Fungivarius Beats $2 Million Stradivarius Violin 210
Fluffeh writes "Violins made by the Italian master Antonio Giacomo Stradivarius are regarded as being of unparalleled quality even today, with enthusiasts being prepared to pay millions for a single example. Stradivarius himself knew nothing of fungi which attack wood, but he received inadvertent help from the Little Ice Age which occurred from 1645 to 1715. During this period Central Europe suffered long winters and cool summers which caused trees to grow slowly and uniformly ideal conditions in fact for producing wood with excellent acoustic qualities. Now scientists are turning to fungi to recreate some of these amazing sounding instruments."
The most beautiful sound (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was much much younger I was purchasing a violin. While at this shop the owner had a 'cheap' Stradivarius. After I had selected the instrument I wanted (this had been going on for weeks of trying them) the owner let me hold, and play, his 'cheap' Stradivarius.
The sound that effused out of that instrument can not be put into words to hear and feel... it made the one I selected sound as if it were a cheap knockoff made of plastic. The tones could not even be compared in the same room- one was transmitted through steel cups and a string, the other was singing in front of you.
To this day that is one of the more emotional feelings of music I have ever felt.
To have that sacred sound reproduced for everyone to have access to- I don't know. It is such a beautiful instrument that, currently, only the elite can have and play (most instruments are endowed to players- on 'loan'). Should everyone have access... would it be the same?
Re:Blind Sound Test. (Score:5, Interesting)
They did it with the monster cables vs a coat hanger [gizmodo.com]. You could probably just grab a $500 violin and pit it against one of these 2 million dollar ones and see. The only problem is that the cost of $2m and $500 vs $150 and a coat hanger is a much bigger monetary difference.
So many variables and theories... (Score:2, Interesting)
For example, the wood for the Stradivarius violins were transported by floating them in salt water behind the boat. And there are theories about the varnish.
The top of a violin has decorative purling trim placed in a groove carved around the outer edge. The groove is thinner than the rest of the violin, and it eventually cracks, causing the face of the violin to resonate better.
Violins that are played sound better than new violins. This can be duplicated by placing a violin in a chamber with speakers, and playing music for many, many hours.
The list goes on.
The reality is that some violins sound better than others. A Stradivarius is an instrument like any others - created by art and skill, not magic.
You want a Stradivarius? $150 gets you the downloadable version of the Garritan Personal Orchestra, which includes Stradivari, Gagliano and Guarneri violins. [garritan.com]
I'm not convinced (Score:5, Interesting)
Nonetheless, this is promising work. A modern violin by the best makers is typically a $25,000 instrument, while professional players in major orchestras are expected to spend several times that for an older instrument. It's like having an extra house payment. If the quality of the modern instruments starts to rival and surpass those of lesser makers in antiquity, it will help young players immensely as well as giving speculators in such instruments a well-deserved comeuppance.
The Stradivarius Myth (Score:5, Interesting)
The "unparalleled" sound of Stradivarii is probably mostly the placebo effect---the Stradivarius myth [telegraph.co.uk].
Here's a quote from the wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]:
Above all, these instruments are famous for the quality of sound they produce. However, the many blind tests from 1817 to the present (as of 2000) have never found any difference in sound between Stradivarii and high-quality violins in comparable style of other makers and periods, nor has acoustic analysis.[2] In a particularly famous test on a BBC Radio 3 program in 1977, the great violinists Isaac Stern and Pinchas Zukerman and the violin expert and dealer Charles Beare tried to distinguish among the "Chaconne" Stradivarius, a 1739 Guarneri del GesÃ, an 1846 Vuillaume, and a 1976 British violin played behind a screen by a professional soloist. The two violinists were allowed to play all the instruments first. None of the listeners identified more than two of the four instruments; two of the listeners identified the 20th-century violin as the Stradivarius.[3]
Re:Blind Sound Test. (Score:5, Interesting)
The $500 violin would fail. Miserably.
source [npr.org]
Re:Blind Sound Test. (Score:3, Interesting)
Perfectly believable (Score:5, Interesting)
I’m really a trumpeter...the computer thing is just to pay the bills.
Last night at a rehearsal, for an incredibly stupid reason (I mean, really, how do you walk out the door without grabbing that big yellow Pelican case?) I had to borrow an instrument.
The one I would have been playing on was owned by both Harry Glantz and Bill Vacchiano, perhaps the two greatest trumpeters ever to play with the New York Philharmonic. It’s a magical instrument, and the only C trumpet I ever want to play on again. Not perfect — it has its quirks — but it’s perfect for me.
The instrument I played on last night was barely adequate, and the mouthpiece was the polar opposite of mine.
It only took a measure or two for me to produce a sound that I considered acceptable. By the end of the first piece, only a trained musician who knows my playing very well would have been able to tell that I wasn’t using my own equipment.
