Physics for the Queen
Jonathan Eberhart · Science News · 1967
That music is mathematical is beyond dispute. The structure of chords, the intervals between notes, however beautiful, are firmly bound in cascades of numerical relationships, as are the rhythms that give the muse its life. Yet the art of the instrument-maker, as refined as it has become since its full flowering in the Renaissance, has nonetheless appeared somehow divorced from such impersonal calculation, in favor of the feel' for a proper design, or of judgment ear. Consider the violin. The design of the queen of instruments reached a peak with craftsmen such as Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Aided mostly by trial and error, and only slightly by the most rudimentary acoustic theory, the masters produced violins which endure even today as pinnacles of achievement. Even in this technological era, science has pointedly ignored the violin. The supposed successors of the masters, in fact, have formed a cult that has been plagued with more peculiar notions and pseudo science than even medicine. This pointed sentiment is that of a woman who is both violin-maker and scientist. But far from experimenting with superscientific electronic constructions of fiberglass and aluminum, Mrs. Carleen Maley Hutchins works in the traditional manner-though with a few hardly traditional tools. Comfortably ensconced in her home laboratory in New Jersey, Mrs. Hutchins measures the resonances of a violin backplate, for example, not by tapping it and judging by ear, but by vibrating the plate with a magnetic driver similar to the core of a loudspeaker and observing the sound waves on an oscilloscope. For almost two decades, Mrs. Hutchins has been playing matchmaker for a wedding of science and the violin. Such a match at last has taken place, producing from the queen of instruments an entire royal family, ranging from a tiny 16-inch treble violin to a huge contrabass seven-footer. The new family has eight members instead of four, replacing the conventional violin, viola, cello and bass viol, but Mrs. Hutchins has produced more than a mere instrumental population explosion. The new instruments are all violins, they all sound like violins, except for range, and they share the same expressive qualities, as well as the violin's power-its ability to stay afloat above the sounds of a whole orchestra. By contrast, each member of the traditional family has its own characteristic sound, so that the cello and bass, for example, sound completely different from the higher-pitched instruments, and even from each other. Mrs. Hutchins didn't do all this by herself. Her chief colleague was the late Prof. Frederick A. Saunders, former chairman of the Harvard phys-