Is the research on violin acoustics a viscious circle?

[David Burgess]

10 minutes ago, Bill Merkel said:

A legitimate test might be if you could strap the jury into goosebump-o-meters and measure their instantaneous responses 

Back when I was living in Hollywood, I sometimes participated in "audience screen tests" of various movies and TV shows. Sometimes, I was furnished with a dial which I could turn from "extremely like, to extremely dislike" (and anywhere in between) at any moment, so every second could be evaluated on such a basis. Other times, I was hooked up to a skin conductivity device.
I kinda hope that violin preference doesn't go down quite the same path, which I took to place almost all the emphasis on marketing.

[Pate Bliss]

^The fiddle testing is marketing or at least will be used for it I guess.  The tests are kind of like our new movie is as good as Citizen Kane because nobody can tell the difference.  Imagine memory in general is as bad as aural memory such that nobody could tell the difference between two movies...

[Violadamore]

1 hour ago, Bill Merkel said:

^The fiddle testing is marketing or at least will be used for it I guess.  The tests are kind of like our new movie is as good as Citizen Kane because nobody can tell the difference.  Imagine memory in general is as bad as aural memory such that nobody could tell the difference between two movies...

In between the last Three Stooges movie, and the current plague of sequel franchises, you could. 

[Pate Bliss]

^That's why I had to grant earlier that the tests do show new ones aren't awful; words to that effect.

allviolinsecretsrevealedfinally.com

 

[Michael Darnton]

4 hours ago, jezzupe said:

Some inconvenient truths;

1. tone is subjective, there is no "it" tone, there may be sound qualities that maybe even most might agree they like, but still there is no "best sounding violin in the world", and there is no way to describe it if there was

Also an inconvenient truth: if you put a great violin in the hands of any good player, most will agree that it's a great violin. The reason is simple: each player can get what they want that violin to do, objectively.

4 hours ago, jezzupe said:

2. by placing early Italian violins on a pedestal {be it that you think they belong there or not} "you" will ALWAYS be comparing anything built to those violins

Until you come up with a more universally revered alternative, this is certainly true. Is that a bad thing? No.

4 hours ago, jezzupe said:

3. much of this discussion is in fact much more about human psychology than construction of wooden objects. Value perception virtually 100% of the time will distort opinions, only when true blind test's are performed do these "priceless" instruments show their place in the contest and over and over it is proven that these "old Italian" violins fare about as well as anything they are compared to, BUT only when no one knows what they are. That in itself is PROOF that the entire thing is group think psychology based on conditioning. "Strad" IS  group think  psychology , know it or not, since you were a child you have been "programed" by others who have been programmed to "think" that there is a magical superior quality of this LEGEND, when in fact this is all pre conditioning to the point of if you are a pro player/maker or if you can't carry a tune and never played anything, by the time you are 20 years old you have heard SO much pro Strad propaganda that you are conditioned, know it or not, to have a "pro" Strad is the best attitude.

This is really the kind of statement most likely to be made by someone who doesn't get it. What you don't personally understand, yourself, becomes myth for you. That doesn't mean it's a myth, or that it's "psychology" at work. It just means YOU don't get it. The difference between the two of us is that I freely admit I don't know  anything about your specialty of floor finishing. But I do have to deliver on a daily basis for people who have good violins, understand what they will do, and expect them to do it. That's not myth.

This is really the essence of expertise in any field. Is it "psychology" that you go to a doctor with your health problems and don't expect your butcher to be giving you good advice?

I'm sorry, Jessupe, that's just contrarian nonsense.

[David Burgess]

2 hours ago, Michael Darnton said:

This is really the kind of statement most likely to be made by someone who doesn't get it. What you don't personally understand, yourself, becomes myth for you. That doesn't mean it's a myth, or that it's "psychology" at work. It just means YOU don't get it.

How can you be sure that it isn't instead YOU who doesn't "get it"?

