Hacker News Reader

>As I understand it, the difference between a crafted instrument and a factory one lies in the way the creator adapts (or doesn't) to the natural grain of the wood. A handmade instrument by an expert can't be beaten by a factory process because each piece of wood resonates differently and those differences must be accounted for to get a good sound.

Violin makers have, sadly, decided to pursue a complete dead end, because of the near-universal preoccupation with old instruments. Stradivarius violins have become the platonic ideal, therefore any new violin can never be better than a close copy. Improvement of the instrument is not merely discouraged, but definitionally impossible. In blind tests, players and listeners consistently either fail to distinguish between old and new instruments or prefer modern instruments, but these findings have had essentially no impact on attitudes.

There is no Greg Smallman, Lucien Gélas or Ervin Somogyi of violins, nor will there be without significant cultural change.

"...the near-universal preoccupation with old instruments"

This, and it's actually kind of sad. There have been double-blind tests that show that Stradivarius violins are acoustically nothing special: experts cannot pick them out by sound alone, or may actually prefer other violins. One example: https://www.science.org/content/article/million-dollar-strad...

It's sort of like the crazy prices paid for paintings by "old masters". Even when the paintings are nothing special to look at. Even when the "old master" in question ran a factory, where his students did most of the painting and he just did some final touches and signed the things.

It is more complicated. Modern violins can be louder, and audience generally think loud=better, but this may not what the player prefers or what is wanted in an orchestra. There is also the issue of playing an instrument only an hour vs playing an instrument for a tour or longer time.

https://www.violinist.com/blog/laurie/20121/13039/

This is a description by one contestant who participated in the 2010 test. She generally likes that new violins can sound really good, but she criticizes:

> As for the old violins: one was a Guarneri del Gesù (circa 1740) and two were Antonio Stradivari (circa 1700 and 1715) "These violins were loaned with the stipulation that they remain in the condition in which we received them -- precluding any tonal adjustments or even changing the strings." That means that, whatever happened to the old violins during their trip -- if they got jostled on the airplane, etc. -- there was no soundpost adjustment, no bridge adjustment, no check for open seams. If the strings were a little older, they were a little older. … My concern is this: it sounds to me like the older instruments were not optimized -- by either selection or by luthier adjustments -- while the new moderns were.

There are also differences between Stradivarius. In the formal test one old Stradivarius was universally disliked and in an informal test a modern violin beat an old strad. She wonders if that was the same model:

> […] During the same event when this study took place, another more informal "study" was done by those who did this one. While jurors were deliberating over the outcome of the Indianapolis violin competition, the audience that was gathered was asked to evaluate some moderns vs. old Italians. Indianapolis Symphony Concertmaster Zach De Pue played four pairs of violins, allowing the audience to decide which they liked best of each pair, based on playing excerpts from "Scheherazade" and Strauss's 'Don Juan.' Each pair included one old and one modern violin. The votes were very close each time, but ultimately the audience chose one modern violin and three Strads, from the years 1699, 1714 and 1715. Several more tests and votes narrowed the fiddles to the one the audience liked best: Jimmy Lin's 1715 Strad. (Was that non-preferred Strad from the study in the mix? I'm guessing it was, and it was the one not-preferred).

It should be mentioned that "old" violins that are still used today have all been substantially rebuilt to accommodate later repertories. There is a lot of difference between an early Baroque violin and a late 19th century violin including the fingerboard and the type of strings, and only a few museum strads that have not been played have retained their original configuration. One benefit of the early music movement that took off in the second half of the 20th century was realising that the "old" and "original" instruments weren't actually that old or original after all, and new baroque violins had to be made from scratch to attempt to reproduce what they would have sounded back like in the 17th and 18th centuries.

It's more than that - the bass bar on modern instruments is substantially heavier, because string tension with modern wire wound strings is higher than baroque era gut strings; the older instruments are more lightly built.

The tone you get with gut strings is completely different than with modern strings - more complex, more resonances, but a modern style instrument will deaden that somewhat, you really want a period instrument to take advantage of gut strings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y4lcQ7BTLw

The neck is also different, but that affects reaching the high end of the fingerboard more than accoustics.

It may be that the old violins are preferred as tools because they somehow help the player achieve the same (optimal for their skill level?) sound, more easily and consistently.

Think of a car that is less effortful to drive. From external appearances, the same driving is happening either way. But inside, the “worse” car has a lot of compensating on the part of the driver, while the “better” car does not.

It’s a good hypothesis. Anecdotally though, I know a bunch of people who have experience playing both, and say that the old instruments can be difficult to play, though sound amazing when played well.

It might be purely due to how expensive they are.

MRI studies proven that people really do draw more pleasure from tasting wine when they know it's expensive.

