In listing other research done under the umbrella
of the CAS, one should note the work in tap-tones, plate tuning,
and location of the main body and air resonances that has already
been discussed. Another research development, among others, in
which Hutchins played a major role was the discovery that a significant
relationship exists between the first mode of vibration in the
top plate (designated as the B1 mode) and the second mode of vibration
of the cavity of the instrument (the A1 mode).[FN
95] If the difference, or Delta, between B1 and A1 is around
100 Hz, the instrument will have a harsh sound, but also a large
possible dynamic variation. Instruments used by concert soloists
usually have a Delta between 60 and 80 Hz and orchestra players
50 and 60 Hz, but instruments used in chamber music might have
a Delta between 10 and 20 Hz. If the Delta for an instrument falls
much below 10 Hz, it will have little power, but be very easy
to play. In order to test this theory, Hutchins has built ten
violins with different Deltas, asking violinists to find the instrument
most like their own. They usually choose one with a Delta near
that of their own instrument. Hutchins considers this a significant
part of her work; it might be a development that helps researchers
to determine the true difference between a great instrument and
merely a good one.[FN
96] This is one of several tests in which Hutchins has made
ten or more instruments; in others she has been measuring the
performance of various archings and types of wood or woods of
various ages.[FN
97]
Although the description so far offered of Hutchins's work as
a scientist has introduced a number of collaborations, she has
engaged in many more projects with engineers and scientists in
the United States and abroad. She began to see the need for these
collaborations as early as the 1950s, when she discovered that
violin acoustics was a field where persons worked in isolation.
Hutchins began her long career of bringing together specialists
in related fields, often formulating the questions for study and
demonstrating their relationship to the physics of the violin.
Hutchins's ability to move between the vastly different worlds
of luthiers and scientists is unusual; she has expressed it as
follows: "I have the wits to understand the scientists and
the hands to do the violin-making."[FN
98] Although Hutchins was trained as a science teacher, she
has done none of the graduate work usually associated with a career
in the hard sciences, and has learned acoustics and other fields
as needed. As will be noted below, professors in acoustics have
found that she has learned these fields well, and made significant
contributions. She has put together a number of conferences and
led many sessions at universities, and has been proudest of those
in which the musical and scientific worlds have met:[FN
99]
The uniqueness of this has been pulling
together music and physics people at these different stops,
and then letting them see that there is something very creative
to it, and they get excited. |
What follows are brief descriptions of some
of Hutchins's more satisfying relationships and collaborations
with scientists and engineers, many of which were made possible
by Hutchins formulating technical questions about the physics
of violins and then seeking a person with the special expertise
to help solve that problem.
Arthur H. Benade (1925-1987), author of Horns, Strings, and
Harmony and Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics, was one of
the most prominent physicists associated with musical acoustics.
An early supporter of Hutchins, he was a charter member of the
CAS and published thirteen articles in the Journal between
1965 and 1986.[FN
100] He once told Hutchins: "Hutchie, you know, you are
the best acoustician in the world who never had any formal training,"
and also praised her in print as "...a skillful instrument
maker in the conventional sense as well as an expert in musical
acoustics..." who has encouraged others to combine the best
building techniques with sound acoustical theory.[FN
101] In 1964 Benade helped to legitimize Hutchins's claim
that the violin octet was a projection of the sound of the violin
into other registers by comparing the tone of members of the octet
with "...the tone of a good conventional violin that had
been tape-recorded and played back at altered speed in order to
transpose its sounds to the pitch ranges of the various new instruments."
His conclusion from tests verified Hutchins's feelings about the
octet: "The final tape put together from our recordings had
a pleasant sound but, far more interesting, it is easy to recognize
that the tonal characteristics of the various instruments are
present in the transposed sound of the ordinary violin."[FN
102] Hutchins and Benade also met at numerous professional
and scientific meetings and served each other as valuable testing
grounds for ideas.
Another charter member of the CAS was Eugen Skudrzyk, a prominent
physicist and acoustician who taught at Pennsylvania State University
and wrote The Foundations of Acoustics. Skudrzyk was
most knowledgeable in the area of vibrations analysis and his
father had done some violin research in Germany. Skudrzyk invited
Hutchins to lecture at Penn State three times and they worked
together on analysis of woods. Hutchins has found some of Skudrzyk's
ideas very helpful, especially that low frequencies, in some contexts,
reflect high frequencies, meaning that one can make changes to
improve the lower range of a violin and help the higher range
at the same time.
