She slept with a violin on her pillow
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
My parents weren't particularly wealthy. I remember as a kid when getting new shoes, I'd sleep with them next to me on the pillow. I feel fortunate to live in slightly greater abundance.
Second thing is about goal realization. About 12 years ago a photo of the Japanese coastline popped up in Reddit. I found it so striking that I made it a goal to visit, and I also set it as the wallpaper for my work computer. I've set goals for myself in the past, some of them a lot harder than this. However, the feeling of logging into the computer of a soul-deadening job, seeing the wallpaper every day, and then, after several years, finally visiting the place is unreal. It's the closest I've had to an out of body experience.
I'm not sure why it struck me so much, but I always suspected a large part had to do with playing so many japanese video games growing up that it felt like a place already well worn in my imagination. I think it particularly triggered a memory of when my father used to take me to CompUSA as a kid, and I'd be there taking turns playing the Dreamcast demo of Sonic the Hedgehog (timestamped link to the level: https://youtu.be/XwtNXo1aQgs?t=432).
Driving on the coast and bridge with my now wife.. unforgettable.
[EDIT] found the post: https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/qcy5m/where_is_this_o... I'm very pleased that my 12 years ago time estimation was right on the money!
Perhaps a case of Thing, Japan.[0]
Turns out the game Roadrash that I played as a kid had that route :)
https://apnews.com/article/big-sur-california-highway-collap...
There is however a lot of debate in the luthier community on if it actually matters. Some claim it does and spend a lot of time on it, and have even setup fancy test fixtures to show patterns with different frequencies. However some claim it makes no difference and [I'm not sure what]. Both produce great instruments.
My wife is a professional cellist and cello teacher, and she absolutely can tell the difference between a handmade instrument and a factory-made one. I've watched her appraise dozens of student cellos, and even though I can't hear the difference myself, I know how good an instrument is from the look on her face a few seconds into playing it. She never looks at the label or pays attention to the appearance of the body, the sound is the only thing that sets the good instruments apart for her.
As I understand it, the difference between a crafted instrument and a factory one lies in the way the creator adapts (or doesn't) to the natural grain of the wood. A handmade instrument by an expert can't be beaten by a factory process because each piece of wood resonates differently and those differences must be accounted for to get a good sound.
I would imagine the CNC milled Yamahas to have much better quality control. It's the same in horology, "hand crafted" Swiss/German watches are valued over precision cut assembly line Seikos even though the Seiko complications are magnitudes more accurate and reliable than the Swiss ones.
Now maybe we could question why have we not come up with anything better for these wood instruments? Like some mixture of plastic?
I've heard that it is quite straightforward with modern tools to make new violins which pass a blind test against a Stradivarius — I wouldn't know myself — but that doesn't mean those with a target price of £500 are actually made to this standard.
This kind of study/comparison really needs better blinding.
While not the same thing, as an example, blind auditions for orchestras really changed the demographics of who got selected.
> However, after adopting ‘blind hiring’ techniques, the TSO saw an increase of women being admitted from 25% to 46%.
https://www.fairhire.org/quest/orchestrating-equity-a-brief-...
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1619443114
>"We find that [violin soloists] generally prefer new violins over Stradivaris, consider them better-projecting, and are no better than players at telling new and old apart."
Do you think Richard Burton would have acted Hamlet better, the same, or worse, if he knew that Shakespeare himself were in the audience?
Their work is over. The words are set. Now let me do my job, figuring out how to say them and how to move. It's between me and the director. We're the ones who can see the set, know the other actors, feel what the audience is responding to.
One thing I love about doing Shakespeare: he's very sparing with stage directions. He lets the words speak for themselves. Often, they suggest how I should sound, when I should be silent, how to move. But he rarely enforces an action on me. And even better... because he's dead, he's not going to come at us if we cut something we don't like, or rearrange.
Modern playwrights love to tell me when to take a (beat). Guys... you wrote the words. I'll figure out how fast to say them. You did your job. Now stay home and let me do mine.
That said... most of the time, playwrights aren't supposed to collaborate with actors. It's not a one-to-one interaction. The playwright writes, makes it available through a service like Samuel French, and has no connection with the actual performances.
They may collaborate with actors and directors during the writing process. That's a different thing from the ordinary work of an actor.
Actors collaborate a lot -- with each other, with the director, with the lights and sound and tech and props. Adding one more voice -- even that of the playwright -- often makes it worse, rather than better.
In particular (switching to my director's hat rather than my actor's hat), it is important that I be the final word on the show. That sounds arrogant, and of course it is, but in a conventional theater process the director's job is to keep all of the other artists working together. That's what makes it look like a finished, cohesive work, rather than a collection of individual performances.