I imagine some people would also derive more pleasure from knowing they're eating the last of a particular species, or walking on a floor made from the last of a particular irreplaceable forest, or racing a car that is the car that was raced in historical race of ages past, or even winning a rai stone in a game of backgammon. All exclusive experiences.

>>> There have been double-blind tests that show that Stradivarius violins are acoustically nothing special: experts cannot pick them out by sound alone, or may actually prefer other violins.

This is widely acknowledged among violinists. In fact there is a growing concern that the Strads are deteriorating. The vast majority of working musicians have never handled a Strad.

I’ve always wondered whether a violin is even a particularly good UX for making violin noises. The shape (and therefore most of the UX) is constrained in the analogue domain… but in the digital domain?

I’ve been consistently surprised to see that unlike with e.g. MIDI “keyboard controllers” (which have evolved and diverged into many different forms for different use-cases, like sequencer button pads), there is no similar experimentation in what form an “electric violin” for greenfield players could tak. Nothing like, say, an instrument played with one finger of each hand along pressure-sensitive slider pads for 4D continuous input.

Make one and find out. People are experimenting with all kinds of novel ideas. Nobody's restrained by tradition.

I feel like, to do it right, you need to already be both

• a violinist (so that you have expertise in what sound you’re targeting, and in the existing “UX” of a violin at a professional level — in combination meaning “so you know what should be easy to play, and what should be hard-but-possible”); and also

• a luthier (so that you have expertise in what factors shape the acoustics of a violin, and the sonic space — including the “bad” parts that no violinist would ever intentionally access — that a violin can generate; and also so that you’ve given thought to the ergonomics of existing violins, so as to ensure that the new thing isn’t making them worse.)

Such a person is likely to have spent their career thinking more about music than about industrial design, though, so I wouldn’t expect such a person to have too many thoughts on a novel violin UX on their own.

So this would likely be at least a two-person project: one person who knows UX/HCI/IdX + hardware engineering, to design and prototype the device; and someone who knows violins, to be that designer-engineer’s critic and internal customer.

I am only one of those people, so as much as I’d like to try this, it’s not the easiest project to pop off the ideas heap.

I think this is what most people who’ve considered this idea from one side or the other would say — which is probably why it hadn’t been done yet.

You also need a generous and patient investor. ;-)

It's being done. There are people who are researching novel ergonomics and designs for instruments. I don't know of one working on the violin specifically, but certainly viola and double bass. Here's one:

https://uptonbass.com/shop/upton-bass-ergo-double-bass-by-ae...

And in the world of double basses, there's enough variation that players do choose basses that fit their bodies. For instance my bass has sloping shoulders that probably affect tone and volume, but that allow me to play with better posture. And designs have changed over the past few centuries. Older basses with super long necks get shortened.

I've also read about a piano professor who's researching pianos with narrower keys, for players with smaller hands, and has discovered that even players with big hands prefer it, who'd-a guessed?

Given the fact that a player has to adapt their technique without taking themselves out of competition for gigs, or getting injured, before even finding out if something is an improvement, maybe a realistic rate of change is pretty close to the actual rate of change.

Different materials are being explored. There have already been start-ups making carbon fiber double basses.

I'm both a musician and a technologist, but I have to admit that I separate those two activities for the most part. I do technology all day, and playing music is my escape from ... user interfaces. Many musicians arrive at the point where they say: Time to stop chasing gear, and start playing music.

> Given the fact that a player has to adapt their technique without taking themselves out of competition for gigs, or getting injured, before even finding out if something is an improvement, maybe a realistic rate of change is pretty close to the actual rate of change.

To be honest, I wasn’t picturing an instrument that improved the ergonomics of violin-playing for existing violinists — but rather an instrument that would massively decrease the difficulty of playing a violin for inexperienced players. Something that would let an audio engineer put a quick realistic violin solo into a piece, without hiring an actual violinist.

As a guitar and bass player one thing that is rarely talked about is that every individual instrument with its particular sweetspots creates a feedback cycle with the player.

That means even if two instruments are capable of theoretically producing the same sounds, it can feel fundamentally different to get there as an instrumentalist, thus each instrument has a character that goes beyond just sound. This is an especially critical point if you are improvising.

This is btw. also why many electrical guitarists insist on loudly cranked amps: the feedback that developes between speaker and guitar allows you to play the guitar differently as each note will sustain longer (or even grow in volume as you let go).

the sound of an electric guitar right on the edge of breakup

> She never looks at the label or pays attention to the appearance of the body, the sound is the only thing that sets the good instruments apart for her.

This kind of study/comparison really needs better blinding.

While not the same thing, as an example, blind auditions for orchestras really changed the demographics of who got selected.