In the 1960s Earle L. Kent was director of research at the Conn
Instrument Company and he later wrote Musical Acoustics, Piano
and Wind Instruments. He offered Hutchins useful advice on
occasion, like convincing her of the folly of patenting her method
of plate tuning. In the mid- 1960s he represented Conn in attempts
to mass-produce alto violins through the German violin company
of Heinrich Roth (for which Conn was the American distributor)
with Hutchins doing the plate tuning and in working out a research
partnership between Conn and Hutchins. Although neither of these
efforts bore fruit, Kent was a strong supporter of Hutchins's
work.
One of Hutchins's early students in violin-making was George Bissinger,
later a professor of physics at East Carolina University. After
becoming a full-time physicist, Bissinger desired to continue
his work with violins and collaborated with Hutchins on several
projects, the results of which were published in the CAS Journal
between 1976 and 1988.[FN
103] In one of their projects, Hutchins and Bissinger studied
the relationship between wood and air modes in the violin. They
filled violins with heavier-than-air gasses like carbon dioxide
or freon and measured differences in sound. These gasses move
the air modes down in frequency, showing how a change in the air
modes with constant wood modes changes the sound of the instrument.
In order to shorten his commute for this research, Bissinger recently
has worked with Robert and Deena Spear in Maryland, two more Hutchins
students.
Rex Thompson is an Australian chemist who came to work with Hutchins
in Montclair as a Churchill Fellow for a month in the early 1970s,
taking a pair of tuned violin plates home with him. Thompson's
interest was the effect of moisture on violin plates, and he demonstrated
that the top and bottom plates of the same instrument should be
tuned at the same time in about 50 percent relative humidity.[FN
104] Hutchins has continued to work with Thompson on varnish
formulas. He is one of a number of Australians active in the CAS.
Daniel W. Haines, a mechanical engineer and now professor of engineering
at Manhattanville College in Riverdale, New York, has been associated
with Hutchins for over twenty years. Much of Haines's work has
been research on the guitar, including the development of an experimental
graphite-epoxy composite for guitar tops. Between 1971 and 1974
he worked with Hutchins and others on the use of this material
in violin tops. They established that it had the acoustical characteristics
of fine spruce, but the material was very hard on human skin,
so their work stopped after the building of a prototype.[FN
105] Haines has remained active in the CAS, serving as editor-in-chief
of the Journal since 1989.
Hutchins has worked with several German scientists. Lothar Cremer,
one of Germany's leading acousticians, corresponded with Hutchins,
and met her at meetings, and invited her to lecture to his students
at the Heinrich Hertz Institute. He published seven articles in
the CAS journal between 1972 and 1989.[FN
106] Cremer and Hutchins co-directed a CAS Technical Conference
in Mittenwald, Germany in 1974, bringing Hutchins's work to the
center of the German violin-making industry. An acoustician who
helped to run the meeting was Helmut Muller, a consulting acoustician,
who also worked with Karl Roy, head of the Mittenwald school for
violin-makers. Hutchins has had the opportunity to demonstrate
plate tuning to Muller on several occasions and he is now fostering
interest in the technique at Mittenwald. At the International
Symposium of Musical Acoustics in Mittenwald in 1989, organized
by Muller, at which Cremer, Muller, Hutchins and other scientists
spoke, Muller joined with Martin Schleske in a paper that asked "Is Scientific Research Useful for Violin Makers?"[FN
107] They made several suggestions on how results of research
could be made more accessible, a subject important to Hutchins
as well. She also worked for several years with Professor Werner
Lottermoser and his associate Jurgen Meyer of the Physicalische
Technische Bundensanstalt in Brunchweig comparing test methods
and results on an instrument they sent to her. Lottermoser has
now retired, but Hutchins still works with Meyer, who is well
known in the acoustics of music instruments.
