Imagine a violin made from a piece of wood that was originally covered with fungi, soggy and probably as appetizing-looking as a moldy loaf of bread. What if that violin had the potential to sound as good as a multi-million dollar Stradivarius instrument, perhaps even better?
Discovery News and Science Daily has reported that researchers at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research crafted such a violin that bested a Stradivarius.
In a sound test conducted at the 27th Osnabrücker Baumpflegetagen (an important annual conference in Germany on all aspects of forestry) in early September, British violinist Matthew Trusler played five different violins for more than 180 people to judge.
One of the moldy violins, crafted from wood that had been treated for 9 months, was ranked by 113 people to be the Stradivarius. Trusler's own violin, a Stradivarius valued at $2 million, was ranked second with 39 votes, and another "moldy" violin, crafted from wood treated for 6 months, ranked third. Two other violins, crafted from untreated wood, were ranked last.
"Never in my wildest dreams did I think that our violin would be identified as the Stradivarius," Francis Schwarze, who worked with colleagues on the fungi-treated violins, said in an interview with Discovery News. He noticed that certain fungi did not produce widespread rot; although the wood's density decreased slightly, the speed of sound did not change within the wood.
Schwarze worked with violin-maker Michael Rhonheimer in order to find out what kind of sound would emanate from fungi-treated wood.
Schwarze used two different fungi, since the top plate of a violin (spruce) is made of a different wood than the bottom (maple or sycamore). The spruce was treated with Physisporinus vitreus, while the sycamore was treated with Xylaria longipes. To introduce the fungi, each cut of wood was submerged in a box of water with a piece of slate carrying the specific fungi needed.
Growing from the rock slate into the wood, the fungi degraded the pit membranes on both the heartwood and sapwood without affecting the majority of the wood.
Different cuts were treated for either six, nine, or twelve months, accumulating a white coat of hyphae and loosing up to 15% of its density. Schwarze and his colleagues then crafted a violin from each of the cuts (during manufacturing, the violin crafted from the 12-month cut developed cracks and was discarded), as well as two control violins that were crafted from wood that not been infected.
The treated wood developed different acoustic properties from its untreated counterparts, having a warmer sound as a result of increasing the dampening factor (making high notes sound better to the ear) and increasing the ratio of the speed of sound to the density of the wood. This treatment, according to Schwarze, recreates the structure of the wood that occurred naturally during the Little Ice Age, when abnormally cool weather caused trees to create a more uniform wood.
Whether the properties of the wood itself is the dominant factor of an instrument's quality remains debatable. As for a wide-spread implementation of fungi-treated wood, experts do not agree on any single conclusion. David Wiebe, a violin maker from Woodstock N.Y., told Discovery News that he is highly skeptical, although the idea is "worth following up on."
On the other hand, Horst Heger of the Osnabruck City Conservatory tells Science Daily that he is convinced that the "fungus violin" and its success represent a revolution in classical music, with talented young musicians having the opportunity to afford an instrument with the same tonal quality as the Stradivarius.
Even so, two critical aspects to the sound of a violin remain, and they are distinctly human: the skill of the maker and the talent of the performer.
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