Of course, I had to work a lot harder than normal to get to that point, and I still wasn’t achieving the results I consider optimal. But very, very few people reading these words would be able to tell that.
I learned that lesson decades ago at a master class with Charlie Schlueter, the principal trumpeter of the Boston Symphony. He wanted to demonstrate something but had left his horns at the hotel. So, he picked up whatever was closest, played a couple phrases, looked askance at the trumpet, set it down, and continued with the class. Everybody’s jaw dropped; the horn was the worst piece of shit I’ve ever played on — it leaked, sounded awful, and you couldn’t play it in tune to save your life. But Charlie still sounded like Charlie when he played it.
Cheers,
b&
Re:The most beautiful sound (Score:1, Interesting)
Something a bit strange happened to acoustic guitars around the 1980s
Companies like Yamaha started making these really solid guitars that were indestructible and had thick varnishes on them, so they looked great and felt solid. The only thing was, they don't sound so good.
When you pick up an old Martin or Gibson acoustic, they feel quite flimsy and light compared to most modern acoustics, but they really sing.
The old guitar makes concentrated on tone, which meant using thin wood on the body quite often, and giving up a bit of strength in the struts. (Thicker struts in the guitar top = more strength = more wood having to be moved by the strings.)
The same thing has happened to drums. The shells of an old ludwig or gretch kit are sometimes half the thickness of a modern mapex or Yamaha kit, and the metal hardware parts much lighter and smaller. But they sing more, as the shells resonate a bit, and the hardware (nowadays often really just big lumps of shit powder alloy (monkey metal)) is not sucking the tone away.
Part of this was due to people needing volume, physically stronger kits for touring, and some really heavy hitting drummers. But a big part is just psychology as heavier sturdier drums with huge metal hardware parts sell better.
With an acoustic instrument, making it physically stronger is often decremental to the tone, but sadly people don't care so much nowadays.
Ya that's a good one (Score:4, Interesting)
Especially because if you actually own a Denon device with Denon Link (I do) it tells you straight out that all you need is twisted pair cable. However my guess is that some audiophile types whined that they couldn't buy "audiophile grade" Cat-5 to Denon. Denon then decided they'd more than happily put a hose in their pockets and suck the money out.
Re:Blind Sound Test. (Score:3, Interesting)
The Independent newspaper carried out a lovely little experiment a couple of years ago. They took a very famous violinist (can't remember who now), gave her a Stradivarius, and sent her busking under a bridge by Waterloo station in London. At one point, the reporter who was accompanying her went to ask a homeless guy sitting under the bridge what he thought. "Is that a Stradivarius?", he asked straight out. Turned out the guy was from Stradivari's home town of Cremona and would've known the sound of a Strad anywhere.
Now, just think how unlikely it is that someone will roll up and busk with a Strad, and yet this guy was sure he knew what he was hearing. So yeah, they have a distinctive sound all right.
Re:Perhaps a placebo effect? (Score:3, Interesting)
However, the listeners were highly inconsistent in their ratings of the sounds of the various instruments. How good a given piece of music sounded was different for different listeners, and unrelated to the commercial "value" of the instruments. It was also not very well corellated with the player's opinion of the instrument's quality.
The main conclusion I drew from it is that the significant difference in an instrument's "quality" is how well it plays (and that could well be different for different musical styles). The quality of sound heard at a distance is primarily a function of the player, not the instrument.
As a guitarist, I disagree with this conclusion. The mistake I think you're making is in equating the fact that these people couldn't hear the difference with a conclusion that the difference therefore can't be heard. I don't think that follows, anymore than it follows to say that because somebody can't tell the difference between a Sizzler steak and a carefully prepared Wagyu steak at a fine restaurant means there is none.
I think a more reasonable conclusion is to say that a lot of people who consider themselves to have refined ears, don't. But that doesn't mean there aren't objectively measurable differences in sound quality, assuming you brought in equipment that was sensitive enough.
I say all this because as a guitar *player*, I, like the violin players in your example, can easily tell the difference between guitars of different makes just by listening to them, and I can do it with near-100% reliability, at least for the most popular makes and models. A Strat and a Les Paul don't even sound close to similar, for example, and an American Strat doesn't even sound like a Chinese Strat (though it sounds closer than a Les Paul). I guarantee that 99% of the rest of the world, though - even many rock music lovers - could not make these kinds of distinctions. There is a difference between knowing what a Fender Strat *is* and knowing how it *sounds* - the latter requires actually using one and then using other models and comparing it, or at the very least actively listening to others doing the same, repeatedly. (And by "actively" I mean really paying attention to this specific facet of the music, what guitar is being played when.)
So I would say that this has more to do with having a trained ear or not than with whether or not there are real differences in sound. If the players can so easily identify the differences, then there probably are differences, and not just in playability. They're the ones that hear these things the most, and also develop the "sense memory" to associate a particular tone with a particular instrument. That's a unique skill that most people never develop.