Bridge-foot Radiativity of Unstrung Violin, Joseph Curtin & Luca Jost, October 18, 2024

A violin’s playing qualities can be evaluated only when it is fully setup, and yet one cannot be sure that a given setup fully exploits the instrument’s tonal potential. This talk looks at measurements to the unstrung corpus that capture what might be called acoustic potential. The work follows up on Woodhouse’s recent talk (https://www.youtube.com/rL9btZHUCcM) on the interactions between bridge and body. Here, we focus on radiativity measurements made at the bridge-foot locations on the unstrung instrument. Comparing these with measurements of the fully assembled violin provides a dramatic illustration of the role of bridge and soundpost in ‘curating’ the final sound. We find a striking sensitivity to millimeter-level changes in driving-point location, suggesting that variations in the position and spacing of the bridge feet may be an underused parameter in violin setup.

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