Another German scientist with whom Hutchins has worked is Heinrich
Dunnwald, who studies the traits of the old Italian instruments
and tries to reproduce them in newer instruments.[FN
108] Hutchins has sent him Sus 260, a violin. Dunnwald is
making some changes on the outside of the instrument, and then
Hutchins will work on the inside. Hutchins is concerned that his
work will lower the Delta so much that the tone improvement will
not be sustainable.
A major center for the study of musical acoustics is the Department
of Speech Communications and Music Acoustics of the Royal Institute
of Technology in Stockholm. A leading physicist and acoustician
there is Erik V. Jansson, who earned his doctorate at Case Western
University with Benade. Jansson has worked on a number of aspects
of the physics of the violin. Some of his latest research concerns
the prediction of what wood in rough form might make good violin
plates. Furthermore, he experiments with the resonance of a simplified
violin body, experiments not unlike ones that Saunders and Hutchins
did in the 1950s.[FN
109] Hutchins and Jansson worked on what they called a "plateric" study. She sent him ten tops and backs of violins which Jansson
assembled in various combinations to measure what kinds of instruments
they produced. Hutchins found Jansson's data difficult to interpret,
but his main argument was that the best instruments had their
peak sounds at frequencies in predictable relationships. One of
Jansson's graduate students, Jesus Alonso Moral, also worked on
this project, spending time with Hutchins in Montclair in the
early 1980s.[FN
110] Another student at the institute with whom Hutchins has
worked is Anders Askenfelt. In 1982 Hutchins offered a three-month
workshop in violin acoustics in Montclair with Moral and Australian
Graham Caldersmith, who was in the United States on a Churchill
Fellowship. Stockholm has had other associations with Hutchins
as well: one of the octets was purchased by the Royal Academy
of Music and is in the permanent collection of the Musik Museet.
She attended meetings of the Stockholm International Music Acoustics
Conference in the summer of 1983 and again in 1993 where there
were demonstration concerts for the octet.
Hutchins published a second article in Scientific American, "Acoustics of Violin Plates," in October 1981.[FN
111] A few weeks later she was called by Kenneth D. Marshall
of the B.F. Goodyear Research & Development Center about modal
analysis of violins. Hutchins sent him three violins-- Sus 181,
295, and 297--for analysis, with Sus 181 in pieces. He has published
a major article in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of
America and three articles and two abstracts in the CAS Journal,
including the lengthy "Modal Analysis: A Primer on Theory
and Practice," an important introduction to the field for
novices.[FN
112] Study of the modes of resonance of violin plates has
been central to the Hutchins's work throughout her career, and
Marshall is a researcher who has built on her work in the area.
An experiment which proves Hutchins's willingness to put her skills
as a luthier at the service of science is the so-called "Swiss
cheese violin," built in the early 1980s at the suggestion
of Edgar A. G. Shaw, a leading Canadian acoustician. Air modes
and wood modes in a violin interact with each other; it was Shaw's
suggestion that by drilling holes in the ribs of a violin that
the air modes would be changed without changing the wood modes,
providing an opportunity to study their relationships not unlike
the heavier-than-air experiments with Bissinger. Hutchins and
Schelleng had tried to provide the same effect by stuffing a violin
with knitting wool, but that changed the wood modes as well. Hutchins
gamely drilled 65 holes in the ribs (the first was the hardest,
she notes!) of one of her unvarnished violins (the number and
positions of the holes suggested by Benade), and began to experiment
with playing the violin while the holes were open, plugged with
sponge, or plugged with cork. With all of the holes opened the
air modes rose about 50 Hz, practically eliminating their reinforcement
of lower wood modes. The lower range of the instrument became
quite weak and the upper range very strong, graphic demonstration
of the important relationship between the air and wood modes.[FN
113] I have heard this instrument played with the holes open.
The violinist tried to produce an even tone throughout the range,
but it was exceedingly difficult. when all of the holes are plugged
with cork, the normal relationship between the air and wood modes
is restored and the violin has the expected tone.
Max Mathews, a former laboratory director at Bell Labs in Murray
Hill, New Jersey, is another engineer with whom Hutchins has worked.
