An unorthodox bridge designed by Joseph Curtin.
“I think best in foam,” Douglas Martin said as he sorted through a heap of pink violin-shaped slabs in the kitchen-cum-workshop of his snug colonial house in southern Maine.
Perfect Violin: Does Artistry or Physics Hold Secret? (June 14, 1994) Web Links Related Organizations From the Violin Society of America Fiddle Physics (The Why Files)
Doug Martin working on one of the violins that he made from balsa wood in the kitchen of his apartment in Eliott, Maine.
Each piece of foam was a template for an experimental instrument he had built or was preparing to build, but none used the traditional spruce and maple favored through most of the hallowed 500-year history of the violin.
Mr. Martin, 63, whose day job is designing sleek rowing shells that slice through ocean surf, is consumed in spare moments by a similarly unorthodox pursuit: abandoning age-old norms of acoustic instrument design as he chases his conception of the ideal violin sound.
A dining table was strewn with rough-hewn violins built of balsa wood and graphite fibers, some with the standard instrument’s familiar curves and narrow waist, but others boxy and ribbed, as if they had been built inside out.
In art school in the 1960s, a professor once tossed one of Mr. Martin’s sketches on the floor and scuffed it up, urging him to abandon caution, and he clearly absorbed that notion.
When a violinist tried an instrument at a recent workshop and one of its blunt shoulders got in the way of his wrist, Mr. Martin summarily sawed off the corner and sealed the opening with a scrap.
He might be mistaken for an eccentric dabbler, except that he is far from alone. From Australia to Germany to Maui, there is something of an explosion under way in the use of science and new materials to test the limits of instrument making.
And the traditional violin-making and violin-playing world is taking note.
Last year, Mr. Martin passed around one prototype, Balsa 4, at an annual workshop on violin design at Oberlin College by the Violin Society of America, a group of builders. When it was played and run through an array of tests, the instrument’s responsiveness and punch startled the gathering, several participants said.
Joseph Curtin, a director of the workshop and a builder from Ann Arbor, Mich., who received a 2005 MacArthur Foundation “genius award” for his violin designs, wrote about Mr. Martin’s work in the society’s newsletter, saying “the traditional violin became obsolete in early July of 2005.”
In an interview, Mr. Curtin said that was only partly a playful exaggeration. It will be a long time before balsa and graphite become the materials of choice, he said. But he added that Mr. Martin and other experimenters were legitimately challenging longstanding notions of what makes a great acoustic instrument, and whether past masters’ work represents a sonic pinnacle or merely the best that could be achieved with traditional materials.
Some of the new designs are mass-produced, with companies (many founded by former aerospace engineers) turning out hundreds of synthetic weatherproof guitars and instruments in the fiddle family.
Others, like Mr. Martin’s, are one-off prototypes. (He has sold only three.)
In almost every case, a central goal, particularly in the resonating top or soundboard most responsible for an instrument’s voice, is a mix of stiffness and lightness.
This combination increases an instrument’s ability to turn the energy in a vibrated string into waves of appealing sound.
That is where unconventional materials come into play. Layered graphite fibers and carved balsa are very stiff but far less dense than the traditional choice of spruce.
“Wood reached the limits of its potential in the first half of the 18th century,” Martin Schleske, a leading violin maker from Munich, asserted in a recent lecture in Germany. “I have no doubt that if Stradivari were alive today with the same force of innovation, he would have already discovered the fascinating acoustic properties of graphite fibers and would have ushered us into a new golden age of violin making.”
This month, Ingolf Turban, a touring concert violinist, compared Mr. Schleske’s latest violin, which has a top made of a mix of spruce and graphite, with a 1721 Stradivarius by recording passages from Mozart’s Violin Concerto in D Major with each. He told Mr. Schleske he preferred the new one.
“I have never been playing any violin with such a singing E string,” Mr. Turban said in a testimonial. “It is no longer like playing violin but like singing.”
Some instrument makers and researchers are using science to deconstruct the dozens of kinds of vibrations and waves that interplay in a violin or guitar to create their distinctive sounds.
Working with Mr. Curtin and several other violin makers, George Bissinger, a physicist at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C., is using medical-imaging gear, laser scanners, arrays of microphones and computers to measure and model how the parts of a violin react once energy is introduced by a bow, fingertip, pick or, in the laboratory, the repeated taps of a tiny hammer.String Theory: New Approaches to Instrument Design
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