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Comment by alexvoda | Hacker News Reader

I do not know whether age has an effect on violin sound. Highly plausible that it does through a multitude of ways.

But this:

> Over time, vibrating wood with oscillating strings, it changes the wood, the atoms in the wood will literally eventually align in such a way that the wooden pieces themselves become tuned to specific complimentary frequencies,

This is a textbook case of bullshit. A clasical case of using scientific words to sound more convincing.

What you are claiming is literally that wood cristalises. Unless you actually have research with electron-microscope pictures to demonstrate such a claim, you are talking crap and spewing it with confidence.

"atoms in the wood will literally eventually align" is analogous to to homeopathy. Compare "The water molecules in the glass of water vibrate according the energy level of the information of the message you shout at it."

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I was not suggesting pieces of the instrument turn into diamond. Everything vibrates at some frequency. Sympathetic resonance occurs when a passive string or vibratory body responds to external vibrations to which it has a harmonic. What I and others are suggesting is very similar to this phenomenon. The wooden body of the instrument changes over time as it is resonated by its own strings, such that it settles in such a way to be resonant of a fundamental frequency. For an acoustic guitar, depending on how it is played, this may mean the entire back piece of the guitar tunes itself to E, A, D, G, or C, as these are the most common open chords due to how the guitar is tuned.

I'm not an acoustical physicist nor a luthier. Perhaps I've used the wrong terms. But I think maybe you can't see the forest for a tree blocking your view, which you've gotten hung up on.

Here is a bad citation.[1] Your searchfu is probably better than mine. Feel free to find a better citation.

[1] https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/4661/manufacturer-...

You suggest that I do not see the forest for the trees.

I say that words have meanings, and that extraordinary claims need evidence.

A material in which atoms (or molecules) are aligned is called a crystal. The process by which atoms align is called crystallisation. If we expand the concept of alignment we may consider atoms that are part of a polymer molecule to be "aligned". A material in which larger structures are aligned is a metamaterial. Beyond this level, referring to the alignment of atoms does not make sense.

Sound can affect the process of crystallisation of a liquid because the formation of crystals is influenced by pressure. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao2Jfm35XeE

But claiming that there is any crystallisation happening in a finished wooden stringed instrument requires evidence because it is implausible.

If we refer to polymers, wood and glue and lacquer all contain polymers. But claiming that those polymers are in any way affected by sound also requires evidence.

Also claiming that wooden instruments contain metamaterials and that the structure of those metamaterials can be altered by sound, similarly requires evidence.

What I am saying is that you not only claimed the existence of an unlikely phenomenon, but you also confidently asserted that it can be explained by physics that contradicts current knowledge. I am claiming that this is the Dunning-Kruger effect in action. I have read the page you link and find it unconvincing.

In my comment to Perenti ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31594035 ) I have proposed an experiment to measure such a phenomenon and proposed alternative explanations for the anecdata.

> You suggest that I do not see the forest for the trees.

Yes, that is right. That is exactly right. You are hanging on words I used, in order to introduce new words and ideas in your first post, so that you can say I am wrong, and even after I explained further, you are then repeating yourself and still arguing against my first post. You are indeed staring closely and intently at a single tree, when everyone else is talking about the forest. Here, I'll quote the citation I used:

> As you play a new guitar (or other wooden instrument), the fibers in the wood settle somewhat due to the vibration, and over time this causes the wood to become stiffer, more stable, and more resonant, which in turn improves the sound.

Different woods experience this phenomenon differently; for example, spruce takes about a year of playing to break in, and a guitar with a spruce top will sound better after a year of playing than it did right out of the box. After that, the aging process is slower and the marginal improvements smaller. Cedar, on the other hand, breaks in both sooner and more steadily---you may notice a slight improvement in resonance earlier than you would with a spruce top, but the overall improvement after a year may not be as much as with spruce.

When I shake a box of sand, the grains will realign, with the larger grains sifting to the top. I suppose you now think I am making crystals with a box of sand? Your employment of "crystals" is a straw man.

Sand is a fluid.

From wikipedia: "In physics, a fluid is a liquid, gas, or other material that continuously deforms (flows) under an applied shear stress, or external force"

Sawdust may be a fluid but wood is definitely not a fluid. And in any fluid, the particles are not in any meaningful way "aligned". What you are describing with different grain sizes is similar to the behaviour of different density liquids like oil and water. They are still in no meaningful way aligned.

So unless you want to claim that a guitar is a fluid, even this interpretation does not apply.

What I am saying is precisely that "the fibers in the wood settle somewhat due to the vibration" is a bullshit claim spouted with utter confidence and lacking any king of evidence.

I am NOT claiming that instruments do not "break in".

I am asserting that this does not happen due to exposure to sound or music. I am asserting that if you do the experiment I describe, there will be no measurable difference beyond individual variation (that is why I proposed repeating the experiment on 2 * n instruments). And I assert that playing the instruments from the same experiment in a double blind listener test no one will be able to observe a difference between the 2 sets of instruments beyond just guessing.

I am claiming that this whole idea is the acoustic equivalent of audiophile grade ethernet cables.

It is merely counterexample, and my use of it was intended to show that your employment of crystals is a straw man fallacy. You employed it only to attack it, but crystal was never any part of my argument. Love repeating myself.

I've owned several acoustic guitar over the last 50 years and guitar tone changes over time, based on how much music it hears/makes. If you take a midrange guitar and put it on a stand near a speaker, and subject it to moderately loud music for days on end the sound _does_ change for the better. This is a commonly observed affect. Other guitarists have mentioned it to me.

Now maybe op didn't word the physics and material science precisely, but what they describe is real. Perhaps you have a better explanation for a commonly observed phenomena.

Mass psychosis.

Has anyone tried to quantify this phenomenon?

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