Frank,<\/p>\n
Thank you very much for your reactions, based not on what you have read in the press (often inaccurate, with little details about the experiment and with many extrapolations) but on the PNAS paper itself. After having read your first few paragraphs, I was impressed: you had read our paper carefully, and your report was accurate. But, unfortunately, not entirely. You seem to have forgotten to read the list of the authors. Otherwise, how could you have considered Joseph Curtin, one of the most renowned makers as \u201ca scientist who is unfamiliar with how professionals seriously assess string instruments\u201d?<\/p>\n
If I may, some of your criticisms are thus unfair: with Joseph on board, we did have \u201ca luthier on hand\u201d and regarding your comment \u201d I enjoyed the confident visual assessment of the strings\u201d, I can tell you that the assessment was much more thorough than this. Joseph Curtin and Fan-Chia Tao (an engineer for the string company D\u2019Addario (!) as well as a good player) are well qualified to judge whether the strings were good.<\/p>\n
Now, may I ask you a few questions?<\/p>\n
How can you write \u201d It is true that many violinists try instruments in a \u201cdead\u201d room as a first step \u201d and then write that the experiment was not valid because it was run in a dead room? Remember, the question we asked was \u201cWhich violin would you like to take home\u201d (meaning so you can try it further), not \u2018Which one would you like to buy\u201d as we know that violinist can\u2019t buy a violin without having played it for a while, and in different venues (in particular in a concert hall). Yes, maybe the results would be different in a large hall (we\u2019re hoping to test this in a near future), we totally agree with you on this, but this doesn\u2019t change the results of our study, nor makes it invalid. Our conclusions were clearly stated \u201cunder the ear, in a dead room\u201d. We are not extrapolating (though, unfortunately some people are) about what would happen in a large hall.<\/p>\n
My second question is: why do you think that \u201cthe methodology of the study virtually guaranteed that the modern instruments would be favorably compared to the older\u201d? It was the exact same conditions for all violins! Isn\u2019t it biased to say that a hotel room and a small amount of time is fine for new violins but a concert hall and a lot of time is needed for old violins? And who is going to take a violin home and\/or to a concert hall if he doesn\u2019t like it after a relatively short trial in a maker\u2019s shop (usually quite dry acoustically)? Nobody \u2026 at least if it\u2019s a modern violin. Now tell them it\u2019s a Strad \u2026 and they will all want to take it!<\/p>\n
Looking forward to hearing from you. All comments are welcome to design another study to cover the limitations of this one. Research with humans works like this; you can never test everything in one experiment, for practical reasons: humans get tired so you usually can\u2019t involve them in an experiment which is longer than 2 hours, and are busy with their own life so it\u2019s hard to have them come for many sessions. So you need to go step by step, and although this can be frustrating sometimes, it\u2019s how it works!<\/p>\n
Best wishes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It doesn’t appear that she read my article with a great deal of precision, but I’ll attempt to focus on the main points above:<\/p>\n
[dropcap]1[\/dropcap]I did indeed look closely at the list of authors, as it would have been unusual and pretty miraculous to randomly guess that Joseph Curtin had participated. You refer to a sentence later in my piece regarding the overall impression when reading the study:<\/p>\n
“Unsurprisingly, the paper itself feels like it was written by, well, a bunch of scientists who are unfamiliar with how professionals seriously assess string instruments.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
That’s not a judgment or criticism of the eminent Mr. Curtin in any way, although I have no idea what his credentials as a scientist are. It’s a personal opinion on how the paper reads on the whole. To reconsider, I did my own little experiment and evaluated the whole dissertation again while sipping a large glass of Maker’s Mark. Same conclusion, and the jargon and graphs still weren’t all that engaging to me. Regarding having a luthier around, again she seems to have missed the context of my statement in the article. I meant having a luthier participate, <\/em>someone that might actually be able to make adjustments during a study of this type. Not simply having one on the premises.<\/p>\n[dropcap]2[\/dropcap]Regarding the assessment of the strings, the insight above is helpful (and not mentioned in the paper itself). But ultimately the opinions of the two gentlemen are irrelevant, because a) they weren’t participants in the study and b) as they both undoubtedly know, strings are highly individual, subjective preferences that make a huge difference when evaluating any instrument. Some people hate Dominant strings no matter how new. Some love D’Addario (mostly guitarists, in my experience). I’m partial to Vision Solo, but they don’t work well on every violin. The point is this:\u00a0no changes or adjustments were allowed on the older instruments, and no one really knew how old the strings were. So under controlled conditions, for two people to say “hey, they look great” was kind of funny to me.<\/p>\n