A common faux pas in theatrical circles is for a writer to bypass the director and give directions to the actors. That is very much a no-no. Actors work together, not as individuals, and a writer telling an actor something different from what the director tells them gives the work a disjointed feeling. If a writer has notes, they go to the director -- who has to be free to ignore them.
Writers, of course, chafe at this. And it's worse when they don't have experience as actors or directors themselves, because they don't know how the process works.
Violin makers have, sadly, decided to pursue a complete dead end, because of the near-universal preoccupation with old instruments. Stradivarius violins have become the platonic ideal, therefore any new violin can never be better than a close copy. Improvement of the instrument is not merely discouraged, but definitionally impossible. In blind tests, players and listeners consistently either fail to distinguish between old and new instruments or prefer modern instruments, but these findings have had essentially no impact on attitudes.
There is no Greg Smallman, Lucien Gélas or Ervin Somogyi of violins, nor will there be without significant cultural change.
This, and it's actually kind of sad. There have been double-blind tests that show that Stradivarius violins are acoustically nothing special: experts cannot pick them out by sound alone, or may actually prefer other violins. One example: https://www.science.org/content/article/million-dollar-strad...
It's sort of like the crazy prices paid for paintings by "old masters". Even when the paintings are nothing special to look at. Even when the "old master" in question ran a factory, where his students did most of the painting and he just did some final touches and signed the things.
https://www.violinist.com/blog/laurie/20121/13039/
This is a description by one contestant who participated in the 2010 test. She generally likes that new violins can sound really good, but she criticizes:
> As for the old violins: one was a Guarneri del Gesù (circa 1740) and two were Antonio Stradivari (circa 1700 and 1715) "These violins were loaned with the stipulation that they remain in the condition in which we received them -- precluding any tonal adjustments or even changing the strings." That means that, whatever happened to the old violins during their trip -- if they got jostled on the airplane, etc. -- there was no soundpost adjustment, no bridge adjustment, no check for open seams. If the strings were a little older, they were a little older. … My concern is this: it sounds to me like the older instruments were not optimized -- by either selection or by luthier adjustments -- while the new moderns were.
There are also differences between Stradivarius. In the formal test one old Stradivarius was universally disliked and in an informal test a modern violin beat an old strad. She wonders if that was the same model:
> […] During the same event when this study took place, another more informal "study" was done by those who did this one. While jurors were deliberating over the outcome of the Indianapolis violin competition, the audience that was gathered was asked to evaluate some moderns vs. old Italians. Indianapolis Symphony Concertmaster Zach De Pue played four pairs of violins, allowing the audience to decide which they liked best of each pair, based on playing excerpts from "Scheherazade" and Strauss's 'Don Juan.' Each pair included one old and one modern violin. The votes were very close each time, but ultimately the audience chose one modern violin and three Strads, from the years 1699, 1714 and 1715. Several more tests and votes narrowed the fiddles to the one the audience liked best: Jimmy Lin's 1715 Strad. (Was that non-preferred Strad from the study in the mix? I'm guessing it was, and it was the one not-preferred).
The tone you get with gut strings is completely different than with modern strings - more complex, more resonances, but a modern style instrument will deaden that somewhat, you really want a period instrument to take advantage of gut strings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y4lcQ7BTLw
The neck is also different, but that affects reaching the high end of the fingerboard more than accoustics.
Think of a car that is less effortful to drive. From external appearances, the same driving is happening either way. But inside, the “worse” car has a lot of compensating on the part of the driver, while the “better” car does not.
MRI studies proven that people really do draw more pleasure from tasting wine when they know it's expensive.
This is widely acknowledged among violinists. In fact there is a growing concern that the Strads are deteriorating. The vast majority of working musicians have never handled a Strad.
I’ve been consistently surprised to see that unlike with e.g. MIDI “keyboard controllers” (which have evolved and diverged into many different forms for different use-cases, like sequencer button pads), there is no similar experimentation in what form an “electric violin” for greenfield players could tak. Nothing like, say, an instrument played with one finger of each hand along pressure-sensitive slider pads for 4D continuous input.
• a violinist (so that you have expertise in what sound you’re targeting, and in the existing “UX” of a violin at a professional level — in combination meaning “so you know what should be easy to play, and what should be hard-but-possible”); and also
• a luthier (so that you have expertise in what factors shape the acoustics of a violin, and the sonic space — including the “bad” parts that no violinist would ever intentionally access — that a violin can generate; and also so that you’ve given thought to the ergonomics of existing violins, so as to ensure that the new thing isn’t making them worse.)
Such a person is likely to have spent their career thinking more about music than about industrial design, though, so I wouldn’t expect such a person to have too many thoughts on a novel violin UX on their own.
So this would likely be at least a two-person project: one person who knows UX/HCI/IdX + hardware engineering, to design and prototype the device; and someone who knows violins, to be that designer-engineer’s critic and internal customer.
