Frequency-domain analysis may hide the very properties that make violins great

Evidence

When physicists attempt to analyze what makes a violin great, there seems a heavy emphasis on the power spectrum. It is not clear that this emphasis is optimal. No violin wins acclaim from audience or player based on how its sounds when a robot draws a bow across one of its strings at a constant rate and pressure for a few seconds, or worse when a sine tone generator is slowly swept through frequency. Plotting forests of violin body resonances, or displaying a few Chladni patterns (deformations of the front and back plates at fixed driving frequency), as informative as these are, may in fact encrypt some of the best and deepest secrets of the violin. — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 1780

Categorization

• SEED: Good core for an essay contrasting steady-state vs. transient analysis of musical instruments — the case that what performers prize (attack, ‘speaking’) is inherently time-domain.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 1780
• XREF: connects to: Frequency-domain analysis mirrors how the human ear processes sound — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 377; An instrument’s identity is set by its unique recipe of frequency components — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 784

Broader Connections

• Frequency-domain analysis mirrors how the human ear processes sound #contradicts (0.75) — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 377