Preservation of the harmonic overtones in the violin family beyond Stradivari

Abstract

Three hundred years ago, Antonio Stradivari enjoyed the golden period of the violin making in the human history. Luthiers and researchers endeavor to study his legendary legacy. Unfortunately, a consensus that the present progress has reached his level remains lacking. Most of the instruments suffer from low sounding power and enigmatic deficit of harmonic overtones. In fact, there is significant energy dissipation in the acoustic couplings in the violin family, completely unaware to luthiers and researchers. The current acoustic mechanism is inefficient in resonance of the wooden plates and hence is the low rate of mechanical energy conversion to the desired sound. We propose a new method for the amelioration of the acoustic couplings to enhance the preservation of the overtone components up to 161% of the pristine and to reduce the instrumental dissipation intensity up to 3.8 dB off (73% off). It results in the tremendously improved sound projection, the shorter reaction time, the longer reverberation time, and consequently the enrichment of the timbre complexity. Our physical method is applicable to the violin family of all sizes and ages, including the Stradivari, and extendable to all string instruments.