Books › Old violins and violin lore, 1900 › scan 207
Scan 207
Old violins and violin lore, 1900
10 lines. Read by computer on 28 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1OLD VIOLINS
3It is not at all an uncommon thing to find a violin, which has been left unplayed upon for some months, sulky when first taken out.
5Do not be rash or fidget with the bridge or sound-post. Warm the fiddle up gently; rub it lightly with all due care, and play on it without taking any notice of its temper; go on for a couple of hours; you will find, to your surprise, that it has recovered all its own sweetness and charm, and will be ready to charm you with the delightful sensitiveness of its response. All that was really wanted was for the temporarily disused channels of vibration to be again filled with sound—the pores—the desiccated hollows to be once more shaken up in the old way. The instrument has really gone to sleep—some of its nerve currents have got sluggish—that is, the desiccated powder molecules have stuck in the pores and must be set rolling again. But, like one just awakened, the fiddle takes a little time to be "all there," as the idiom runs.
7Something similar may be observed in a large hall. When, after the atmosphere has been quiescent for some time, speaking first begins, the speaker will not be heard well; the atmosphere is stiff, and only when the whole of it has been set in vibration—and that takes a little time—does it become sensitive and sufficiently elastic to be capable of transmitting the slightest inflections of sound.
9There is, again, an electric as well as an atmospheric and molecular state of the air and all other vibratory substances, but this is a side of acoustics extremely
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