一篇关于新琴与老琴鉴别的学术论文，发表在PNAS上面

wycalan

Most violinists believe that instruments by Stradivari and Guarneri
“del Gesu” are tonally superior to other violins—and to new violins
in particular. Many mechanical and acoustical factors have been proposed
to account for this superiority; however, the fundamental
premise of tonal superiority has not yet been properly investigated.
Player’s judgments about a Stradivari’s soundmay be biased by the
violin’s extraordinary monetary value and historical importance, but
no studies designed to preclude such biasing factors have yet been
published.We asked 21 experienced violinists to compare violins by
Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesu with high-quality newinstruments.
The resulting preferences were based on the violinists’ individual
experiences of playing the instruments under double-blind conditions
in a room with relatively dry acoustics. We found that (i) the
most-preferred violin was new; (ii) the least-preferred was by Stradivari;
(iii) there was scant correlation between an instrument’s age
and monetary value and its perceived quality; and (iv) most players
seemed unable to tell whether their most-preferred instrument was
new or old. These results present a striking challenge to conventional
wisdom. Differences in taste among individual players, along
with differences in playing qualities among individual instruments,
appear more important than any general differences between new
and old violins. Rather than searching for the “secret” of Stradivari,
future research might best focused on how violinists evaluate
instruments, on which specific playing qualities are most important
to them, and on how these qualities relate to measurable attributes
of the instruments, whether old or new.

wycalan

论文链接 www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1114999109