Violin Forum/Message Board

[actonern]

An editorial from today's (Canada's) National Post that may be of interest...

Unlocking the 'Strad secret'
National Post Published: Monday, July 07, 2008
An old friend resurfaced in the world press last week: the "secret of the Stradivarius" story. A group of Dutch scientists at the University of Leiden Medical Center, it seems, ran five violins made by the legendary Antonio Stradivari of Cremona through a computerized tomography machine, along with a control group of modern instruments. They found that the precious old instruments had a much more uniform density throughout their bodies than the new ones. Why might this be the case? No one knows for sure. Will it be possible for present-day manufacturers to duplicate this unusual quality? Maybe, maybe not. How might it account for the special tone of the Strad? Your guess is as good as anyone's.
But one thing is certain: no one is going to stop subjecting Stradivarius instruments to various indignities in search of the key to their sound anytime soon. The fewer than 700 survivors have been biopsied and scanned by scientists so often that if they were human cancer patients they would have long since cried "Enough!" and shuffled off to die in peace. The incalculable costs of all this research have yielded little or nothing in the way of practical advice for contemporary instrument manufacturers -- and yet editors and TV producers dutifully report every new development in this compelling cottage industry as though lives were at stake.
We cannot seem to resist. We cannot even seem to form a coherent institutional memory of how often we have reported what is, in essence, the very same story. A sampling of rapturous "Strad secret" reports from the fairly recent past would include these moments:
1991 A Florida organic chemist patents a method for fabricating convincing Strad knockoffs by subjecting wood to pressurized treatment with tung oil, a Chinese product similar to linseed oil that was new to Stradivari's generation, along with a dye made from rattan fruit. Two years earlier a New Jersey chemist had patented his own version of Stradivarian coating -- "a precise sequence of multiple layers of shellac, varnish and reddish-brown color pigment."
1997 A U. S. radiologist who was given permission to X-ray four Strads reports that the concealed grain pattern of the instruments was evidence of distinctive treatment "with some high-density material." Amateur violinist Dr. Steven Sirr makes no bold claims to have discovered a unique answer to the Strad mystery, but tellingly admits in The New York Times one possible motive for performing such research: "For a shlump like me to be able to play a Strad, it's just great." Meanwhile, the English are peering at Strads under an electron microscope at an unexpected layer of 18th-century "Polyfilla" containing a confusing mixture of pestled minerals.
2003 A pair of Americans -- a dendrochronologist (an expert in tree rings) and a climatologist -- note that Stradivari's lifetime coincides with the "Maunder minimum," a period from 1645 to 1715 which represented the peak of Europe's early-modern "Little Ice Age." They confirm that Mediterranean trees from the period have narrow rings, reflecting long, bitter winters and virtually absent summers. 2006 Violinist Joseph Nagyvary, a longtime star of the "Strad secret" genre, reports that he has found the likely formula for the preservatives used to protect the surface of Stradivari's violins -- a complicated array of glues and minerals whose sonic effects are "structured at the level of a billionth of a metre." Meanwhile, at a European materials-science conference, a PhD student puts forth her own theory: the secret sauce is a fungus capable of acting on spruce in such a way as to "reduce the cell wall thickness of the wood without impairing its firmness."
In view of the many separate theories which continue to persist in the study of Stradivarius acoustics, it is hard not to sympathize with adherents of the sternest theory of all: there is no Stradivarius secret.
Stradivari was obviously a supreme master who applied the best available knowledge to every phase of violin production, and perhaps simply reached a peak that is no longer attainable by busy modern technicians who lack the benefit of guild participation. His violins were mostly refurbished in the 19th century anyhow (using techniques we would now consider butchery), and setting out to prove that they are objectively superior to good modern instruments is harder than you might think. Blind tests cannot settle the issue because the Strad sound is associated automatically with quality. And expert players participate in the process of exalting the Strad when they "play in" a newly acquired one until it sounds "right" to them. Absolutely no one is going to give up halfway through such a process and conclude, though it might be true, that he got unlucky and bought or borrowed one of Stradivari's total duds.
The secret, in the end, probably mostly lies within us. We like mysteries; we like magic; we want to believe in the simple solutions which defy us in our own lives. These are among the needs art itself meets, and the endlessly striving Stradivarius scholars are perhaps most sensibly ranked among the artists.

