Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

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>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.

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