To build a better violin; can scientists determine why some instruments sound great? - Cover Story

Science News, Sept 3, 1994 by Richard Lipkin

"A wood's age is very important," she says. "Violin makers' lore says that it takes 50 years for optimum seasoning. I respect that lore. Most of the time it turns out to be right."

Why does aged wood play better? No one is quite sure. Scientists know that once a tree is cut, crystals begin to form in its cell walls. The older the wood, the greater its crystallinity and the less susceptible it is to airborne moisture. Hutchins believes that those crystals alter the wood's resonant frequencies by augmenting its vibrations.

Violin lore holds that how an instrument is played affects the way it eventually sounds. Craftsmen also believe that a top violin needs 80 years of good playing to get broken in properly. Players often report that an unused instrument "goes to sleep" and requires regular playing to bring back its luscious sound.

Hutchins thinks the explanation lies in how the harmonic vibrations of bowing affect the polymer chains of violin wood. Over time, the polymers tend to suffer microscopic breaks, which then reform into subtly different patterns. To test her theory, she ties some instruments to speaker cones and subjects them to 1,500 hours of classical music. "They do sound better afterwards," she says.

Though Hutchins has spent most of her career tinkering with materials, another project may prove her most enduring legacy. In 1957, the composer Henry Brant pressed Hutchins to design and make a set of violin-family instruments, each with a violin's power, clarity, and tone -- yet together able to cover a four-octave range. Unlike the violin, viola, cello, and bass -- all originally designed to fit fiddlers' bodies rather than their musical needs -- Hutchins' instruments are crafted to be acoustically superior and to have an orderly span of sizes.

The result: the Octet family of instruments, whose eight members range in size from a tiny treble violin to a hefty large bass. Rooted in calculations done by Saunders in the 1930s, then modified with an updated scaling theory, the Octet family projects violin tones into seven other ranges. Together, the eight instruments form a graduated series, each violin a half octave above, or below, its neighbor.

Though musicians fashioned similar instruments during the 16th century, those violins never caught on, for assorted technical reasons. However, the modern Octet could. Though Hutchins finished the first Octet in 1965, it has taken nearly 30 years of painstaking labor to get all the kinks out. Today, six sets of Octet instruments travel around the world for musicians to muse upon and play. A set was flown recently to Russia's St. Petersburg Conservatory of Music for players to try out. Concert artists such as cellist Yo Yo Ma have experimented with the new instruments.

No one can say for certain if the Octet instruments will become the fiddle of choice for musicians, as some claim, or historical relics, as others think. One impediment to their use is that very little music has been written specifically for them. While some classical and jazz musicians have shown interest, Hutchins thinks it could take 50 years for the new instruments to catch on.