com/blind-tested-soloists-unable-to-tell... [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.)
gooseyard 10y ago
relevant here: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7168.full http://www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7168.full
Nelson69 10y ago
Is it limited to audio output? What about the playing quality or the emotional aspect of playing a great instrument played by other great musicians? There are an awful lot of variables, especially regarding listening conditions. And then the strings are going to be different too. You're definitely the odd man out if you don't prefer a Strad to a modern instrument, that strikes me as an odd thing. If it's so overwhelming then there should certainly be something measurable in the audio or there would be differences due to taste and preference, right?
- ythn 10y ago
  > the emotional aspect of playing a great instrument played by other great musicians? Equip: Famous Violin [+5% playing ability from placebo effect]
  - dcsommer 10y ago
    Heh, I'm pretty sure I had this exact effect when I tried playing a $250k Pietro Guarneri violin. Only it was more like [+200% tone quality], and since my own violin is just a decent student instrument, a good chunk of that bonus was real improvement. But the emotional/"holy shit" aspect of it shouldn't be understated either :)
dahart 10y ago
I linked to this study in another thread here, but they tested whether professional violinists could tell whether a violin was old or new. The conclusion for this test is: no, they can't reliably hear the difference between Strads and modern instruments. http://www.thestrad.com/blind-tested-soloists-unable-to-tell-stradivarius-violins-from-modern-instruments/ http://www.thestrad.com/blind-tested-soloists-unable-to-tell... "Soloists readily distinguished instruments they liked from those they did not but were unable to tell old from new at better than chance levels,’ the report concluded. ‘Given the stature and experience of our soloists, continuing claims for the existence of playing qualities unique to old Italian violins are strongly in need of empirical support."
adpoe 10y ago
Yes. You can watch some researchers working an "acoustic fingerprint" in this video. Linking to the start of that segment: https://youtu.be/eNzRHuqvMxQ?t=50m14s https://youtu.be/eNzRHuqvMxQ?t=50m14s Pretty cool stuff.
graycat 10y ago
Violins? Okay, here's some of my story: For a while, wanting to learn well the math for theoretical physics, I was a math grad student at Indiana University. They put me in courses beneath me and courses irrelevant to the math I wanted. For "beneath", they put me in a course in point-set topology. Maybe okay: First lecture I learned that the text was Kelley, General Topology. Heck, as an undergraduate I'd already gotten a copy and a reading course, read the thing, and gave lectures once a week to a prof. One week I explained a chapter and the next week worked exercises from that chapter. Another course was abstract algebra from Herstein's book. Gads: Group, rings, fields, vector spaces, and I'd had that as a ugrad. I asked the prof if he was going to cover group representations, and he said that was "deep". I told him it was also my ugrad honors paper. Really bad was early in a course in real analysis where the prof wanted to see me after class about my work on his first test. He treated me with contempt. The test had been on set theory, and I'd used lower case omega for the first uncountable ordinal, believed that the notation was standard (had had a summer NSF course in axiomatic set theory), was in a hurry and didn't explain the notation. So I explained. Then the prof caught on: My work was correct and, indeed, one step shorter than his solution. I asked what he wanted to see me about, and he said "nothing". Gads. I didn't want to see him again. They said Galois theory to me one too many times. So, I kept doing my teaching, mostly calculus. Gads, that was first year college calculus, and I'd never taken it but taught it to myself and started on sophomore calculus. Then I started studying Fleming, Functions of Several Variables with the exterior algebra at the back, etc. I liked music a LOT, still do, but didn't know much, but Indiana University had a terrific music school, and my dorm was next door. In the dorm was a violin student of Josef Gingold and a protege of Issac Stern with a letter of recommendation from from Zeno Francescatti. Once, for fun, in a practice room, with a pianist and me listening, he sight read the Vieuxtemps Fifth violin concerto. One afternoon in the dorm, he put his old Italian violin under my left chin and gave me a first lesson. Magic! So, I signed up for a first course, one on one, in violin! The teacher was another violin student: Poor guy, had to start out by showing me how to hold the violin, and after the semester he was soloist for the Brahms concerto in Toronto! He was good! Eventually I made some progress: Problems: Started too late, too little talent and practice! But, violin is doable and about the most fun can have standing up -- get a voice to permit screaming out to the heavens about the passion of the human spirit! On violins, one difference is how easy it is for the violinist to get the sound they want. That's a biggie. A listener may never know about any of that, but there's little doubt for the violinist! Years later that violin student was a well known professional violinist. I called him for a recommendation of a violin shop for routine maintenance on my violin, and he gave me David Segal Violins in NYC who had made his then favorite violin. IIRC he said he liked the Segal violin better than any of the old Italian instruments. So, maybe, one way and another, there are people now who know how to make some of the best violins ever. Generally I long since gave up on taking seriously anything in the NYT. But, gee, maybe for anything they publish, someone likes it! My favorite piece of music is the Bach Chaconne for unaccompanied violin. I made some progress with it. To me the best part is the end of the central D major section; it has a violin scream out passion beyond belief. The piece deserves more than a solo violin and has been arranged for solo piano by Busoni and also for full orchestra. A piano performance I like is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOFflFiLlT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOFflFiLlT8 When my startup is farther along, maybe I'll get some maintenance on my violin and get through the rest of the Chaconne. Just need a lot of practice!

by geebee 10y ago

davesque 10y ago

I've wondered this myself. I majored in music and I know that musicians love their legends. They love to agree that this or that historical figure was a genius or a jerk (but usually nowhere in between) and the same sentiment carries over to instruments. It's basically a perfect setup for bias to come into play.

