Regarding the Sound Quality of Violins and a Scientific Basis for Violin Construction

Abstract

Response curves, important both for steady sound and transients, give a far-reaching insight into the objective characteristics of violins: good ones exhibit large amplitudes at low frequencies and small ones at high frequencies, a broad minimum near about 1500 cps, and larger amplitudes between about 2000 and 3000 cps. The musical subjective significance of these physical properties is mentioned briefly. In general, the sound pressure radiated from a violin follows the inverse-distance law, being independent of frequency. The influence of wood thickness is very important, that of the varnish is comparably small. Pine has a greater damping at high frequencies than at low frequencies. This seems to be a good acoustical reason for making important parts of stringed instruments of pine. Sapwood is better than heartwood. Similarly, some kinds of varnish produce more damping at high frequencies than at low frequencies. If a resonance curve is to be imitated in detail, it is necessary to change carefully the wood thickness of certain parts of the violin body. The applicability of present-day scientific knowledge to the construction of violins is here outlined.

Violin varnish induced changes in the vibro-mechanical properties of spruce and maple wood

“…The modal damping ratios showed a strong and significant increase [with an exception of the NA system for mode (1,1)], as also previously reported for wood strips (Meinel 1957;Haines 1980;Eichelberger 2006). Unlike the spruce plates, the increase for the longitudinal mode was higher than that for the torsional mode.…”

“…Besides the importance of E R and E L , numerical sensitivity analyses showed an important influence of the in-plane shear modulus G LR on violin top and back plates (Rodgers 1988;Viala et al 2016) and, generally, also of the maple back on the final eigenfrequencies of the entire instrument (Viala et al 2016). Nonetheless, measurements on maple are very rare and one can find more general comments on the damping properties (Meinel 1957;Eichelberger 2006), eigenfrequency changes (Woo Yang Chung 2000) or a single measurement of the impact of a particular varnish (Haines 1980). The potential influence of varnish on the shear properties of both, spruce and maple, has not been studied to date.…”

Controlling the timbre of wooden musical instruments by chemical modification

“…Factors affecting the timbre of wooden string instruments are the frequency dependence of the loss tangent (tan 3) of wood for violin top plates (Meinel 1957) and the ratio of shear modulus to Young's modulus of wood for piano sound boards (Nozaki et al 1988). On the other hand, because the increase of tan ~ with frequency is brought about by the increase in the ratio of shearing deformation to bending deformation (Holz 1973;Ono et al 1979), these factors are also related to the sound level radiated at high frequencies.…”

Effects of oriental lacquer (urushi) coating on the vibrational properties of wood used for the soundboards of musical instruments

“…Although some researchers have dealt with the effects of coating on the radiated sound [8,9], to our knowledge, only Ono has tried to relate the vibrational properties of coated wood to those of wood and coating layer [6]. Figure 6 illustrates the most simple model for the coated wood, namely model I, proposed by Ono.…”