Abstract Violinists rely on violin crafters, or luthiers, to adjust their instruments’ acoustics. To do so, luthiers not only alter violins’ material forms but also talk with violinists about perceived and desired timbres—qualities of sound that lack standards of measure and are notoriously difficult to describe. This paper undertakes a linguistic anthropological analysis of a violin adjustment session in the Northeastern United States, showing that despite such difficulties, luthiers communicate successfully with violinists about timbre through situated practice. While luthiers sometimes use standard, enregistered cross-modal or synesthetic metaphors for timbre that can be analyzed in terms of lexical semantics, I emphasize that they also improvise on a wider repertoire of emergent and embodied semiotic strategies. By listening beyond the lexical and the enregistered, this paper synthesizes an interdisciplinary approach for research on communication about timbre, sound, and the senses.
Juliet Pascal Glazer (Fri,) studied this question.