#violin design

[c0ldh3ll]

MONAD Studio

[graceandgratitude29]

Vintage Violin Pillow

Love the violin? May this pillow design be your intimate companion.

[michirujackson]

oh!!! this is so cool! MONAD Studio #Piezoelectric_violin

source: http://www.monoandstereo.com/2015/02/monad-studio-piezoelectric-violin.html

[kriscrash]

Bird themed violins! Magpie violin is pretty terrible, it can't be tuned and I doubt it's even in a state to play. Swan violin is of course the best thing.

I realize I've not been drawing them entirely correctly, with the body thickness and the carved rim on where the panels meet. Just trying to get at least two violin designs out per day so we have some to pick from! I imagine these could belong to Fabian and Lorelai.

[kriscrash]

Fiddlesticks and sea ukulele.

[kriscrash]

Moldy oak violin is my favourite so far :)

have some music so you can be annoying like me and dance in the office.

[thissoundhasnowords]

L,

What drew me to violin making I’ve written to you before and was mostly realized once my studies had already begun. But briefly, the violin (and here I mean the violin family instruments) contained within it a wealth of information that in many ways had been covered over by time, a market, and its great success as a musical instrument. It is a complex object but an object nonetheless. By complex object I mean that more than a tool it is something like a subject rather than an object, a pursuit, a chasing after something in sound. The object could be beautiful, like something that sits in a gallery - something crafted by hand, yes, something with a pleasing shape, something with some color, etc. It was also something that could sit in a museum as something with a place in history. But it could be used too - something that could take a place on stage in the hands of a musician, to play music, something that could travel from room to room, place to place, sound to sound. And as this, it was something that contained these movements too, in so far that it outlasted whoever played it, and whoever played it next, and perhaps, with some attention and care, outlast even he or she who plays it today. That the violin hasn’t changed much over time speaks both to its success but as well to the interest in the sound that it makes and continues to make. It is a voice and gives the musician who plays it a chance to extend their own voice in song. This is what I saw in it and still do: a technical problem - how to make it? - and a container of problems - how was it made at a particular time and how so successfully that it need not be remembered exactly how by those who make it now?

In Edmund Husserl’s work on the origins of geometry, he says that questions of how things began are the one thing the ‘originators’ of an idea never have as a concern - that origins can only be a problem for us as moderns reflecting on something that already is. In some ways this is the problem for our contemporary questions regarding the origins of the violin. We can trace a movement - of Arabic luthiers to the south of Spain where the primitive European instruments were made more complicated into lighter instruments bent out of thinner wood than the ones carved out of trees like hollowed out canoes wrought up until that time. From there to the expulsion of Jews from Spain and the movement of this technical understanding north to Italy where the violin finally coalesced into its current form sometime around the mid 16th century. All this a movement of people and ideas in the form of the work they took with them. But to really give an origin to the idea is more difficult. Our explorations suffer this difficulty not so gracefully, at times approaching dogma.

But there was a great innovation made more recently in the work of François Denis. (Interestingly, not many violin makers are paying enough attention to this and it’s a meaningful lack of attention in that it describes the reason why the understanding he’s uncovered (he calls it “the art of measurement”) was lost to begin with!)  Imagine that by the time of Stradivari, the original principles of design which allowed the violin to be expressed in the from that he advanced in his work was already being forgotten under his instruction. By instruction I mean that here was a very successful workshop, already one hundred years and more after the first violins became the violin. What made his workshop successful was that it could make what at one time had to be designed. Tweaking of models now, Stradivari was a great designer. But the principles of his designs or of the designs he was altering need not be understood by the workers who followed his drawings, and maybe not even by him. This was in many ways the beginning of the industrial revolution in violin making and so in some ways we’ve never stopped working for Stradivari in that violin makers ever since have been receiving a form already made, tweaking it here and there, making it a bit more of one’s own, but after something that has already been made and very much not with a similar understanding or with whatever understandings were necessary in the intellectual toolbox of the ‘original’ craftsmen who participated in its invention. This is why François’ work has not been thoroughly embraced as the revolutionary research it is: It is not necessary to make a violin! It wasn’t necessary for Stradivari and certainly not for his employees. How much less so today when there are so many instruments still around that can be copied. One need not draw your own violin from scratch. Pick one off the wall and trace it. One need not design one’s own f-holes or lay them out on an instrument of your own design and make them harmonious. Trace the ones that already exist, make a template from them, and reproduce it as much as you can stand it. But this is all that can be stood. Herein lies the logic of the industrial revolution I think.

Interestingly, much like Husserl’s thoughts about origins, and their invention by those who come after the fact, I think it’s amazing that what François has uncovered about the origin of violin making may not even have been the case. But it is. But only if we say so now. And that is in part what I’m trying to do. To make something that contains its principles of design. I’ll try to flush this out a bit in my next letter.