Subject: Re: what makes a great violin From: Erick Gallun <gallun(at)BU.EDU> Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2004 11:43:13 -0500I happened to be reading a great old work "Science and Music" by Sir James Jeans, first published in 1937 in which the topic of violin tone is discussed. Let me quote: "Backhaus has examined the frequencies of the body vibrations of a first-class Stradivarius, and finds that the majority are fairly evenly distributed between 3200 and 5200. In other violins the frequencies are usually lower and also less evenly distributed. A good modern violin shewed a distribution which approached that of the Stradivarius in uniformity, but the frequencies themselves were about 500 cycles lower. In a poor modern violin, the frequencies were not only less well distributed, but were also about 1000 cycles lower. In brief, the bad violin picks out certain rather low harmonics in an arbitrary way, and reinforces these unduly, while the good violin picks out a wide band of high harmonics and reinforces these rather impartially." Solving the inverses problem of how the Stradivarius does this physically is a much more difficult (and lucrative - if solved) question. For more details on this, once could perhaps see the Backhaus papers in Benchmark Papers in Acoustics, Volume 6, Dowden Hutchinson and Ross 1976 (Also, take a look at the Catgut Acoustical Society Library http://ccrma-www.stanford.edu/marl/CASL/ which contains the only Backhaus reference I could find). Erick Gallun Postdoctoral Fellow Hearing Research Center Boston University