violin society of america

Spectrogram

I just discovered spectrogram viewer on Audacity and my vocal sweeps inadvertently drew some violin arches and a content-looking long-haired chubby-faced girl with my voice (lower right)!

spectrogram of voice

I love spectrograms! Half my lifetime ago, I would watch my favorite songs on the Winamp spectrogram for hours.

So I guess it should surprise no one that last week I had a wonderful time at Oberlin Acoustics Workshop this year, learning, hanging out and doing bridge rocking frequency taichi with brilliant minds and people I admire!

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VSA 2014: Claudia’s Nightmare

claudia fritz paris experiment nightmare

Claudia Fritz is one of the designers of the Paris experiment, the double-blind test of preference of old Italian violins and newly made violins. Its results made a few people angry, with implications such as newly made instruments sound just as good as Strads, and professional violinists can’t tell the difference by playing in a room or concert hall.

Some more official back story:

Personally, I’m very happy this experiment happened. Then again, I’m with the luthiers:

claudia fritz paris experiment results

 

Either way the results went, people were gonna get angry.

VSA 2014: Broken record

This year, the VSA held its instrument competition. Once the winners were announced and the competition room opened, everyone stormed in and got their grubby hands all over the brand new instruments. Violinists went down the line of 250 violins, playing their favorite golden magic test passages over and over and over. When two approached one another, I fully expected some virtuoso battle to erupt:

competition instrument exhibit

It was as though each one thought they were the ONLY one in the room. Oh right, they’re violinists. 🙂