What Joshua Bell's experiment tells us

[GeorgeH]

7 hours ago, martin swan said:

Forming judgments on evidence and experience is a pretty fundamental thought process, and we are all always in a state of WYSIATI.

Indeed, Heisenberg proved that it is physically impossible to know everything about anything.

But we can know what we cannot know.

Nevertheless, perpetuating myths, legends, and beliefs as facts without consideration of whether they are rigorously proven (or even provable) is common in the violin world and many other spheres of human thought. 

[Violadamore]

26 minutes ago, Yoshiharu Ito said:

Actually, what I'm beginning to wonder, following this line of discussion, is why the spiral motif was so ubiquitous in Renaissance Italy in the first place.

Maybe because the Renaissance was a resurrection (followed by a transcendence in the 1600's) of Classical literature and ideas?  Weren't the Greeks (e.g., Archimedes, Ionic column capitals, etc.) very aware of spirals?   

[Violadamore]

1 minute ago, GeorgeH said:

Indeed, Heisenberg proved that it is physically impossible to know everything about anything.

But we can know what we cannot know.

Nevertheless, perpetuating myths, legends, and beliefs as facts without consideration of whether they are rigorously proven (or even provable) is common in the violin world and many other spheres of human thought. 

1) Actually, quantum uncertainty is the least of it.  Beyond Heisenberg, there's chaos math to discover, so we don't always know the scale of our ignorance until something bites us, and causes us to examine it more closely.  IMHO, violins are chaotic in nature.

2)  Study enough archaeology and you'll find that many myths, legends, and beliefs have provable foundations.  BTW, those who dig up charcoal, usually get more dates.......     

[Dr. Mark]

1 hour ago, Yoshiharu Ito said:

1 hour ago, Dr. Mark said:

I expect that you mean to ask why artists use the spiral so often...?

Actually, what I'm beginning to wonder, following this line of discussion, is why the spiral motif was so ubiquitous in Renaissance Italy in the first place.

That might be a result of Renaissance Italy being a maritime nation.  The spiral was used throughout that region since time immemorial to represent waves, so there might be some conscious and/or subconscious proclivity in people so dependent on the sea.

[Pluto Vermin]

^They were fascinated by the way water goes down a drain, like cats.  Violin is basically cats.

[go_oa]

A return to the beginning of the post:

Violin design may have settled 300 years ago, but bows only settled 150 years ago. And in fact bow material is under siege even now.  A fiberglass bow that has been finished by a human can be very good.

In the wind section there is still active redesign of some instruments.  For example, the Contraforte redesign of the contra bassoon is a very new entrant.   And the recognition that pinholes can make some difficult high trumpet notes more secure is a remarkable  change.

The addition of electronics to our beloved violin is the direct expression of human inginuity applied to our world.  Is an amplified violin a new instrument?  Is an electronic bridge an insult to our way of music?  We are entering a new world.  The creative artists have a new, enlarged canvas.  I do not understand it yet.   

 

 

[Yoshiharu Ito]

8 hours ago, GeorgeH said:

Indeed, Heisenberg proved that it is physically impossible to know everything about anything.

But we can know what we cannot know.

Nevertheless, perpetuating myths, legends, and beliefs as facts without consideration of whether they are rigorously proven (or even provable) is common in the violin world and many other spheres of human thought. 

I believe that the act of trying to know what cannot be known is itself important.

[Yoshiharu Ito]

9 hours ago, Don Noon said:

 

As expected of Maestronet! I see this has already been a subject of much debate. Thank you for pointing that out.

[Yoshiharu Ito]

9 hours ago, Violadamore said:

Maybe because the Renaissance was a resurrection (followed by a transcendence in the 1600's) of Classical literature and ideas?  Weren't the Greeks (e.g., Archimedes, Ionic column capitals, etc.) very aware of spirals?   

This is fascinating.

We may never be able to prove why the violin scroll takes the form of a spiral. But if anyone knows of sources that shed light on why the spiral was so consciously used in Italian Renaissance art and architecture  and where that understanding ultimately came from , I would very much like to know.

[Yoshiharu Ito]

8 hours ago, Dr. Mark said:

That might be a result of Renaissance Italy being a maritime nation.  The spiral was used throughout that region since time immemorial to represent waves, so there might be some conscious and/or subconscious proclivity in people so dependent on the sea.

That is very interesting. My knowledge of Italy as a maritime nation was limited to the fact that timber was transported along canals , so this opens up a new dimension I had not considered.

[Yoshiharu Ito]

6 hours ago, Mansfield Piggot said:

^They were fascinated by the way water goes down a drain, like cats.  Violin is basically cats.