I am only one of those people, so as much as I’d like to try this, it’s not the easiest project to pop off the ideas heap.
I think this is what most people who’ve considered this idea from one side or the other would say — which is probably why it hadn’t been done yet.
It's being done. There are people who are researching novel ergonomics and designs for instruments. I don't know of one working on the violin specifically, but certainly viola and double bass. Here's one:
https://uptonbass.com/shop/upton-bass-ergo-double-bass-by-ae...
And in the world of double basses, there's enough variation that players do choose basses that fit their bodies. For instance my bass has sloping shoulders that probably affect tone and volume, but that allow me to play with better posture. And designs have changed over the past few centuries. Older basses with super long necks get shortened.
I've also read about a piano professor who's researching pianos with narrower keys, for players with smaller hands, and has discovered that even players with big hands prefer it, who'd-a guessed?
Given the fact that a player has to adapt their technique without taking themselves out of competition for gigs, or getting injured, before even finding out if something is an improvement, maybe a realistic rate of change is pretty close to the actual rate of change.
Different materials are being explored. There have already been start-ups making carbon fiber double basses.
I'm both a musician and a technologist, but I have to admit that I separate those two activities for the most part. I do technology all day, and playing music is my escape from ... user interfaces. Many musicians arrive at the point where they say: Time to stop chasing gear, and start playing music.
To be honest, I wasn’t picturing an instrument that improved the ergonomics of violin-playing for existing violinists — but rather an instrument that would massively decrease the difficulty of playing a violin for inexperienced players. Something that would let an audio engineer put a quick realistic violin solo into a piece, without hiring an actual violinist.
That means even if two instruments are capable of theoretically producing the same sounds, it can feel fundamentally different to get there as an instrumentalist, thus each instrument has a character that goes beyond just sound. This is an especially critical point if you are improvising.
This is btw. also why many electrical guitarists insist on loudly cranked amps: the feedback that developes between speaker and guitar allows you to play the guitar differently as each note will sustain longer (or even grow in volume as you let go).
He showed me his electric guitar. It was unbranded, pretty plain, and beat up. Sort of a Gibson Les Paul-looking thing, made of some solid light wood. Maybe maple.
When he played it, it sounded amazing. I couldn't believe the sound came from that raggedy-ass-looking axe.
It was made by a family friend. A chap named Paul Reed Smith.
It 90% halo effect.
However, the wood, in particular, for the Stradivarii came from forests that had suffered droughts and was quite a bit denser than expected for that species.
That having been said, wood degrades. It doesn't matter if you put magic varnish on it or not. Wood ages nicely in instruments for about 10 years. Then it's good for about 50 years. After 50 it starts noticably degrading, and the more heavily used the more it degrades.
You will note that the Strads are long past the point that the wood is "good". People who play violins can tell. However, nobody involved in a "blind" test is going to slag violins that might be Strads--that would be bad for their reputation.
Ironically, those Strads aren't completely original, either. They have been repaired to various degrees over the years, given more modern bridges, etc. So, we get a Ship of Theseus argument.
As for modern handmade violins, the top ones are easily as good or even better than Strads. Strads may have been "magic" in the 1700s and 1800s, but we have really good control of things, better measurement, better analysis, better materials, etc. in the modern era.
Luthierie in the 2000s is still art, but it's got a lot of science backing it up nowadays.
>> at the suggestion of a mentor, she created an artist’s name, Anna Arietti, to better fit in with Italian culture.
>> To make her label, An stamps her ink signature onto a small piece of paper — a browned page from a secondhand book, giving the impression of age.
I'm sure there is a lot of great craftsmanship in one of these, but some aspects are not entirely authentic.
Also the classical world is super biased in their ways when it comes to equipment
But I hope we can all agree that such kind of passion and drive in a young person is a very nice thing to see. Especially now when many kids are only interested in quick tik tok style of entertainment and rarely show an urge to do something hard on their own. Or I'm just looking with middle aged eyes and it was always a rare thing for a kid to be really passionate about something.
Remembering my childhood peer group, I definitely don't remember many kids exhibiting this kind of passion for anything.
I'd say that most of the time passion is killed in the egg by parents without them noticing by the lack of support (buying a book, materials), interest or attention ("I don't have time to look at what you made") or just plain shunning. Outside big cities, pre-internet time, lack of available knowledge or place to get it can also be a big problem.
School also play a role, even if just by robbing kids of most of their free time. The corporate-like schedule which is incompatible with reading a book from cover to cover in one go is why I didn't read much fiction at the time.
