Research

Modern standards implicitly assume a hand size, finger span, and muscle endurance profile closer to an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century European male laborer than to today’s diverse population of professional players. The result...

Robots perform the gestures of discovery without the consciousness of risk or failure. They enact  the evolution of intuition without the anxiety of meaning. I. The Problem Stated: Robotics Meets...

At no point does ‘tone’ exist as a stable object. It is a time-dependent pattern of energy flow, continuously sustained and continuously decaying. This immediately distinguishes sound from visual phenomena....

“The Tourte bow occupies a transitional place in the history of human instrumentality: it is the moment when gesture becomes mechanism.” The cello bow is a technological artifact that hides...

“The history of the violin, like the history of life, is written in the language of disappearance.” The violin is often praised as the perfect instrument. Yet its perfection, if...

“Whenever a practice detaches from its social environment but retains its prestige, myth rushes in to fill the gap.” One of the most persistent misunderstandings in modern violin culture is...

Every violin carries the marks of its years.  The color of its maple, the texture of its spruce, and the crispness of its tone all record slow transformations in wood...

When a violin or a cello speaks, two worlds sing to one another. The world of structure—the maple carved bridge, stiff enough to bear a hundred kilos of string tension—and...

The dog’s olfactory system—nearly a thousand times more sensitive than the human’s—represents a form of knowledge without representation. Smell is not an image, not a geometry, not even a structured...

When luthiers speak of “tradition,” they are not merely appealing to precedent; they are invoking a natural-historical intelligence that precedes analytic reasoning. They believe the violin’s form did not emerge...

Introduction: The Question of the “Ideal of Sound” Every epoch constructs its own ideal of sound. This phrase, often used by organologists and historians of the violin, conceals a complex...

When musicologists and historians say that “the ideal of sound has evolved across musical eras,” they imply that there exists a collective intentionality — a cultural noesis — toward which...