Measuring the frequency response of a violin—What Does it Mean?

Over the last few decades, a group of luthiers and physicists (and a programmer or two) have been working on better characterizing the violins using a number of advanced tools to try and gain insight into what makes an excellent violin. Radiation and mobility measurements, as well as full modal analyses, have been coupled with hearing tests to better understand the instrument. My role in all this has been to help develop an analysis toolkit (freeware)—and my goal with this talk is to have more of a discussion on how best to interpret these results. We will play (in real time) with convolving the frequency response function with the signal from an electric violin and compare it to how the original instrument sounds, and then remove parts of the frequency response function and compare that to the original instrument with various modes suppressed.