There is an interview with the conductor of the test on BBC's radio 4 'Inside Science' it is available as a pod cast.
Keith
Keith
Alas, the best trumpet in the world in my hands still won't make me play like Wynton Marsalis or Adolph Herseth...
There was a study years ago (I cannot find reference, it was linked on a musician's forum) showing listeners could clearly pick out a Stradivarius from a modern violin. Further research revealed that the player actually played the selection better on the Strad, perhaps knowing the instrument was that revered old fiddle. They took the same player blindfolded and repeated the exercise, again requesting identical performances. The second time nobody could reliably tell Strad from modern. I don't know if it was the same study or even relevant, but wanted to relate a tale showing how hard it is to account for all the variables.
Chances are if I have a Blackburn (very nice, expensive) trumpet in my hand, and know it, I am going to try my best to play up to it whereas I might just blow through the selection on a student horn just because my mind "knows" what to expect from each horn.
When I was in college studying pre-med stuff one of the courses highlighted the Driver's Ed Effect. A bug study was done showing students with Driver's Education were better drivers and also had better grades and such. Later studies revealed that the student's who took driver's education were generally better students to begin with, and with or without driver's education the students with better grades were better drivers.
Yup. Perceptual bias works in many areas outside listening tests.
Alas, the best trumpet in the world in my hands still won't make me play like Wynton Marsalis or Adolph Herseth...
That's interesting. I think I respond more to 'the notes on the page' than the performance. I know that there are certain chord progressions, intervals etc. that really get to the heart of me. I suspect that in the example you give above, I would prefer the kid's version because it would be clean, fresh and less 'theatrical'.Saw a documentary of sorts with Wynton Marsalis in it. Part of it covered his teaching at Julliard. It was recorded reasonably well. One of the students played the trumpet part of a classical piece. I was thinking wow that sounds awfully good and this kid is like 17. Wynton stops the kid shaking his head no, no, no. He says, "you don't listen to this music do you. Other than for class here you don't listen to it." The kid admitted that was so. Mr. Maralis went on to explain you have to spend time, listen to and live with music like this to have a chance to play it in a way worthy of the music. He then picked up his own trumpet and played the same bit. Wow wasn't enough to get across how much better that was. How much better someone like Wynton Marsalis played such music compared to a talented teenager. Now I am no trumpet player and somehow it was obvious the difference though I couldn't describe how.
I finally remembered who did the survey among violinists about their assessment of quality; 100 mostly professional german violonists were asked :
the numbers in brackets show the amount of attributes used by the group overall to describe the respective feature. With 38% "timbre" was in this survey the most important feature followed by "response" and "projection" . A bit more information is given in this:
Geissler et al.; Psychoacoustic Investigations on the Possibility of Aurally identical Violins. Proceedings of the Stockholm Music Acoustics Coference, August 6-9, 2003 (SMAC03), Stockholm, Sweden
http://www.schleske.de/fileadmin/user_upload/doc/SMAC03.pdf
The mentioned example of a weak projecting violin was found in one of Schleske´s publications:
Schleske, Martin; On making Tonal Copies of a Violin, CAS Journal Vol.3, No.2, (Series II), November 1996.
http://www.schleske.de/fileadmin/user_upload/doc/CAS_Tonal_Copies.pdf
The swedish luthier Terry Borman provides a comparison of Stradivari vs. Borman:
http://www.bormanviolins.com/stradcomp.html
additional pages contain a lot of information, including a list of comparable blind tests.
She's dang cute too, those blue eyes!Sort of a time-lapse here:
Wow.
5,890,629 views
A zit-faced dude would have gotten 589 views.Wow.
5,890,629 views
Apparently just a detail of geometry in the mechanism, not a different schema. My mother, a piano player, said her old Steinway lacked the feature, her later Yamaha had it, but it only mattered to her when a friend who could play the HK at full speed visited(she would make him play it for her). She couldn't play it full speed, and cared more about the tone of the piano.
Seems that at the bottom of the Stad vs modern violins things is a deep rooted need for Humans to look for an Absolute, something that can't be challenged.
I remember my reactions after I heard a PA system in a Birmingham, Alabama auditorium... It sounded as good or better than anything audiophile I've heard. I dismissed it ... I was in a good mood , I was happy but it wasn't live music that was playing on it it was recorded ...and it sounded fabulous.. It bothered more when I went back home and listened to some of the cuts they were playing ... good but it wasn't the same thing ... I learned later it was an installation by Danley Sound Labs , from the mind of Tom Danley, one of the most innovative and fertile mind in the business. These installations sometimes sound better than many audiophile system one is likely to encounter ... and cost much less on top of that ...
I have no doubt that some modern violins can be better and proven better than any Stads ever made but ... This is a tough pill to swallow for many... that the Emperor cloth ... can be surpassed