[Violadamore]

3 hours ago, Bill Merkel said:

^That's why I had to grant earlier that the tests do show new ones aren't awful; words to that effect.

allviolinsecretsrevealedfinally.com

 

No!  The answer's on Page 25. 

[David Burgess]

56 minutes ago, Violadamore said:

No!  The answer's on Page 25. 

That's where I got mine.

[jezzupe]

Oh I'm not here to accuse people of "not getting it" nor defend my position or opinion really, again I just state the facts as they seem to be known,and that seems to be that in numerous blind test's that have been done over the years "great Italian" violins do not stand out and are not something that "just anyone" can easily clearly pick out as "superior" to other instruments be they modern or older, French, Italian, or another nationality, and I'd just let that "statement" do the talking, unless of course someone has links to some test that was done where it was shown that "they" clearly were better and picked out among others?

That being said I'm more concerned about what is not being focused on and that is developing, proving and having contests about what does matter SUPERIOR SPECIAL HEARING ABILITIES...to me instead of the same old "let's try to prove Strad or other great makers are the best" I would be much more interested in trying to prove, go toe to toe, mano o' mano against other peers in "listening contests" where a person is given a gold star award and an all you can eat buffet at Denny's for proving their ears are "best"

So I am much more impressed by a person listening to say 7 to 10 violins blind. no names given, only numbered, give them 2 minutes of listening to each, in a room where they can walk around and hear it at a distance and close and then simply play them again after the introduction in random order, say 30 seconds each and then let them list and tell us which one is which, several rounds over several days with various instruments could be done and the folks with the best record of correct picks would be crowned EAR MASTER !!! not to be confused with beast master

That to me matters more than "is Strad sound the best" because then when it comes right down to it at least "we" or one could have some actual brevity behind their opinion if in fact one could do as I suggest, it may be that no one can, and it's all just dumb luck, but I have a feeling that certain people would stand out if such contests took place

EDIT; thinking about this some more I would say that these contest's should start with just 2 violins and then work their way up in numbers in an elimination process where several listeners participate at the same time to speed it along, that being said, I bring up this developing and proving,or demonstrating "superior hearing" because I want to give Strad and the old Italian guys the benefit of the doubt that it's not them, it's us. Meaning there very well may be listeners that can identify "Italian sound" and maybe very specifically. 

It's just that if we were to consider "blind listening test's" a "scientific" endeavor, I would say in the Italians behest that it has not been a very big control group as far as "numbers" and proof of quality of participants.

I really do wonder what "category" person would be EAR MASTER ? I would think it would be between a maker and a player? but who knows, maybe someone who is an advanced music listener who does not even play would win? perhaps being blind would help?

I don't know but I sure would like to see the development of such skills fostered in a more professional, say Oberlin like environment and I think contest's are a great way to do it, as they are somewhat like a performance 

Because, well maybe Strads do sound superior or markedly different, we just haven't had the right people at these blind test's?

[Andreas Preuss]

16 hours ago, Don Noon said:

[…] assuming you find something in the model that gets a change you want, then you "just" have to build it.

My simple answer on this is that I don’t think that violin makers can work precise enough to make this work in terms that you modelled in the program violin zero and build the changes on violin one. Or if they would it would be by far too time consuming.

The complicated answer is that all what counts for violinists is the ‘overtone configuration’ given that the base of the sound (signature modes etc.) doesn’t have extreme irregular patterns. And this means that a violin responds willingly to all the player is doing with bow speed, pressure and location on the string plus the bow he/she is using. (You could also add the type of bow hair and rosin) And I don’t see how this can work if the model doesn’t calculate those factors. Or it will be always an imprecise approximation for what we are looking for, and this means too imprecise to be useful.

At best I think such a model can teach us what changes are not significant for the sound and clean up some prejudices which have piled up.

[Andreas Preuss]

11 hours ago, Bill Merkel said:

^The fiddle testing is marketing or at least will be used for it I guess.  The tests are kind of like our new movie is as good as Citizen Kane because nobody can tell the difference.  Imagine memory in general is as bad as aural memory such that nobody could tell the difference between two movies...