His work in violin acoustics has included the design an electronic
violin and work on the bowed string, projects on which he has
reported in the CAS Journal.[FN
114] Hutchins was a consultant for Mathews's design of an
electronic violin in the late 1960s, helping with the instrument's
tone quality and how that quality can be measured. Mathews's instrument
consists of a frame with steel strings stretched across it, playable
by a conventional violinist. The sound of the instrument, produced
electronically, was based upon Hutchins's understanding of a violin's
tone. Mathews has also built an electronic viola and cello. In
more recent years Mathews has been a professor in musical acoustics
at Stanford University, where he has been an important figure
in establishing the CAS archive.
The engineer with whom Hutchins has worked with the most over
the last fourteen years is Oliver Rodgers, retired from Scott
Paper.[FN 115] Rodgers played chamber music with Saunders while a Harvard undergraduate,
and was always interested in the technical side of the violin.
He first came to Hutchins in 1979 to watch the shop work, but
was drawn to the study of violin-making, and soon began to work
with her in scientific areas. Rodgers has discovered that Hutchins
has a gift for getting persons ever more involved in her work:
at one point he made a drawing of a viola he wanted, and soon
found himself preparing drawings for the octet. He describes Hutchins
as a "bulldog," a pragmatic experimenter always working
on two or three different theories, and a researcher not afraid
to contradict herself in print after further research.
Rodger's most significant contribution is an ongoing attempt to
make a computer model of the entire violin while working as an
adjunct professor at the University of Delaware since 1984. He
wanted to learn a finite elements analysis program and found the
violin to be an ideal, if complicated, introduction. He started
with a Stradivarius completely described by Sacconi,[FN
116] but over the years he has changed the description of
the instrument in the computer. His modelling of the top-first
flat and then arched--has allowed him to transfer Hutchins's knowledge
of plate tuning to the computer. Rodgers has tuned 3000 to 4000
plates on the computer, discovering especially sensitive places
where wood should be removed. The project is extremely complex.
The Vax computer on which Rodgers first worked took two hours
of central processing time to tune a plate; in the process the
computer solved 8000 algebraic equations.[FN
117] Rodgers has become very active in the CAS and sees his
collaboration with Hutchins becoming even closer in the future.
Wilfred Cote, professor at Syracuse University, has worked extensively
on the microstructure of wood. He has provided Hutchins with photographs
of wood at a microscopic level, and has indicated that when wood
is vibrated under stress by sound waves, like a violin being played,
the long-chain polymers in the wood break. With changes in temperature
and humidity, however, the polymers repair themselves. This is
what happens in the process of "playing in" a violin
so that it responds more easily. When it is left unplayed for
a period of time, the chains tend to repair themselves, but not
entirely. Violinists recognize this as an instrument left idle
for a few months that needs to be "played in" again.
Hutchins has shown this experimentally by vibrating a number of
violins continuously for 1500 hours, causing the B1 body vibration
to decrease some 25 Hz, making the instruments easier to play
and "more friendly." When allowed to rest for three
months the B1 body vibration goes back up about 15 Hz, but not
all the way.
Young Nam Kim, an expert in fluid dynamics, works on air flow
through jet engines for Pratt-Whitney in Hartford. He became interested
in air flow around the f-holes in violins, and went to Montclair
several times to work with Hutchins during the winter of 1992
and 1993. It is Kim's intention to model the flow of this air
on computer.
A leading figure in musical acoustics is Gabriel Weinreich, physics
professor at the University of Michigan. Weinreich has written
on the physics of the piano and the violin, is a long- time member
of the CAS, and since 1980 has been associated with the Institut
de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris,
headed by Pierre Boulez.[FN
118] (An acoustician based at IRCAM with whom Hutchins has
worked is Xavier Boutillion.) Weinreich introduced Hutchins at
an Acoustical Society of America session held in her honor in
Baltimore in 1991. After defining the various tasks in science,
he provided the following effective final remarks to a description
of Hutchins work as a scientific collaborator:[FN
119]
No respect for authority; a long attention span; scrupulous honesty;
enthusiasm for intellectual collaboration; and the willingness
to spend a lifetime beating a path through the jungle. When I
think of Carleen Hutchins in terms of those criteria, anything
to do with any other kind of credentials fades instantly into
insignificance. Accordingly as I open our special session on "Bowed
Strings--Honoring Carleen Hutchins," I feel honored and privileged
to bestow, in my name and that of my colleagues, the title of
"Honorary Research Scientist" on this gracious lady.
