Scan 84
The violin & its story : or the history & construction of the violin, 1905
4 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 68. See the scan on archive.org.
1into a mere broad coffin—"two boards and four little boards"; the belly and back were perfectly flat, and two straight slits took the place of the soundholes. His idea was to have two vibrating flat boards, the vibrations to be communicated from belly to back by a little rod or sound-post. Savart thought very highly of his instrument, and so did many others after him. It need not be said that this "box" lacked all the brilliance of the Italian masterpieces, though it may have been suitable for the expression of the "softer sentiments." This rectangular chest, called a "fiddle," like many another box which enthusiasts have fitted with strings, had a very weak and peculiar tone of its own, but it was not in any sense the true "fiddle-tone."
3Later on, Savart abandoned the use of this rectangular monstrosity, and sought by other experiments to unravel the secrets of the art of violin-making. He believed he could find useful data for his enquiries in the vibration numbers of the belly and back, as well as in the volume of air enclosed with the violin. By the liberality of Vuillaume, the Parisian violin maker, Savart was placed in a position to thoroughly examine a great number of the best specimens of Stradivarius and Guarnerius, not only as complete entities, but also as regards their separate components, and to make of them a most careful acoustic analysis. By means of a series of experiments, on similar lines to those made in physics to discover the nature of the vibrations of sounding bodies, Savart found that the note given by the belly and back respectively of each of the masters' instruments differed by a tone. In order to convince himself of the necessity for this difference of a tone, he had a violin built, of which both belly and back were of pine, and the tones of which, when set in vibration, were precisely alike. The quality of tone of this violin turned out to be thin and weak. Then he substituted a back of maple for the one of pine, the note of which was the same as that of the belly, just as was the case with the pine back. This, again, proved to be a bad fiddle, and the tone very poor indeed. If two
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