The thing is if some violin maker would try to promote something what he/she considers a personal breakthrough in making instruments a better tool for players nobody will pay attention to it. We know that all those claims in the past have landed in the garbage anyway. (Who remembers Paul Kaul?) 

So science is a helpful marketing tool, 
because it has at least the advantage to create the picture of irrefutable evidence, though IMO this is not always the case. 

[Andreas Preuss]

On 6/1/2023 at 4:14 AM, Andrew tkinson said:

What I was mainly suggesting was that possibly the use of new materials in instrument making to replace increasingly scarce  traditionally used woods may allow or even encourage some changes in design? 

If you would find any material disadvantage in the materials currently used, this makes sense. However I am pretty sure that well selected spruce tops are irreplaceable and what we perceive as the best and typical violin sound is bound to this specific material. Though carbon fiddles come pretty close, they can’t really match the ‘woody’ sound. (At least all those I have tried myself so far)

I have once participated in a blind test of a violin made entirely of bamboo. It was compared with a good normal violin and it was interesting that only half of the audience got it right. But the point is that any better player will notice the difference and that’s what really matters. (In the end violin makers sell their instruments to players and not to the audience)

[Andreas Preuss]

13 hours ago, David Burgess said:

Some do, some don't.

Those who don’t, stick pretty much to what Antonio Stradivari and Guiseppe Guarneri del Gesu have proven to be better. 

[David Burgess]

2 hours ago, Andreas Preuss said:

Those who don’t, stick pretty much to what Antonio Stradivari and Guiseppe Guarneri del Gesu have proven to be better. 

Perhaps, but this is the statement I was responding to:
"That just describes any cultural phenomenon.  Recognize that the competing makers themselves copy Strad to the Nth degree, outline, arches, thickness, and even paint... "

So it's a matter of degree.

I'll use myself as an example, since I arguably know my own work pretty well:
While the appearance of my instruments is largely inspired by the work of Stradivari, my sound and playability target and strategies are drawn from a much broader range of instruments, some of which were quite different from those of Stradivari and del Gesu... sometimes weird enough that I thought they had no right to work as well as they did. So when I ran across these instruments which departed from convention in major ways, yet worked remarkably well, I tried use this as an opportunity to learn what other factors might be important, either on their own, or possibly in compensation for the elements which were unconventional, and then incorporate those into my own making strategy, if I could figure out a way to do that.

[Marty Kasprzyk]

One of my violins was in a blind listener and player test along with five other violins.  Nobody in the listener group of about two dozen people picked mine as their favorite.  The only one who liked it best was the player.

 

 

 

[martin swan]

9 hours ago, jezzupe said:

 

I really do wonder what "category" person would be EAR MASTER ? I would think it would be between a maker and a player? but who knows, maybe someone who is an advanced music listener who does not even play would win? perhaps being blind would help?

 

I know your post was a bit polemical but I actually agree with you.

One of the problems with all this, as with wine tasting, is that many people think they can make identifications or distinguish differences but they can't. Some do it for a living without any actual talent or ability. On the other hand there are well proven examples of people with genuine and exceptional ability.

Of course they aren't making value judgments, but simply saying this wine came from this hillside in this year rather than the next year or the neighbouring hillside ...

There are definitely people who can differentiate between violins in the way that you describe but they are few and far between. Most are hopelessly lost and are easily tricked by differences in volume of playing, angle of the instrument, the power of suggestions etc.

I think of myself as an EAR MASTER having spent decades making fine-tuning decisions at a mixing desk or in a mastering studio, but every now and then I get lost in a blind testing when I'm hoping to sell one of the violins!

So to ask most listeners to even distinguish, let alone make a viable value judgment, is generally just pissing in the wind.

For the player the matter is easier since they can judge the response, and are more influenced by issues of comfort.

[GeorgeH]

4 hours ago, martin swan said:

One of the problems with all this, as with wine tasting, is that many people think they can make identifications or distinguish differences but they can't. Some do it for a living without any actual talent or ability. On the other hand there are well proven examples of people with genuine and exceptional ability.

