Acoustical adjustments to improve tone and playing qualities of child size violins
Carleen Maley Hutchins, Mary Lee Esty · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1978
Two sets of acoustical adjustments are being successfully applied to improving the tone and playing qualities of child-size violins—3/4, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/10, and 1/16: (1) Tuning a pair of free plates of a given instrument using the Chladni pattern method to indicate where and how much wood to remove from each plate for desired frequency and damping characteristics of mode 2 and mode 5; (2) Applying the principle of second harmonic reinforcement to the low G string range of each instument by adjusting the Helmholtz air resonance to be more than an octave above the open G196 Hz—between 400 and 450 Hz—so that strong tones occur over a range of two or three notes an octave below the Helmholtz resonance as the broadband input from the bowed string activates the instrument. Methods of plate tuning and frequency adjustment of the Helmholtz air resonance will be discussed and illustrated and small violins will be played to demonstrate results.