String Instrument Theories

"I had an uncle who had made instruments," Hutchins said. "He sent me to a violinmaker down in the old Bowery in New York, where I got a blueprint, a book and some wood. When it was finished, it was rated the work of a good carpenter, which is what I was."

What began as a whim 51 years ago grew into Hutchins' lifelong quest to replicate the quality of violins made centuries ago by the Italian masters, using scientific techniques. Her inquisitive mind and meticulous methods would transform her from a science teacher at a New York City girls' prep school to a self-taught acoustician of global stature and the inventor of an entire family of instruments called a violin octet.

And although she hasn't found the secret of the Stradivarius, she's come close.

"Unquestionably, her work has brought scientific thinking to violinmakers around the world, whether or not they embrace it," said Joseph Curtin, an Ann Arbor, Mich., concert-violinmaker who has incorporated Hutchins' techniques in instruments he's made for such virtuosi as Yehudi Menuhin and Elmar Oliveira. "She started the Catgut Acoustical Society, which is largely responsible for what's now a trend toward taking the violin seriously from an acoustical point of view. For me, it means I can make better instruments, simple as that."

Next Wednesday, the Acoustical Society of America will award Hutchins an Honorary Fellowship, which the organization has given only 14 times in its 69 years. The first went to Thomas A. Edison.

The old masters

Three hundred years ago, such Italian violin masters as Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri created exquisite instruments through an alchemy of instinct and experimentation. They would rap their knuckles at strategic points and decide from these "tap tones" where to shave wood from the top and back plates before putting them together.

"The expert makers knew what sounds to listen for and how to achieve those sounds, but we didn't," said Hutchins. "They also knew how to feel it in their fingers. I got excited because I wanted to see if I could find some way of measuring what they knew how to do."

To find out, Hutchins borrowed from the work of 19th century physicist Felix Savart, who had studied how sound vibrations moved through the wooden plates of old Italian violins.

At the time, Savart was working with Jean Baptiste Vuillaume, a master violinmaker in Paris, who had been asked by famous performers of the 1830s to modify their Stradivarius and Guarnerius violins so they could fill new, larger concert halls with sound. To do so, Vuillaume removed the top and back plates, installing heavier base bars and lengthening the neck.

While the violins were apart, he let Savart test the plates. Using a technique developed by another 19th century physicist, Ernst Chladni, Savart sprinkled the tops and backs with dust and ran a bow across the plate edge. Dust settled into distinctive modes, called Chladni patterns.

The best violins produced specific patterns. Hutchins reasoned that if she could measure and reproduce the patterns produced by Italian violins, her instruments would equal them in tone quality.

"I devised a method where you can take a violin top or back, mount it like a dish with the curved side down and sprinkle it with a very fine powder or Christmas glitter," said Hutchins. Through a hole in the worktable where the plates are mounted, she'd vibrate the plate with a loud speaker that emitted a single frequency sound - like a siren - producing distinctive nodal patterns in the glitter.

"Using that method, it took me tests on 200 instruments in the making and 20 years to find the optimal frequency relationships between the top and back. Now, violinmakers around the world are learning this method to help them make fine instruments every time."