This analogy fits exactly. There was a recent study where the investigators took a white wine, dyed a portion of it with a flavorless dye, and served both to so-called connoisseurs for tasting and evaluation. All (or virtually all) thought they were different wines: a red wine and a white wine. The article about the study also showed that there were only a very tiny number of people who could reliably identify wines in blind testings.

Similarly, there are only a tiny number of people with the olfactory talent to reliably distinguish a fresh batch of shrimp from a bad batch of shrimp.

And then there are stories like this recent one:

NY restaurant couple mistakenly served $2000 Mouton 1989 after ordering $18 Pinot

 

[Michael Darnton]

I doubt anyone is interested but I will tell you how again how I learned to hear violins. For a while I was the "tour guide" at B&F. As part of that I would show instruments to visiting soloists. What I did was ask them to rank them, then tell me what they did and did not like. When I didn't hear it, which was all the time at the start, I asked them to clarify until I could. They were universally kind in doing this, playing things over and over on different violins telling me what to listen for. I have continued that practice for the last 30 years.

If you have someone at the top of their field show you something over and over until you get it, that's a precious gift. I still don't hear everything they do, all the time, and still do that drill in adjusting, learning more all of the time. A lot of what they experience is tactile and I will never get that, but I don't deny their problems, I fix them.

Right now I'm training someone. They're in the room for most adjustments. They don't hear most of what we (player and I) hear, but that will take time, just as it did for me. When you are an adjuster this is an essential skill. Players won't come back to someone who can't hear. 

Any talk about this skill from someone who's not had the experience and learned from it is just meaningless BS.

[GeorgeH]

@Michael Darnton, can you distinguish/recognize these things now when you play a violin under your chin?

And how much has to do with the players' bows? 

[Don Noon]

7 hours ago, Andreas Preuss said:

So science is a helpful marketing tool, 
because it has at least the advantage to create the picture of irrefutable evidence, though IMO this is not always the case. 

Science is rarely used this way.  Marketing is almost always pseudoscience, or a bit of science hyperbolified into something unrecognizable.

6 hours ago, Andreas Preuss said:

I am pretty sure that well selected spruce tops are irreplaceable and what we perceive as the best and typical violin sound is bound to this specific material. Though carbon fiddles come pretty close, they can’t really match the ‘woody’ sound. (At least all those I have tried myself so far)

No solid material can come close to the properties (primarily radiation ratio) of decent spruce.  Balsa and some other low-density woods can match or exceed spruce in that one parameter... but there are other properties that matter too.

I suspect that with enough effort and development, a carbon fiber top sandwich with extremely thin face skins, or some other finely braced method, could be made to work like spruce.  At 100x the cost of spruce.  Maybe more.

Spruce is good stuff.  And cheap.

[Violadamore]

1 hour ago, GeorgeH said:

This analogy fits exactly. There was a recent study where the investigators took a white wine, dyed a portion of it with a flavorless dye, and served both to so-called connoisseurs for tasting and evaluation. All (or virtually all) thought they were different wines: a red wine and a white wine. The article about the study also showed that there were only a very tiny number of people who could reliably identify wines in blind testings.

Similarly, there are only a tiny number of people with the olfactory talent to reliably distinguish a fresh batch of shrimp from a bad batch of shrimp.

And then there are stories like this recent one:

NY restaurant couple mistakenly served $2000 Mouton 1989 after ordering $18 Pinot

 

That link is looped back here.  Here's the story, from a reliable source:  https://www.decanter.com/wine-news/new-york-restaurant-mistake-mouton-rothschild-1989-446051-446051/

[Michael Darnton]

1 hour ago, GeorgeH said:

@Michael Darnton, can you distinguish/recognize these things now when you play a violin under your chin?

And how much has to do with the players' bows? 

