[hackingonempty]

Only a handful of controlled tests have been conducted and listeners failed to identify or prefer the Strads. None of the experiments were very big so there might be a perceptible difference that can be detected with more statistical power. Blinding the eyes and noses of top level musicians might bias the results.

It is very difficult to obtain access to the instruments. The general sentiment from musicians and collectors seems to be that they don't want a bunch of scientists to come into their world and tell them that what they are or are not hearing or they just don't understand why controlled tests are required.

[userbinator]

The general sentiment from musicians and collectors seems to be that they don't want a bunch of scientists to come into their world and tell them that what they are or are not hearing or they just don't understand why controlled tests are required.

There seems to be the same sentiment from audiophiles against testing their ridiculously overpriced placebos, although sometimes it does happen and the results are exactly as you'd expect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47015987

[baerrie]

Furthermore, there are many intangible qualities of the way an instrument resonates and feels while playing that often contributes more to the better playing than the raw sound itself. It’s strange to say but instruments have a sort of soul and that can inspire musicians which leads to better sound

[danielbln]

Sounds to me like a bunch of physical and therefore measurable (and tangible) properties and some placebo effect on top.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I understand what you're getting at, and I can appreciate it, but it's also kind of bullshit. You say "instruments have a sort of soul and that can inspire musicians which leads to better sound" - well, if that's the case, then people should be able to hear the difference in that sound in blind tests, which so far they basically haven't.

[baerrie]

A relationship with an instrument takes time. There are more factors than the mechanical use of an instrument, our hands and bodies feel things on subconscious levels, leading to emergent qualities that don’t fit neatly into “sounds better or worse”. For musicians and artists this is a no brainer, for those that haven’t experienced this I understand why you are incredulous but it doesn’t mean it is a throwaway factor.

[bondarchuk]

But a cello is not a machine on which you press one button and then one sound comes out. You can't just press the button on both machines and then check which makes the better sound. Playing a cello is a feedback loop between the instrument, musculature, nerves/brains, emotions, culture.... It's not unthinkable to me that something like that would take a couple decades of work by highly skilled people to lead to an extraordinary outcome.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I agree with everything you've said. It's also completely irrelevant to the question at hand, which is whether there are any real, noticeable physical differences between the sound produced by a Strad and that produced by expert modern luthiers.

I certainly appreciate all the emotions and culture that go into making beautiful music on a cello. But it's important to separate that placebo affect ("I think it sounds better because I know it's a Strad"), from the real physical differences, because people have gone to great lengths to find "the secret of Strad": was it his varnish, the Maunder Minimum, an extended drought, special wood treatment to prevent woodworm, etc. etc. Except time and time again we find there is no "Strad secret", beyond his expert craftsmanship, attention to detail, and fundamental changes he made to the shape of the plates of his instruments compared to his predecessors.

[bondarchuk]

>whether there are any real, noticeable physical differences between the sound produced by a Strad and that produced by expert modern luthiers.

Isn't this trivially true? I'm sure if you hook up both cellos to a bowing robot using many permutations of contact point, fingering, speed, pressure and angle, and record the sound, it would be possible to consistently discern them through spectral analysis or something. Is the claim that if an expert modern luthier reproduces a stradivarius he can get it so close as to measure identically?

edit: by the way

>I agree with everything you've said. It's also completely irrelevant to the question at hand, which is whether there are any real, noticeable physical differences between the sound produced by a Strad and that produced by expert modern luthiers.

I don't know why you would say my post is irrelevant to that question. You said "people should be able to hear the difference in that sound in blind tests", and I'm saying that the difference between two cellos could be more complicated than just listening to one after the other for some minutes and filling in a questionnaire.

[dyauspitr]

I guess another way of putting it would be that the aura of an instrument that elicits a more sentimental playing of it by the musician is sort of not really interesting or relevant because you can just lie about any instrument to elicit it.

[hackingonempty]

In controlled tests the instruments are played by highly skilled musicians (usually the ones that possess them) but they don't know which instrument they are playing. Musicians cannot perfectly reproduce their performance so statistical methods are used to separate the effect from the noise, just like every other scientific experiment.

[vscode-rest]

Are the studies blind or double blind? If the musicians do not know what they are playing, they will not be able to “respond” to it.

[hn_throwaway_99]

There have been both. Here is a famous example from around 1977 I believe that was broadcast on the BBC (I knew of this example but this is the first time I actually found a recording of the broadcast): https://www.baroquemusic.org/violincomparison.html . The violinist playing is Manoug Parikian, who presumably knew which instrument was which, and neither Isaac Stern nor Pinchas Zukerman (both world class soloists) nor Charles Beare (a famous luthier described as "the most esteemed authenticator in the world" by the NYTimes) could identify which violin was which.

[dyauspitr]

You’re going to run into a bunch of trouble using “soul” for anything. It serves a purpose but that’s usually either laziness, inability to measure some physical quality or a placebo effect. Generally pointing that out will end up putting someone in the pedant bucket but I’m risking it.

[baerrie]

It is none of those things despite being not easy to measure. There are many phenomena not empirically proven that science still mentions and theorizes about. The quantum theory of cognition points to something like a soul mattering more than it used to for example. There are countless scientific discussions involving unknown unknowns of our universe yet as soon as we go the opposite direction, into the unknown unknowns of our own experience, that is somehow unscientific?