I read books like crazy when I was younger, I loved to read
School did everything it possibly could to make sure I stopped enjoying it though, and sure enough by the time my Grade 12 literature class was done with me it had finally bludgeoned out the last enjoyment of reading I had
It took me a long time to realize that a lot of book studies, film studies, really any media studies, is just snobbery and not worth a damn. It's better to just enjoy what you enjoy
“Nah it was actually made in 2022 and that’s a made up name on a fake label lol”
Sorry if I come across as ignorant but scratching something with pasta and using yellowed book pages to give it an artificially aged look is dishonest, especially for a $18k object made by a skilled artisan. I’m sure it looks and plays great in its mint form.
It seems like what a cheap knock off manufacturer would do.. imagine if McLaren did this, what, just scuffing up the door handle with an old key. Outlandish and backwards, haha.
Or perhaps our repulsion reveals how unrefined and plebeish our opinions are on this topic, which is still kind of hilarious but also unfortunate, because it means a group of folks has effectively settled on preferring their McLaren with the intentional scratches.
In some sense car manufacturers do do this - their designs are famous for being full of functionally empty retro cues that customers nonetheless go for.
But I'm just a pleb here... if an instrument feels good to play and sounds good, then that'll do!
Torrefaction (or rather an optimised heat treatment process) can undoubtedly produce clear acoustic benefits. Suitable thermal treatment can significantly increase the stiffness and reduce the damping coefficient of wood, resulting in a more acoustically efficient material.
"Oops, the modern engines aren't as loud, let's use the speakers to fake it!" I think it's equivalent.
Funnily, I'm somehow more bothered by the violin pasta scratches than by the digitally generated engine/exhaust noise. I'm not sure why.
It's common to do various things to make instruments look older than they are, but it's controversial.
That's a design choice, and design choices that appeal to tradition are everywhere, even in software.
Aside from some experimental luthiers everyone builds the same style of violin because there's an assumption that if you're deviating from that form (e.g. cornerless violins such as the Chanot model, or baroque style piecrust violins) you must be sacrificing sound quality. And if you decorate your violin, it must be that it didn't sound good enough and you need to make it look good instead to sell it (strangely, as you mentioned, artificially making the violin look older is exempt... probably because it makes them fit in with the uniformity of classical violin)
The best sounding violins I've had were all a bit ... crooked. The simple reason is that being slightly asymmetric really hurts the value of a violin, even if the sound is fine. As a hobby musician I don't really care and am not ashamed of having a violin that looks a little "off" when close up. If you're not playing professionally this, or buying from upcoming luthiers who still have to make a name for themselves are good ways to find good-value buys.
And I thought it was all about sound. She probably has a tiktok account too!
Instinctively I find this absurd too. I always thought it was funny that, at least at the level of student instruments, the more you spend, the more beaten-up your new instrument looks. Basic ones have an even spray varnish (which I generally quite like). My slightly better* Chinese factory instrument is antiqued to the extent of having a more worn-looking patch where the hand rests when playing in higher positions, as if to suggest decades of performance as a soloist. It's nonsense.
But plainly people do like this and makers do make it. See e.g. the instruments at https://www.myluthier.co/category/violins (I can't afford to shop there, I just picked it because they have pretty preview images) which stand as quite good evidence against any suggestion that "reputable luthiers would never". Yes at some point you just have to make a living, but there's enough skill put into it to suggest there might be something more artistically interesting going on as well. The results are certainly quite personal.
There are practical arguments for antiquing. It's kind of handy when you're playing in an ensemble: from a distance my cello looks basically the same as the others around me in the orchestra even though some of them are a century older and genuinely quite harshly used. And you never have the pain of getting the first obvious scratch or chip in a pristine instrument.
Curiously this doesn't seem to be a very new practice either - I think even 150 years ago, new instruments were being turned out designed to look like much older ones.
* Sounds and plays better, not just cost a bit more. I didn't choose it for the antiquing!
Unless she is telling people it is old when it is actually new, it isn't dishonest. Its not different than any other cosmetic choice.
My bass guitar isn't actually made out of red wood, it is just covered in red paint because I like the way red stuff looks.
If you see the a high-gloss finish and a characteristic woven pattern, you're looking at a showpiece rather than a serious instrument. That's not what a high-performance composite looks like - you should expect to see the satin finish and linear "grain" of unidirectional pre-preg. I'm yet to see that on any musical instrument.
Wood instruments need a finish to protect them against moisture, but that isn't an issue for CFRP. Any finish - especially the kind of thick finish you need to get a high gloss over woven reinforcement - makes the instrument worse for no benefit other than cosmetics. If you would choose a shiny instrument over one that sounds better, you're buying a showpiece rather than a serious musical instrument.
Epoxy is a necessary evil in CFRP, but we want the absolute highest possible fiber volume ratio. Unidirectional or spread-tow reinforcement will always allow for a higher fiber ratio than woven material.
Building a classical guitar from scratch (with a pro luthier): https://youtu.be/qmDAIlEGO_Q?si=uLyMOGBMXEGMkIFt
Everything about the process is fascinating.
That's why people buy fusilli pasta.