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The University of Southampton
Engineering

Violin Acoustics – a tale of coupled oscillators Seminar

Time:
16:00
Date:
29 November 2016
Venue:
13/3017

For more information regarding this seminar, please email Rameen Mustafa at R.Mustafa@soton.ac.uk .

Event details

The Institute of Sound and Vibration Research seminar No registration required

What makes the difference in the quality of the sound of violins made by the great Italian violin maker Stradivarius, typically costing several millions of pounds, from those of most (but not all) later makers has fascinated both musicians and acousticians for almost 200 years. However, it is only recently that a successful model for the structural and acoustic properties has emerged. This talk will provide an overview of how the violin and its close relatives- the viola, cello and double bass- produce their sound and how our understanding of the vibrational and acoustic properties of such instruments has advanced from both recent experimental measurements on around 100 valuable early Italian violins and many fine modern instruments, and physical models validated by finite element computations. We will argue that the acoustical properties of the violin can be described by the vibrations of the thin-walled, shallow, box- like, shell structure of the violin body, with the broken symmetry of the individual top and back, guitar-shaped, anisotropic plates largely determining the frequencies and shapes of the acoustically important vibrational modes. As indicated by the title of the talk, the modes of the assembled violin, with neck, fingerboard, strings, etc attached, can then be considered simply as a collection of coupled oscillators, with the resulting normal modes determining the resulting vibrational and acoustical properties.

Speaker information

Colin Gough , University Of Birmingham. Colin Gough is an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Birmingham, where he led an internationally leading multidisciplinary research group on high-temperature superconductors. However, as a keen violinist leading the University’s professional string quartet, he has always been interested in how the sound of the violin is related to its physical properties, teaching undergraduate courses and organizing projects on Musical Acoustics. He has published many research papers on musical acoustics, including a prize-winning article on Violin Acoustics in IOP’s Physics Today and an updated article for ASA’s Acoustics Today (2016). In addition, he contributed the chapter on Musical Acoustics for the Springer Handbook on Acoustics and a chapter on the Electric Guitar and Violin for Springer’s Science of String Instruments. He is on the staff at the annual Oberlin Workshop on Acoustics for Violin Makers

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