Sound radiation by violins radically modal
George Bissinger · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2003
Following a radically modal path pioneered by Gabi Weinreich in the early 1980s, normal-mode vibration and radiation analysis was applied to quality-rated violins. Being able to describe the violin in terms of normal-mode behaviors leads directly to a violin equation, allows extraction of a critical frequency for the violin, provides estimates of the fraction of vibrational energy radiated and extends to modal-average trendline modeling of the acoustic output, all of which can be linked to violin quality classifications if desired. Some quality-related results mirror Weinreich’s conclusions from inverse radiativity measurements on violins, i.e., there is little difference in the radiativity of good and bad violins below 1 kHz. The first corpus bending modes (the baseball modes), first identified by Gabi and Eric Arnold, are a major contributor to violin sound and highlight one of the important aspects of Gabi’s research, the coupling between wood and air. The first near-field acoustic holography results indicate that a significant part of the radiation from these structural modes is from the f-holes of the violin. These normal-mode investigations reflect some of the importance of Gabi’s work for modern violin acoustics. [Research supported by NSF.]