Just like the cat head on your avatar

[martin swan]

16 hours ago, Yoshiharu Ito said:

Thanks!

I’m curious about the scientific side as well. Does the scroll significantly affect the instrument’s resonance or the harmonic balance of the acoustic spectrum? I’d love to hear how it’s viewed in terms of pure acoustics.

A spiral is a mathematically derived ornament.

So we might think of it as equivalent to an ornament in music such as a trill or more specifically a turn  - an embellishment to a note which can be expressed as a formula.

The ornamentation in the instrument has its parallel in the music the instrument is expressing.

I think this is probably quite a Renaissance concept, more so than thinking in isolation about what it might do acoustically.

[martin swan]

8 hours ago, Yoshiharu Ito said:

That is very interesting. My knowledge of Italy as a maritime nation was limited to the fact that timber was transported along canals , so this opens up a new dimension I had not considered.

I don't wish to be pendantic, but I would point out that Italy didn't exist until the mid-1800s. In Stradivari's time it was a complete jumble of warring kingdoms, big and small.

Also most of Europe was maritime - this was how trade happened. Much easier to transport goods by boat than by packhorse or cart. Venice was perhaps the 'market leader' but Britain, Spain, Portugal, Holland, the Baltic States, Scandinavia were all predominantly maritime.

The Spanish were mining vast quantities of silver 3000 miles away in Peru and destabilizing European economies a century before Stradivari was born.

 

[Blank face]

The spiral was invented by the maritime tribe of the Ammonites appr. 400 million years B.C. Unfortunately all of their craft secrets are lost and no living memory of their music exists anymore.

[Yoshiharu Ito]

3 hours ago, martin swan said:

A spiral is a mathematically derived ornament.

So we might think of it as equivalent to an ornament in music such as a trill or more specifically a turn  - an embellishment to a note which can be expressed as a formula.

The ornamentation in the instrument has its parallel in the music the instrument is expressing.

I think this is probably quite a Renaissance concept, more so than thinking in isolation about what it might do acoustically.

From your perspective, if the spiral was brought into music, what philosophy do you think it originally came from?

Thinking about it more carefully, I find myself sensing the spiral even in Bach's Cello Suites.

If the scroll is Fibonacci, then the ornamentation and improvisation in Renaissance and Baroque music brings me back to the thread I started on Maestronet last November （ on Pythagoras and Plato ） and the exchange I had there with François Denis and Dr. Mark.

3 hours ago, martin swan said:

 

The Spanish were mining vast quantities of silver 3000 miles away in Peru and destabilizing European economies a century before Stradivari was born.

 

The broader point about European maritime culture is well taken.

[Yoshiharu Ito]

54 minutes ago, Blank face said:

The spiral was invented by the maritime tribe of the Ammonites appr. 400 million years B.C. Unfortunately all of their craft secrets are lost and no living memory of their music exists anymore.

That is always the Idea, isn't it

[Don Noon]

5 hours ago, martin swan said:

A spiral is a mathematically derived ornament.

...probably quite a Renaissance concept, more so than thinking in isolation about what it might do acoustically.

A mathematical spiral is one thing.  Shells of snails and other sea critters I doubt would follow exact mathmatical shapes, but are natural spirals that are everywhere.  They look cool.  In trying to develop a CNC program to cut scrolls, I wasn't able to get any nice mathematical curve to look right.  No biggie, I just used a bunch of tangent curves until it looked about right.

Having a mass at the end of the neck does do something acoustically that seems beneficial.  So why not carve it into something artistic, like a scroll, or head, or whatever.  

[Dr. Mark]

12 hours ago, Yoshiharu Ito said:

I believe that the act of trying to know what cannot be known is itself important.

I absolutely agree. 'Cannot be known' is a human assessment and as such is subject to ignorance

 

12 hours ago, Yoshiharu Ito said:

if anyone knows of sources that shed light on why the spiral was so consciously used in Italian Renaissance art and architecture  and where that understanding ultimately came from , I would very much like to know.

It might be the art itself illustrates the source, like in these frescoes from bronze-age Crete:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Aegean_frescos#/media/File:Knossos_women_fresco.jpg.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Aegean_frescos#/media/File:Knossos_frise2.JPG

The underlying idea - and that it occurs at the termination of locks of hair, as waves reach a vertical termination, at the growing ends of plant tendrils, as people grow old near the end of life, the fetal position at the beginning of life - would suggest its use as a finial, the spirals used in art being more or less a stylization and reduction of observed natural forms.  We don't need to have ever consciously thought of this trend either as a culture or as individuals for it's influence to arise in our manners of expression.  Why our minds do this I don't know, but the development of mathematics requires something similar.  It ultimately must be a consequence of environment and natural selection, and deeper still, physics.  Occam's razor and the least action principle are closely related ideas.  Look at all those chickens and eggs - I wonder which came first...?

