Abstract
Violin design has been in flux since the production of the first instruments in 16th century Italy. Numerous innovations have improved the acoustical properties and playability of violins. Yet, other attributes of the violin affect its performance less, and with fewer constraints, are potentially more sensitive to historical vagaries unrelated to quality. Although the coarse shape of violins is integral to their design, details of the body outline can vary without significantly compromising sound quality. What can violin shapes tell us about their makers and history, including the degree that luthiers have influenced each other and the evolution of complex morphologies over time? Here, I provide an analysis of morphological evolution in the violin family, sampling the body shapes of over 9,000 instruments over 400 years of history. Specific shape attributes, which discriminate instruments produced by different luthiers, strongly correlate with historical time. Linear discriminant analysis reveals luthiers who likely copied the outlines of their instruments from others, which historical accounts corroborate. Clustering of averaged violin shapes places luthiers into four major groups, demonstrating a handful of discrete shapes predominate in most instruments. Violin shapes originating from multi-generational luthier families tend to cluster together, and familial origin is a significant explanatory factor of violin shape. Together, the analysis of four centuries of violin shapes demonstrates not only the influence of history and time leading to the modern violin, but widespread imitation and the transmission of design by human relatedness.
Highlights
Members of the violin family, their progenitors, relatives, and modern experimental instruments exhibit a remarkable diversity of body shapes (Fig. 1A–B) [1,2,3]
Differences in shape between instrument types .9,000 body outlines of violins, violas, cellos, and double basses were obtained from iconography collected from various sources through cozio.com (Tarisio Auctions)
An Elliptical Fourier Descriptor analysis was used to measure the shape of violin family members (Figs. 1B, S1) [13,14,15,16,17,18] and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) performed to visualize patterns of variance (Fig. 1C; Datasets S1, S2)
Summary
Members of the violin family, their progenitors, relatives, and modern experimental instruments exhibit a remarkable diversity of body shapes (Fig. 1A–B) [1,2,3]. Some instruments that may have inspired the first violins produced by 16th century Brescian luthiers include the drop-shaped rebec, the box-like vielle (Medieval fiddle), and the lira da braccio, the shape of which resembles modern violins but with a broader base (often heart-shaped) [4]. When first studying plate resonances, Felix Savart went so far as to create a flat, trapezoidal instrument to better focus on Chladni patterns (Fig. 1A) [10] Schelleng, in his The Violin as a Circuit [11], took a similar view of shape as a hindrance, rather than object, of analysis: ‘‘The violin family presents many unsolvable problems; its shape and the peculiarities of its materials were certainly not selected with regard to convenience in analysis.’’
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