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Scan 273
Old Violins And Their Makers, 1883
2 lines. Read by computer on 27 September 2026. Printed page 259. See the scan on archive.org.
1that he adopted a process of a similar nature in order to determine its acoustical properties, for, besides these experiments on Stradivari wood, others were made with pieces of wood whose looks were identical with the appearance of the bits from the old violins, and the dimensions were made exactly similar. These pieces all yielded notes differing from those of the Stradivari bits by intervals of a third, a fourth, and even more, so that the eyes of the great maker, however experienced, could be no guide to him in that respect. In order to ascertain if the lower and upper tables had any definite acoustical relations to each other, these portions were subjected separately to similar operations. Several violins of the highest merit, by Stradivari and Joseph del Jesu, were employed for this purpose, and it was found that the note yielded by the backs was invariably a full tone lower than that given by the belly. Other experiments were made with instruments constructed so that their tables were nearly in unison, and then occurred those "beats" which result in noise instead of tone. Having thus arrived at the conclusion that there ought to be a tone of difference in the acoustic relations of the two portions, the experimenters then endeavoured to ascertain what ought to be the mass of air contained in the complete chest of the instrument. By an ingenious method they found that the mass of air in all the best instruments of Stradivari and Guarnerius upon which they experimented yielded a sound equal to 512 vibrations per second. This sound was the C (ut) of Stradivari's time, but when the experiments were made (1838), 512 vibrations were equal in sound to B natural (si,
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