Making new wood sound like old wood

Pretty self explanatory. A scientist figured out how to make new wood acoustically better.

Treatment With Fungi Makes a Modern Violin Sound Like a Stradivarius

ScienceDaily (Sep. 8, 2012) — A good violin depends not only on the expertise of the violin maker, but also on the quality of the wood that is used. The Swiss wood researcher Professor Francis W. M. R. Schwarze (Empa, Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, St. Gallen, Switzerland) has succeeded in modifying the wood for a violin through treatment with special fungi. This treatment alters the acoustic properties of the instrument, making it sound indistinguishably similar to a Stradivarius.

On the flip side, there is evidence that experienced musicians can't really tell the difference between a Stradivarius and a violin off the shelf. I really don't think there is a right or wrong sound in an instrument and it's really up to what we like. The article below has a clip of two violins and they certainly sound different to me but how would I know which is the Strad unless I listened to them all the time?

Incidentally, I like the top sound sample better.

Double-Blind Violin Test: Can You Pick The Strad?

Wow, interesting. You know what's crazy? I came on here to start a thread about an awesome book I just read. It's called The Violin Maker. It's all about modern violin makers living in the shadow of Strad and Guarneri, trying to replicate their sound. A lot of it is about how luthiers (and scientists, more recently) have spent 300 years looking for some trick or secret technique that Stradivarius used. Toward the end of the book, the author goes to Strad's hometown of Cremona, Italy, to talk to luthiers there. This passage, in the shop of an eighty-year-old luthier, kind of blew my mind:

‎This was as close as I would get to finding the spirit of Stradivari in Cremona... It was the spirit that propelled a man to labor for seven or eight decades at the same craft... Simone Sacconi wrote that 'this craftsmanship had become a myth because it was not understood.' But he hoped that his life's work, his book, would help violin makers to understand 'the simple truth of a daily routine of work and of the use of techniques which contained nothing mysterious.'

'So,' I said, 'you agree with Sacconi, that there was no secret.'

Francesco Bissolatti required no translation for that. 'One secret,' he responded immediately, holding up a finger. 'The secret,' he said, 'is being able to do it.'

Replies

Ryan Lansing September 14, 2012 at 11:59am

Wow, interesting. You know what's crazy? I came on here to start a thread about an awesome book I just read. It's called The Violin Maker. It's all about modern violin makers living in the shadow of Strad and Guarneri, trying to replicate their sound. A lot of it is about how luthiers (and scientists, more recently) have spent 300 years looking for some trick or secret technique that Stradivarius used. Toward the end of the book, the author goes to Strad's hometown of Cremona, Italy, to talk to luthiers there. This passage, in the shop of an eighty-year-old luthier, kind of blew my mind:

‎This was as close as I would get to finding the spirit of Stradivari in Cremona... It was the spirit that propelled a man to labor for seven or eight decades at the same craft... Simone Sacconi wrote that 'this craftsmanship had become a myth because it was not understood.' But he hoped that his life's work, his book, would help violin makers to understand 'the simple truth of a daily routine of work and of the use of techniques which contained nothing mysterious.'

'So,' I said, 'you agree with Sacconi, that there was no secret.'

Francesco Bissolatti required no translation for that. 'One secret,' he responded immediately, holding up a finger. 'The secret,' he said, 'is being able to do it.'

This reply was deleted.