> However, after adopting ‘blind hiring’ techniques, the TSO saw an increase of women being admitted from 25% to 46%.

https://www.fairhire.org/quest/orchestrating-equity-a-brief-...

Apparently, people can tell the difference. They do seem to prefer newer violins over the old ones:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1619443114

>"We find that [violin soloists] generally prefer new violins over Stradivaris, consider them better-projecting, and are no better than players at telling new and old apart."

Violin playing is an expressive performance art. Feeling transcendent makes experts play better.

Do you think Richard Burton would have acted Hamlet better, the same, or worse, if he knew that Shakespeare himself were in the audience?

Great way to put it

Ugh. I hate it when the playwright comes to shows. They always have opinions.

Their work is over. The words are set. Now let me do my job, figuring out how to say them and how to move. It's between me and the director. We're the ones who can see the set, know the other actors, feel what the audience is responding to.

One thing I love about doing Shakespeare: he's very sparing with stage directions. He lets the words speak for themselves. Often, they suggest how I should sound, when I should be silent, how to move. But he rarely enforces an action on me. And even better... because he's dead, he's not going to come at us if we cut something we don't like, or rearrange.

Modern playwrights love to tell me when to take a (beat). Guys... you wrote the words. I'll figure out how fast to say them. You did your job. Now stay home and let me do mine.

This comment comes across as arrogant and dismissive of authors. Maybe this is a common attitude in theater but it doesn't come across as very collaborative from the outside.

It was intended to come off as exaggerated for humor, but clearly that didn't convey. I'm sorry for that.

That said... most of the time, playwrights aren't supposed to collaborate with actors. It's not a one-to-one interaction. The playwright writes, makes it available through a service like Samuel French, and has no connection with the actual performances.

They may collaborate with actors and directors during the writing process. That's a different thing from the ordinary work of an actor.

Actors collaborate a lot -- with each other, with the director, with the lights and sound and tech and props. Adding one more voice -- even that of the playwright -- often makes it worse, rather than better.

In particular (switching to my director's hat rather than my actor's hat), it is important that I be the final word on the show. That sounds arrogant, and of course it is, but in a conventional theater process the director's job is to keep all of the other artists working together. That's what makes it look like a finished, cohesive work, rather than a collection of individual performances.

A common faux pas in theatrical circles is for a writer to bypass the director and give directions to the actors. That is very much a no-no. Actors work together, not as individuals, and a writer telling an actor something different from what the director tells them gives the work a disjointed feeling. If a writer has notes, they go to the director -- who has to be free to ignore them.

Writers, of course, chafe at this. And it's worse when they don't have experience as actors or directors themselves, because they don't know how the process works.

I remember visiting a friend, while in high school (in the 1970s). He lived in a fairly exclusive area.

He showed me his electric guitar. It was unbranded, pretty plain, and beat up. Sort of a Gibson Les Paul-looking thing, made of some solid light wood. Maybe maple.

When he played it, it sounded amazing. I couldn't believe the sound came from that raggedy-ass-looking axe.

It was made by a family friend. A chap named Paul Reed Smith.

I was only ever a mediocre cellist (Suzuki book 7) but my sister was legit good and won a scholarship-ish thing to borrow some hundreds-of-years-old cello worth six figures. When playing it, even I could immediately tell the difference between it and my mass-produced Yamaha.

> When playing it, even I could immediately tell the difference between it and my mass-produced Yamaha.

I would imagine the CNC milled Yamahas to have much better quality control. It's the same in horology, "hand crafted" Swiss/German watches are valued over precision cut assembly line Seikos even though the Seiko complications are magnitudes more accurate and reliable than the Swiss ones.

I could see differences due to materials. Wood is not uniform product, so picking the right section for right part might do something minor. Metal is metal and we get very exact and uniform properties with modern manufacturing.

Now maybe we could question why have we not come up with anything better for these wood instruments? Like some mixture of plastic?

Carbon fiber seems to work reasonably well for guitars, I don't own one but I've tried them out and I think they're perfectly fine.

It's closer to a difference between mass retail and tailor fitted clothes. Big vendors have great quality control too, but it's not the robustness of the stitch or uniformity of color that's important here.

You must be right, those thousands of professional violin players who've been playing since kindergarten are just deluding themselves.

I think there is some survivorship bias at work. An instrument that feels and plays great was just more likely to survive several hundred years.

"Quality control" doesn't tell you what standard they have for acceptable, just that such a standard exists.

I've heard that it is quite straightforward with modern tools to make new violins which pass a blind test against a Stradivarius — I wouldn't know myself — but that doesn't mean those with a target price of £500 are actually made to this standard.

I’ve watched a few YouTube videos of people with their eyes covered listening to acoustic guitars, and they try to pick which one is more expensive. Some after a few picks can even tell the brand and model. It’s pretty remarkable.