The Secret of A Stradivarius Violin

Photo of Spanish Stradivarius II, circa 1687, on display at Palacio Real de Madrid. Image under GFDL License from Wikimedia Commons.

For the past 300 years, musicians and scientists have puzzled over the unparalleled quality of classical Cremonese violins made by Italian masters like Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesu.

A Dutch doctor and a violin maker from Arkansas think they have cracked the mystery after comparing five classical and eight modern violins in a computed tomography (CT) scanner normally used to examine patients.

Using an adaptation of a computer program developed to calculate lung densities in people with emphysema, they were able to analyze the physical properties of the violins without risking damage to instruments worth millions of dollars. The researchers examined one of the key properties of the violins, the wood density, at the level of the wood's growth rings. While they found no significant differences between the median densities of the modern and the antique violins, they did discover far less variation between wood grains in the old ones.

Since differentials in wood density affect vibration and therefore sound quality, the discovery may well explain the superiority of the Cremonese violins, they reported in the online journal PLoS ONE on Wednesday.

So why is the maple and spruce wood in a Stradivarius so different?

Part of the reason may be that trees grow slightly differently today than in the past.

"Climate difference could explain part of it but treatment of the wood could be another explanation. A third answer could simply be the aging of the wood over the past 300 years," Dr. Berend Stoel of the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands had told Reuters. "There is no way of knowing from this data; we've just shown there are density differences."

» Source: Reuters

Antonio Stradivari is generally recognized as the greatest violin maker in history. He was born in Italy in 1644 and worked for most of his life in Cremona. He inscribed his violins in Latin, so the instruments took on the Latinized version of his name--Stradivarius.

His violins are famous for their superb sound quality, beautiful resonance and rich, deep tone.There have been various theories put forward over the years to explain the unique character of Stradivarius violins. The quality of the wood has been cited as a factor as well as the precise shape of the instrument, the thickness of the wooden plates in the belly and the back of the violin, and the varnish.

The master maker Stradivari made more than 1,100 violins, 650 of which survive today.

Antonio Stradivari died in 1737, aged 93.

» Sources: stradivariusviolins.org/The Globe and Mail