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The work on new materials is driven variously by simple passion and curiosity, as in Mr. Martin’s case, and commerce, as companies hunt for ways to make better mass-produced instruments. (Student violins are notoriously hard to play, discouraging learners just when they should be inspired.)
Douglas Martin at home in 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)Another goal propelling some builders toward synthetic materials is the prospect of creating fine-sounding instruments that can endure abuse and the vagaries of weather that can destroy an old wood model.
John A. Decker Jr., a physicist and aeronautical engineer, created his weatherproof and resonant RainSong line of all-graphite guitars after moving to Maui in 1981 to manage an Air Force observatory. He found that the extreme Hawaiian humidity and heat ravaged his classical instruments.
The top guitars, with nary a fleck of wood in sight, sell for more than $2,000 and have showed up in the hands of performers including two longtime rockers, Steve Miller and Daryl Hall. Dr. Decker said the most responsive possible guitar soundboard would be one with infinite stiffness and zero mass, so that the energy from the slightest tug of a finger on a string would translate most efficiently into moving air instead of diffusing as heat in the structure of the instrument.
Graphite fibers allow the top to be pared to the minimum mass and eliminate the need for supporting braces required in conventional wooden guitars, he said.
He said there were always trade-offs, and aesthetics is surely one. “Graphite is not a very romantic material,” said Dr. Decker, who builds wooden classical guitars in spare hours. “It doesn’t have grain and swirl and flame and all the things that koa and quilted mahogany do. On the other hand, you know what the thing is going to sound like, which from the musician’s point of view is better.”
For Mr. Martin, the experimentation is ultimately driven by his search for a sound: a soaring, enveloping sound he recalls vividly from childhood summer nights around a campfire in Cohasset, Mass., when a friend’s dad pulled out an old Italian violin.
“The sound of that instrument just burned in my brain,” Mr. Martin said.
As of last weekend, he was still in pursuit, having just started on Balsa 15, with no end in sight.
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