[Dave Chandler]

This made me think, I've read most of these issues before in a variety of sources. It brings up the issue of uniform density in Cremona violins, and I've noticed that when I'm graduating the top, I use a strong light from behind to check my rough work. Then double check with my graduating caliper. I've noticed that what appears to be a more translucent spot does not always turn out to be thinner than the surrounding area, its almost as if there is no relationship between translucence (sp?) and thickness.

If you graduate the top based on translucence, are you graduating based on density? Is uniform density, or uniform thickness the goal?
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Dave in the Blue Ridge
Southern Violin Association

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to the next with no loss of enthusiasm" Winston Churchill

"I took the road less travelled, and now I don't know where I am." Marco Polo

[Oded Kishony]

see below

[Oded Kishony]

Light transmission seems to be a property associated with the aging of wood. In very old violins the wood becomes completely opaque.

[Andres Sender]

Oh, is uniformity the goal? I wasn't aware...

[actonern]

Dave:

I remember about 20 years ago, holding the top plate of a viola up to the sunlight for the first time and "discovering" the transluscence difference of light through the spruce top... I secretly imagined that I must be on to something in the way of "speed thicknessing" according to light density.

Alas, as you note, the opacity of spruce often has nothing to do with actual thickness... there are places that appear to be dark and are quite thin, vs. places that are quite red and are still thick.

I felt mildly irritated when I subsequently learned that everyone and their uncle has made the light transmission observation...

[violinarius]

I find that this report is misleading, since the 'overall' density of the old wood is the same as the new wood.

Did the cellulose move from the Late-wood to the Early-wood to maintain the same density as the New instruments?

Perhaps they had a treatment that would remove Late-wood and then another that would replace it in the area of the Early-wood.

If the report found that the overall density of the older instruments was lighter, and that the Late-wood was lighter, then it would make sense.

Too bad they didn't look at non musical instrument wood that was 300 years old to see if it too was more uniform in density.

So at least we know that there are some instruments from the Masters that have the same density as modern makers. There goes the Maunder Minimum theory out the window!

Found your link:

http://www.financialpost.com/scripts/story.html?id=636636

[Michael Darnton]

Well, that was out the window, anyway. If you look at the dates involved, you'll see that wood from the "little ice age" would have been the wood that later violin makers used--Stradivari was living in it, he wasn't using it: the wood he was using was grown earlier.

[Oded Kishony]

I

[violinarius]

Since the report states that the overall density has not changed, but only lists possibilities for cellulose *removal* in it's discussion, such as bacteria eating it, or acids, then the failure to point out that something in treating it, has to be removed from the Late-wood only/mostly, and something else/same *added* to the Early-wood only/mostly, in order to maintain the same density, is misleading.
If they had at the very least pointed out that something has to be added, if something is removed, to maintain the same overall density, but that they had no idea what it was, then they would have done a more thorough job in the 'Conclusions' section of the report.

I should have said that the report is 'somewhat' misleading. My mistake. I'm sorry. I don't think the authors are trying deception here. It just strikes me that the lean is toward the tendency of loss here.

All this of course assumes that the wood was the same as todays wood.

You may have failed to see and quote my WINK that should be a tip off that this is sarcasm.

"Did the cellulose move from the Late-wood to the Early-wood to maintain the same density as the New instruments? "

The real benefit of this report to me is the fact that the wood is the same density as modern wood, so the belief that older wood from an extinct tree, had lighter density is not supported here.

[Oded Kishony]

[David Tseng]

As I have suggested in MN, this article points to the direction of wood treatment. On the graph of their density differential, there is a modern violin top which falls below the Strad/GDG. I suggested that this top was over-treated. (Terry also informed me that the wood of this violin was somehow treated).

[Oded Kishony]

He's also said that the modern violin did not sound any 'different' from any of the other modern violins. So whether or not the wood was treated, it didn't seem to make much of a difference.

It's not magic wood. That's been demonstrated many times now.

Oded Kishony

[David Tseng]

I've been using the same recipe for 20 years now, only in the last 5 or 6 years, I became a little smarter to do it better. Sound-wise, it depends on the substance, process, and quantity.

[MANFIO]

Why this Stradivarian atavism? Why is the world obssessive/compulsive about Antonio?

I would be satisfied with Catarina Guarneri secrets, I would love talking with her about Szering's "Leduc"...
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