[dropcap]3[\/dropcap]To the first question, it’s worth noting that I never wrote that the experiment was not valid. But this seems to point to the main criticisms I’ve repeatedly heard and read regarding the study, although I do not agree with all of them. To me, the problem is that the initial press accounts went something like this (obviously I’m paraphrasing):<\/p>\n
“This rigorous scientific study proves that a bunch of professional violinists can’t tell the difference between these really expensive Strads, del Gesus, and modern instruments, so the modern ones must be just as good. It’s all a bunch of hype.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/strong>Any press quotes I saw from the authors of the study pretty much agreed with that statement, or at least didn’t contradict it. But there’s a sentence in the paper itself that is really important:<\/p>\n\u201c The study was designed not to test the objective qualities of the instruments, but the subjective preferences of the subjects under a specific set of conditions\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/em>This received almost no public attention at all, nor did many of the questions Ms. Fritz cites above. To me this acknowledges that a genuine industry-standard evaluation and comparison of all six instruments is not possible in a hotel room, with very little playing time and no possibility of adjustments on the older instruments. Unless you read the paper itself, you would be unaware that the real question of the study seems to be “what will be the initial, momentary impressions of some professional violinists under these very specific conditions?” That’s entirely different than what was widely reported, and given the chance to clarify, the (quoted) authors have not done so with any degree of detail.<\/p>\n[dropcap]4[\/dropcap]Finally, the answer to the second question is pretty straightforward. The modern violins were presumably in very good adjustment and condition (since that was allowed), and superior examples of each maker’s work. And as I noted in my article, many newer instruments sound spectacular under the ear in a small room, but less so in a concert hall.<\/p>\n
Because of the lending restrictions, it is impossible to know whether the older ones sounded anywhere near as great as they could, even for 10 minutes in a dead room right under your ear. Even simple and common adjustments that might take place in a violin shop were disallowed, such as changing strings or moving the bridge a bit. So a cursory opinion of each instrument is certainly possible, just not very reliable. As I also stated in the article, it doesn’t seem surprising that people’s perceptions were altered by the prior knowledge that some of the instruments were Strads. But this study seemed to go past that idea in a sort of jumbled way, complicated by the press accounts. Incidentally, I know several musicians who prefer superior modern instruments to lesser examples of old Italian masters’ work (Stradivari included). But it took them more than 20 minutes in a hotel room to reach that conclusion.<\/p>\n
I think the study raises some interesting points and has certainly provoked a lot of discussion; I also think it’s incomplete and misleading in certain ways. I’d still invite anyone to read it for themselves and draw their own conclusions. I thank Ms. Fritz for taking the time to comment, and look forward to the next phase of her research.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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Last week’s article\u00a0got quite a few clicks, and yesterday I received a comment from Claudia Fritz, who supervised the much-discussed research. I detected a slightly elevated fur level, so it seems like a thoughtful reply is in order.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[27,29,31],"tags":[65,66,73,87],"class_list":["post-1383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-funny-things","category-violin-stuff","tag-strad","tag-stradivari","tag-violin","tag-violin-study"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/insidethearts.com\/nondivisi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/insidethearts.com\/nondivisi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/insidethearts.com\/nondivisi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insidethearts.com\/nondivisi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insidethearts.com\/nondivisi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/insidethearts.com\/nondivisi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/insidethearts.com\/nondivisi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insidethearts.com\/nondivisi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insidethearts.com\/nondivisi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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