Sorry Mr. Swan - but really.

[martin swan]

...

 

 

 

[Dr. Mark]

Just contemplating that 'ancient Greece' wasn't really a country either but however imprecise it's usually sufficient, and that natural spirals seem to predate the development of mathematics sophisticated enough to describe them.

[martin swan]

18 minutes ago, Dr. Mark said:

Just contemplating that 'ancient Greece' wasn't really a country either but however imprecise it's usually sufficient, and that natural spirals seems to predate the development of mathematics sophisticated enough to describe them.

Surely everything in physics and the natural world predates the development of mathematics sophisticated enough to describe it?

[quietlifemotel]

On 4/23/2026 at 7:13 PM, Yoshiharu Ito said:

This is a fascinating phenomenon...!

On 4/23/2026 at 7:13 PM, Yoshiharu Ito said:

  On 4/23/2026 at 10:59 AM, Jwillis said:

They blast opera and classical music at gas stations to prevent loitering. Perhaps not all people’s tastes are the same   https://abc6onyourside.com/news/local/columbus-gas-station-south-high-street-obetz-road-blasts-opera-music-247-to-deter-loitering

At university I played fiddle in an alt-country band inspired by Richard & Linda Thompson and the Velvet Underground. We played a few gigs with a guitarist who led a hardcore band named "Happy Flowers." They got their start at a show where, at the end of the night, the barkeeper told them to play so noxiously that everyone would leave the bar. They became shockingly successful. Even without doing any Puccini covers.

This was some time ago, although admittedly in the  post-Baroque era ... 

A few years later, in Chapel Hill, NC, there was a famous bookstore that — quite unfortunately — resorted to Musaq in the owner's "scientifically informed" belief that this would encourage people to spend more money.

People hear things differently, for different reasons. Relativity is complicated  

[quietlifemotel]

2 hours ago, martin swan said:

Surely everything in physics and the natural world predates the development of mathematics sophisticated enough to describe it?

A NASA  astronomer I knew used to marvel at the application of higher mathematics to astronomy. She said it was stunning to her that some of the most seemingly  bizarre-and-unnatural implications of Einstein-and-beyond  Nobel-prize level mathematics would, relentlessly, be confirmed by later observations by astronomers working at places like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.  

Human perception seems to be another kind of science, though ...

[Don Noon]

Astronomical things behave only according to the laws of physics and math.  Some of it can be extremely complex and non-intuitive, like relativity, but it's just math.

I rather think of musical instruments as following the path of life and evolution.  By trial-and-error, life finds things that work better at achieving "success"... as defined by surviving and making more offspring.

Instruments are mostly a trial-and-error thing, with the ones that are most pleasing to players and listeners (including visually) becoming more popular and thus in a way creating more "offspring".  Like life, instruments follow the local pressures and evolve differently, creating new species or races, if you will.  Maybe not so much now, where the world has shrunk.

I think that the violin has evolved in ways that were not totally understood by the makers.  F-holes have some acoustic effects that are different from C-holes, the scroll has some effects, as do the corner blocks.  You don't need to know what they are doing for them to become preferred for their function, although you could also argue things from a visual aesthetic as well.

[martin swan]

32 minutes ago, Don Noon said:

I rather think of musical instruments as following the path of life and evolution.  By trial-and-error, life finds things that work better at achieving "success"... as defined by surviving and making more offspring.

Instruments are mostly a trial-and-error thing, with the ones that are most pleasing to players and listeners (including visually) becoming more popular and thus in a way creating more "offspring".  Like life, instruments follow the local pressures and evolve differently, creating new species or races, if you will.  Maybe not so much now, where the world has shrunk.

I think that the violin has evolved in ways that were not totally understood by the makers.  F-holes have some acoustic effects that are different from C-holes, the scroll has some effects, as do the corner blocks.  You don't need to know what they are doing for them to become preferred for their function, although you could also argue things from a visual aesthetic as well.

That's a great way of seeing it.

Perhaps the way to tie it into the OP's philosophical question would be to ask if the evolutionary process has now stopped. It seems that we are now dealing with an orthodoxy rather than an evolving narrative, and that contemporary violin-makers have stepped out of this evolutionary chain by slavishly copying the models that are seen as canonical.

I think this has enormous relevance to the question of antiqueing, which for me is quite a profound ethical dilemma.