Is A Stradivarius Violin Easier To Hear? Science Says Nope

by NPR May 8, 2017

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Violinist Adrian Pintea, from The Julliard School, plays a 1729 Stradivari known as the “Solomon, Ex-Lambert” in 2007 at Christie’s in New York. Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

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Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images

Violinist Adrian Pintea, from The Julliard School, plays a 1729 Stradivari known as the “Solomon, Ex-Lambert” in 2007 at Christie’s in New York.

Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images

Another day, another study undercutting the myth surrounding the 18th-century Italian violin maker Antonio Stradivari.

Since the early 20th century, musicians and instrument experts have been trying to figure out what, if anything, makes the violins he made sound better.

Dedicated NPR listeners and violin enthusiasts may remember a few years ago when a team led by the French acoustics researcher Claudia Fritz published a study showing that blindfolded professional violinists could not tell the difference between a so-called Old Italian violin (they tested instruments made by both Stradivari and Guarneri) and a new violin.

At the time, it was a bombshell.

Of the 17 players, seven said they couldn’t tell which were which and seven got it wrong. Only three got it right.

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“In terms of physics, we haven’t found any differences, basically, between new and old Italian violins,” she explains.

On Monday, Fritz and a team published a follow-up study. This time, they focused on how audience members experience the differences between old and new instruments.

In particular, they were looking into the widely held belief that violins made by Stradivari have a paradoxical ability to project their sound while still seeming relatively quiet to the ear of the person playing them.

In one experiment, they had 55 people listen to six violins — three by Stradivari and three by new makers — in a small concert hall outside Paris and fill out a questionnaire about which they felt projected better.

Fritz, an associate professor at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, described the Paris audience as “people with an expert ear,” including professional musicians, instrument makers and others. They listened to the violins with and without an orchestra accompanying.

“Everybody knows about this claimed superiority, so everybody was quite enthusiastic about taking part,” she says.

In a second experiment in New York City, 82 people listened to the same six violins playing unaccompanied. That audience was made up of a mix of experts and non-experts.

Fritz and her team made recordings of the experiments. Here are four clips: two each on a Stradivarius violin and a new violin.