Of Cremona Violins, the ear, and peer review

Gabriel Weinreich’s review of Kameshwar Wali’s book Cremona Violins: A Physicist’s Quest for the Secrets of Stradivari (PHYSICS TODAY, October 2010, page 54 ) makes one wonder whether Weinreich thinks Wali wrote about the wrong physicist. In any case, the review seems to miss the point of the book by concentrating on minor issues while ignoring Jack Fry’s beautiful, comprehensive, mechanical theory of the violin, discussed thoroughly in chapters 3, 5, 6, and 7. Especially telling is Weinreich’s catty remark that Fry did not publish his stuff in refereed journals, as if that would guarantee its virtue.

Wali’s book appeared at an opportune time for me; I had recently started to build a pipe organ and became interested in how musical instruments produce their distinctive sounds. I remember Fry giving two truly memorable colloquia when I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the early 1970s. In the first he touted a hokey theory that aging of the varnish made old violins superior. In the second he started developing the theory discussed in Wali’s book, of the violin as a system of driven oscillators.

Cremona Violins is actually excellent and well written; it gives a general reader some insight into how a scientist thinks, how knowledge develops, and how basic research transforms into engineering. Fry’s quest is a study in microcosm of how we do science, with false starts and incremental advancements. Wali’s book explains how such diverse disciplines as acoustics, hydrodynamics, and human perception determine the quality of musical instruments. It also gives us a flavor of how different groups of intelligent people, in this case scientists and musicians, use different language to explain the same things.

Kudos to Wali for documenting this remarkable work for posterity.