I am not a soloist-quality player, so my experience is considerably different from theirs. in some cases I have little dodges that can tell me things that I can't fully experience, but I can never have the full experience. A large part of my adjusting is to ask the victim to play music for a while. I notice things I do and don't like, taking a full inventory, and I also spend a lot of time watching the player, looking for spots where he's uncomfortable, working a bit, repeats something--- all of the little clues that something isn't right that I can't hear--then I try to figure out what I can do to fix all of those problems, all at once. I base my adjustments on the player's style and what I can learn about his tastes, what he is trying to do, the normal context of his playing. That's different for every player. I know what adjustments do what, what they do against each other, additive and subtractive, and I know several ways to accomplish a lot of things, so I can come pretty close on the first try. It's not slap-and-pray adjusting and it's taken me years to work out. Then maybe a few little touches, and we're done.

With someone who's in for the first time,  it can be pretty funny.  After the initial adjustment I get a lot of variations of "What just happened here? This is the best my violin has ever sounded! I think we should leave it here." If it's a VIP my partner is usually in the room and laughs: "That's what he does."  That's because I actually do know what I'm doing. Then when I see them again they have a whole new list of things they try and can't get because those things were never ideas in their minds, things to try, before. :-)

I'm working on two Strads at the moment. We just recently sold a Guad that sat in a really famous shop for nearly five years unsold because it basically didn't work at all after their work and now it does. This is what I do. We don't stress any of this in our advertising since the objective is not to attract adjustments and repairs. Almost 100% of what we do in the workshop is for resale and maintaining past customers. Outside adjustments are fun, and as you might see they don't usually take me more than a few minutes, so they're not a real intrusion. I only charge when I cut; that's the line on that. Virtually all of my adjustment people are local pros, touring pros, players from symphonies within a circle of a couple hundred miles, like that, not students and amateurs. It's more cut and dry that way, with experienced players who know what they need, on instruments that are good enough to actually respond to adjustment.

The bow matters a lot, of course. In most cases I think we can assume that the player has found the best bow he could find for his own instrument, and I need to work around that. If we're selling something there's a pile of bows on the table at the same time for the customer to work through, in addition to what he might bring.

edit: I'm lucky that I never had to adjust bad instruments to learn on. My experience with those is that instruments are adjustable in proportion to their possibilities to the player. I tap those same possibilities in adjustment, bringing them out, pushing them back, moving them around, like moving pebbles around to build something more complex. If an instrument is inherently bad, one big lump of rock, adjustments have no effect because there's no material to work with and push around. Just moving it an inaudible inch in one direction is major work. I think that's why I disagree with a lot of adjustment lore. . .  if you can't change anything, you start imagining changes. That's where psychoacoustics comes in.

[Andrew tkinson]

On 6/1/2023 at 4:33 AM, Dr. Mark said:

Go ahead - pass the buck-buck bu-gawk

I wonder if people with synaesthesia/synesthesia, possessing a sort of enhanced hearing could make be used to make comparisons of violins if they were the judges in blind tests? Maybe they could make more accurate and repeatable comparisons? Perhaps some people are better equipped to become "ear masters" because of their special talents, in a similar manner to the way that special tactile, visual and memory abilties are attributed to the best instrummentmakers  - and chicken sexers!

For ordinary people it can be hard to believe that some people are endowed with extraordinary gifts but we just have to read Dr.Marks statement above to see that he, like his fellow Doctor, Dr. Doolittle is able to talk to the animals, in this case speaking fluent chicken! 

[GeorgeH]

@Michael Darnton, thanks for the detailed answer. It was very interesting to me.

@Violadamore, thanks for pointing out my link error. I fixed it.

[David Burgess]

2 hours ago, Michael Darnton said:

if you can't change anything, you start imagining changes. That's where psychoacoustics comes in.

Agreed. I am of the opinion that many adjusters rely more on "psychological adjustments", than physical or real outcomes. Either that, or they dink around and pepper the client with questions long enough, that the client finally gets exhausted, and says "it's better now", and goes away to preserve their sanity.