Fungus-treated wood = excellent violins?
blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2009/09/sweet_sounds_of_science_biotec.html
Replies (14)
My only question is how do you stop the fungus from infecting most of the wood, to the point of no return?
It's worth noting that the people who rated the violins were foresters, not musicians. Also worth noting is that in other Strad versus modern violin comparisons, the results don't always favor the Strad anyway.
Strads aren't that great, you have to be one heck of a violinist to bring out the bueatiful sound
Well, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss this.
First of all, they even admit that part of the biggest challenges is that they can't even really call this a scientific experiment in the strictest sense of the word because of the subjective nature of the evaluation of "tone quality."
Now that they've demonstrated that in a limited sample pool of five instruments and a 180 people that the differences in tone are perceptible and identifiable, they need to expand the number of instruments involved and perform this test across a larger population demographic, and see what those results are. We're making some big assumptions about the person doing the actual playing of the violins though!
The pursuit of knowledge here is not in trying to claim that there is nothing different about old Italian instruments, but rather to use science to discover *what* the particular attributes that account for the sound might be, whether it is construction, materials, environment/time, chemistry, or a combination thereof.
No offence intended to Bruce or any other folk who find the article interesting but not only do I agree with Kristian and David's observations but I'd go further and say the article is based on false and unsubstantiated assumptions about Strad's violins, the wood available in his time and the wood available now, plenty of which is of the same density or lower than we find in Strads. The fact that one violin made with rotted wood got 90 votes from 180 foresters and the Strad got 39 votes from the same audience proves very little apart from the fact that a substantial number of the audience did not think it sounded the same as a Strad......
Just in case anyone accuses me of being narrow minded let me just say this..I make my living as a violin maker..I'm open minded and constantly looking any edge that can give me advantage...but reading an article like this is really quite infuriating........what can I say........It's rot!
How would violinists feel reading an article in Nature saying that an audience of pathologists found that violinists infected with Paganini's better known diseases played better than healthy violinists....????? .....For me as a violinmaker this article feels that silly.
Melvin, that was really good! :-)
We makers are hit all the time with the latest "theory du jour" about why Strads sound good. It seems like when it's a slow news day, Strad stories find favor with the media.
Like Melvin, I'll look for every real advantage. Despite having heard of the fungus theory before, I haven't been swayed enough to grow mushrooms on my violins. ;-)
Might aswell start experimenting with kitchen ingredients. I hear olive oil makes a good coat.
The problem is that such comparisons are never being equal to begin with.
No single bow works with all violins.
No single violin works with all player.
No Strads or Del Gesus sound the same.
I've had some experiences where the fungus grow on one tuning peg on my student's violin. It just won't go away unless I'm going to dip it into boiling water, which I don't dare to do so as it might damage the peg. And now we're talking about the wood used on the violin body?
f......g brilliant. Really. And it only costs 25.000 swiss francs.
“My only question is how do you stop the fungus from infecting most of the wood, to the point of no return?”
Carol,
To stop fungus, you can use Borax that you can find easily at the drug store. You can use too oxalic acid, you can find it at http://www.woodfinishingenterprises.com/dyes.html
Be careful with oxalic acid, it is strong. Always wear eye protection, long clothes and gloves. Strong acid can be really dangerous, if you spread a good amount of it over your clothes, takes it off immediately, wash your skin for 15 minutes and go to the hospital. It is not necessarily the case with oxalic acid, but with strong acid, it can degrade the calcium into your human tissues, if not neutralized properly it may develop a gangrene. It is not a joke, strong acid has to be manipulated with the greatest care.
I'm a believer.
It seems to me that the fungi is attacking the tree sap ,not the wood , making the wood more porous.
http://blog.mycology.cornell.edu/?p=184
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvyZjGb5hvo
Also, they are saying that they can lower the density of the wood by 15%.I am sure that most violin makers would agree that the weight of the wood is a factor - the lighter the better,to a point.
http://news.discovery.com/tech/fungi-violin-better-stradivarius.html
http://www.theviolinsite.com/violin_making/violin_wood.html
It's seems that Strad. may have been aware of the fungi,they treated the violins we fungicides.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10686-why-do-stradivaris-violins-sound-sublime.html
The violin plates are known to be lighter.
http://www.platetuning.org/Tap_Routine_-_J_Curtins_Strad_article_06.pdf
I think this type of wood treatment will make a violin makers job easier.
As Melvin mentioned, low-density wood is already available to makers who wish to use it, without requiring any treatment.. We have a lot of data and history on how well natural, untreated wood holds up over time.
What a violin maker definitely needs to avoid, out of a sense of responsibility to the customer, are wood treatments which have the potential to create problems with the longevity and durability of a violin. Various wood treatments have come and gone. Some of them produced catastrophic results with the passage of time, and that's why they fell out of favor.
Violins can and have been produced, without any wood treatment, which will fare as well in listening tests as the fungus treated violin. Why risk it? If I were to buy such a violin, I would want an iron-clad, lifetime guarantee covering future problems. Or it would need to be darned inexpensive, in which case I'd be willing to assume the risk.
Since acid was mentioned as a way of stopping the fungus growth, I'll mention that acid and violin wood have turned out to be unhappy partners. ;-) Acid can sometimes be neutralized, but doing so can leave yet another set of reactive compounds in the wood.
I agree with David here. We have to be careful with wood degradation.
An old technique was to float the wood into water because it protects the green wood (freshly cut) against insects, etc. At the time of Stradivari, some sources mentioned that the wood he used has floated into the river for many months.
It is known that some old church made of wood had its wood dig into a river for many month. When dried, the wood proved to be much more stable.
Another technique is to dig the wood for 9 days into a saturated sea salt solution. When dried, the wood is stable forever.
The wood is composed in part of hemicellulose, this is a xylan, a polysaccharide or a sugar that can be easily degraded into water. So when we dig wood into water, we degrade hemicellulose.
A lot of research has been made about degrading the hemicellulose because it reacts with humidity variations, making the wood unstable.
For drying the wood, there is not really any shortcuts, the old method letting the wood outside has been proven the best until now. Industrial drying techniques produces often splits and deformation. So the slow old method is the best.
For already seasoned wood, a superficial wood treatment is OK. I mean you can apply a 5% solution of borax, and dry it with a air dryer to void wood tension while drying. Most salt as borax, potassium sulfate and others have the properties to kill the bad insects and are mordants to fix water base or alcohol tints. The borax is a weak acid, when mixed with vernice bianca it helps to polymerise the egg white. The vernice bianca is an old mix made of egg white, gelatine and arabic gum where some may add honey or maple sirup. This is a base to isolate the wood from oil varnish. In all cases, vernice bianca has to be exposed under the sun or UVA and UVB to polymerise properly.
I use to prepare my table with 2 or 3 coats of vernice bianca, and one coat on the ribs and the back. Since the maple does not absorb very much, it is not necessary to treat it as much as the table.
A good analysis about the composition of the varnish process with Stradivari :
http://www.maestronet.com/forum/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=5579
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September 16, 2009 at 02:56 PM ·
Again a study with no scientific merit from which you can conclude nothing. They have only five instruments to test. There is not enough material to conclude whether the differences found between materials are statistically significant.
You can say that with 180 participants in the audience there is probably a statistically significant part of them that prefers the fungus treated wood but you cannot from this study conclude that fungus treated wood is better. It could be down to luck and without a big enough statistical base you would never know.