Automatic tool to help instrument/bow recognition

[uguntde]

On 7/18/2025 at 3:31 PM, martin swan said:

It's a good question.

Who would use such an app?

Anyone who has accrued significant professional knowledge of violins and bows would do a better job than AI ... I can't see myself ever using such an app and in relative terms I'm not even that knowledgeable.

The knowledge itself is commercially very significant, so acquiring this knowledge (or the appearance of it) without too much hard work/genuine study would seem most relevant to ''cash in the attic" speculators looking at things at auction or maybe violin shops and household clearance firms who see things that are beyond their pay grade.

How are you going to charge for this knowledge? Are you really going to hand over the algorithm that tells someone that the violin for sale for £50 at their local flea market is worth £500,000? 

And how will you indemnify the users of your app who overpay for things based on inaccurate readings from your app?

A dendro app would be a different concept, but I can't see how it would be commercially viable, given that you'd have to buy someone else's extremely valuable database ... it's not like getting a dendro done is very expensive.

Even chatGPT which has been trained to 'please' uses all pictures on maestronet. Cozio can try to protect themselves, but they have no chance, as nobody can proof where information comes from. What these tools lack is what is not in the pictures, like what a bow mortice looks like or what corner blocks look like. But check out corner blockology, these tools can translate what has been written better than any human eye. 

But once all these pictures have been weaved in any AI tool will be superior to any human. This is the  kind of thing AI does well.

Believe me, I tried a lot in the past year. AI tools can teach chemistry better than I or any of my colleague can. We are all affected. 

 

 

 

[Will Turner]

I've searched for a few instruments as a curiosity.   At this time, I find that ChatGPT, Grok 4 and several others confuse makers and players.   One attestation was to mention a "famous Cremonese maker" that never made a single instrument, instead played many another makers instrument and the player in that feed never lived in Italy.

The problem is that inaccurate information on the internet is ingested by these AI systems and it's not able to distinguish fact from fiction.   I could see the ability to confound the searches by posting a bunch of inaccurate information on different sites for an instrument one might want to sell to falsely increase it's valuation and a fake providence. 

[JonnyFW]

I could see a limited use case for this kind of technology in identifying specific instruments that have been lost/stolen, or have been deliberately misattributed.

To take a purely hypothetical example - someone has a well-known, documented instrument by a historic maker, that went missing in mysterious circumstances decades ago. It gets "laundered" by giving it a new name and year, coming up with a new provenance, and gets put up for auction.

I can imagine that the AI would do a good job of comparing the suspicious violin to a database, looking at all the little dents and scratches, and saying that it actually matches a missing instrument from years ago.

Or maybe someone nicks my violin (by a contemporary UK maker) at the bus stop, and it turns up a few weeks later for sale, on the Facebook feed of an innocent violin shop 100 miles away from me.

I might quite like a website where I can upload a few pictures, and the AI scans the web for violin sales to see if it can find anything with the exact same shape/colour/antiquing pattens as mine.

[Violadamore]

If they tucked all the electronics necessary inside of a self-propelled Furby, which would climb around the violin to examine it, make Furbish comments, and maybe play something on it, I can imagine a lucrative market for their product, just not the one they had in mind.    

[Wood Butcher]

6 hours ago, Violadamore said:

If they tucked all the electronics necessary inside of a self-propelled Furby, which would climb around the violin to examine it, make Furbish comments, and maybe play something on it, I can imagine a lucrative market for their product, just not the one they had in mind.    

Just think how this could have helped to identify that basement Strad, once owned by a shoe tycoon.

[Rothwein]

Famolare owned a Strad? Must've had wheels...

[Blank face]

On 10/22/2025 at 5:30 AM, Violadamore said:

a self-propelled Furby

Today that’s called a drone; or „search and destroy“?

[Violadamore]

15 minutes ago, Blank face said:

Today that’s called a drone; or „search and destroy“?

These things:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furby . They are capable of some very bizarre behavior resembling AI, such as spontaneously starting to talk and/or sing to themselves and each other in the middle of the night.  

[Wood Butcher]

Why do they look like something from a nightmare? I thought they were children's toys!

[Violadamore]

4 hours ago, Wood Butcher said:

Why do they look like something from a nightmare? I thought they were children's toys!

Some kids like horror movies, too.    I always found the darned things disturbing.  A dear friend of mine (my source for the behavior report) got some for her kids, and wound up pulling the batteries to stop them from waking her youngsters up, and to stop her older kids from teaching the things to cuss, etc.    At least some of the models will memorize and repeat things.