Traditional technology cannot select wood with the best sound quality.

According to a team based in Austria, despite their reputation as master craftsmen, violin makers do not actually choose the best materials.

They often focus more on the appearance of the wood rather than its acoustic quality when selecting it.

Christoph Buknowitz and his colleagues from the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria, tested wood selected by renowned violin makers to see how it benefits the sound of the violin.

They found that qin makers often cannot select the best wood in laboratory acoustic testing.

Undoubtedly, this is a daunting task, as the qin maker only conducts visual and tactile checks when making selections, without using any tools.

But in the process of trade, the usual practice is that violin manufacturers tend to rely on traditional empirical rules and subjective impressions, rather than using modern measuring equipment to determine the use of wooden blocks.

Ulrich Wegst, a materials scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Metals in Stuttgart, Germany, said, "Some violin makers have developed their own very high-tech ways to make instruments, but most seem to have only optimized designs based on over a hundred years of experimentation

knock on wood

For hundreds of years, choosing musical instrument wood has become a highly skilled skill. For the violin, different parts of the instrument are traditionally made of different types of wood: ebony and rosewood for the fingerboard, maple for the code, and spruce for the soundboard. The amplification of the vibration of the strings by the soundboard greatly determines the final sound quality of the instrument.

Buknowitz and his colleagues selected 84 quality grades of Norwegian spruce samples, which are the best soundboard wood for violins.

They made these into 40 x 15 centimeter wooden boards and handed them over to 14 top Austrian violin makers. Please ask them to grade it based on sound effects, appearance, and overall suitability.

Qin makers have to rely on their senses and experience, using traditional techniques such as tapping wood to evaluate their sound,

Then, the researchers conducted detailed experiments to test the strength, hardness, and acoustic properties of the wood.