icantdrive55 10y ago
Yea, I used to worship old Martin guitars. I then happened to see this guy on YouTube sample three guitars. A Martin, a Yamaha, and the Ibanex. I figured my Ibanex would come in dead last. It came in first? That said, I have an old Dobro guitar, and it does sound better than any guitar I have owned? The more I think about it, I think my Dobro's nut is just set high--making my terrible fret work sound better? (There's even debate about old vs. new Dobros. New Dobros supposedly sound better. This thinking also popped up when old Dobros were getting hard to find.)

cpayne 10y ago

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 10y ago
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-stradivarius-violins-from-modern-instruments/ http://www.thestrad.com/blind-tested-soloists-unable-to-tell... [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.)

gooseyard 10y ago

relevant here: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7168.full http://www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7168.full

Nelson69 10y ago

Is it limited to audio output? What about the playing quality or the emotional aspect of playing a great instrument played by other great musicians? There are an awful lot of variables, especially regarding listening conditions. And then the strings are going to be different too. You're definitely the odd man out if you don't prefer a Strad to a modern instrument, that strikes me as an odd thing. If it's so overwhelming then there should certainly be something measurable in the audio or there would be differences due to taste and preference, right?

ythn 10y ago
> the emotional aspect of playing a great instrument played by other great musicians? Equip: Famous Violin [+5% playing ability from placebo effect]
- dcsommer 10y ago
  Heh, I'm pretty sure I had this exact effect when I tried playing a $250k Pietro Guarneri violin. Only it was more like [+200% tone quality], and since my own violin is just a decent student instrument, a good chunk of that bonus was real improvement. But the emotional/"holy shit" aspect of it shouldn't be understated either :)

dahart 10y ago

I linked to this study in another thread here, but they tested whether professional violinists could tell whether a violin was old or new. The conclusion for this test is: no, they can't reliably hear the difference between Strads and modern instruments. http://www.thestrad.com/blind-tested-soloists-unable-to-tell-stradivarius-violins-from-modern-instruments/ http://www.thestrad.com/blind-tested-soloists-unable-to-tell... "Soloists readily distinguished instruments they liked from those they did not but were unable to tell old from new at better than chance levels,’ the report concluded. ‘Given the stature and experience of our soloists, continuing claims for the existence of playing qualities unique to old Italian violins are strongly in need of empirical support."

adpoe 10y ago

Yes. You can watch some researchers working an "acoustic fingerprint" in this video. Linking to the start of that segment: https://youtu.be/eNzRHuqvMxQ?t=50m14s https://youtu.be/eNzRHuqvMxQ?t=50m14s Pretty cool stuff.

graycat 10y ago

Violins? Okay, here's some of my story: For a while, wanting to learn well the math for theoretical physics, I was a math grad student at Indiana University. They put me in courses beneath me and courses irrelevant to the math I wanted. For "beneath", they put me in a course in point-set topology. Maybe okay: First lecture I learned that the text was Kelley, General Topology. Heck, as an undergraduate I'd already gotten a copy and a reading course, read the thing, and gave lectures once a week to a prof. One week I explained a chapter and the next week worked exercises from that chapter. Another course was abstract algebra from Herstein's book. Gads: Group, rings, fields, vector spaces, and I'd had that as a ugrad. I asked the prof if he was going to cover group representations, and he said that was "deep". I told him it was also my ugrad honors paper. Really bad was early in a course in real analysis where the prof wanted to see me after class about my work on his first test. He treated me with contempt. The test had been on set theory, and I'd used lower case omega for the first uncountable ordinal, believed that the notation was standard (had had a summer NSF course in axiomatic set theory), was in a hurry and didn't explain the notation. So I explained. Then the prof caught on: My work was correct and, indeed, one step shorter than his solution. I asked what he wanted to see me about, and he said "nothing". Gads. I didn't want to see him again. They said Galois theory to me one too many times. So, I kept doing my teaching, mostly calculus. Gads, that was first year college calculus, and I'd never taken it but taught it to myself and started on sophomore calculus. Then I started studying Fleming, Functions of Several Variables with the exterior algebra at the back, etc. I liked music a LOT, still do, but didn't know much, but Indiana University had a terrific music school, and my dorm was next door. In the dorm was a violin student of Josef Gingold and a protege of Issac Stern with a letter of recommendation from from Zeno Francescatti. Once, for fun, in a practice room, with a pianist and me listening, he sight read the Vieuxtemps Fifth violin concerto. One afternoon in the dorm, he put his old Italian violin under my left chin and gave me a first lesson. Magic! So, I signed up for a first course, one on one, in violin! The teacher was another violin student: Poor guy, had to start out by showing me how to hold the violin, and after the semester he was soloist for the Brahms concerto in Toronto! He was good! Eventually I made some progress: Problems: Started too late, too little talent and practice! But, violin is doable and about the most fun can have standing up -- get a voice to permit screaming out to the heavens about the passion of the human spirit! On violins, one difference is how easy it is for the violinist to get the sound they want. That's a biggie. A listener may never know about any of that, but there's little doubt for the violinist! Years later that violin student was a well known professional violinist. I called him for a recommendation of a violin shop for routine maintenance on my violin, and he gave me David Segal Violins in NYC who had made his then favorite violin. IIRC he said he liked the Segal violin better than any of the old Italian instruments. So, maybe, one way and another, there are people now who know how to make some of the best violins ever. Generally I long since gave up on taking seriously anything in the NYT. But, gee, maybe for anything they publish, someone likes it! My favorite piece of music is the Bach Chaconne for unaccompanied violin. I made some progress with it. To me the best part is the end of the central D major section; it has a violin scream out passion beyond belief. The piece deserves more than a solo violin and has been arranged for solo piano by Busoni and also for full orchestra. A piano performance I like is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOFflFiLlT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOFflFiLlT8 When my startup is farther along, maybe I'll get some maintenance on my violin and get through the rest of the Chaconne. Just need a lot of practice!