By George ILIEV
Violin holes kept evolving in 16th-century northern Italy
Early Italian violin makers designed their instruments with a round hole in the middle. None of them knew that this was sub-optimal. Acoustics and sound resonance improve not by increasing the size of the hole but by lengthening the edge of the orifice, according to a study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Gradually, customer feedback influenced the workshops of the Stradivari and Guarneri families in Cremona during the Renaissance. Through trial and error they kept increasing the length of the hole's edge until we now have the optimal known design with a typical "f" shaped hole.
Market selection resembles natural selection
Interestingly, the feedback loop of the market closely resembled natural selection: a process entirely based on customers choosing violins that they perceived as having the best acoustics. This, rather than conscious R&D attempts by the makers to "fiddle" with the sound, made the producers prosperous and ensured that the successful designs would be passed down the next generation in the luthier's family.
Unwitting violin makers did not know the recipe for their own success
The producer of the violins with the best sound would simply be favoured by the buyers, even if the producers themselves didn't know why. Violin-making is a complex art of tweaking multiple variables, so the luthiers may have thought that the varnish or the strings they used made their product superb. Yet, in the end it all boiled down to the hole.
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Violin photo attribution: Wikimedia Commons
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