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 philosophical claim: that sound—an invisible, temporal, and relational phenomenon—embodies the moral and metaphysical values of a culture. To say that the seventeenth-century “ideal of sound” differed from that of the twentieth century is not merely to record a change in taste, but to identify a transformation in the structure of human attention, in the way the world is heard and known.
In the early modern period, this ideal was bound to the organic body. The violin’s sound aspired to the human voice, its gut strings and resonant timbre forming a continuum with the flesh that created it. By the late nineteenth century, however, a new ideal had emerged—one of projection, brilliance, and technological power. The transition from gut to steel, from resonance to projection, is not merely material; it is metaphysical. It marks the passage from an organic ontology of participation to a mechanical ontology of domination.
This essay traces that passage through the lens of Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907) and the philosophy of biology, showing how the organic materials of early violin making embodied a living continuity with biological morphogenesis, while the later industrial materials (steel, synthetic varnishes, machined fittings) represent the Enlightenment’s faith in rationalization and control. The evolution of violin sound becomes a microcosm of modern epistemology: from élan vital to the mechanized will to power.
2. The Organic Paradigm: Gut, Voice, and the Vital Continuum
The earliest violins and viols were built from the living body outward. Their strings, carved from sheep or goat intestine, were not simply convenient materials but symbols of participation in a natural order. The use of gut situated the violin within an ecology of organic resonance: animal body to human hand to vibrating air to listening ear. In the Baroque imagination, sound was a living substance, not an abstract waveform.
In biological terms, gut strings embody the complexity of collagen fiber alignment, anisotropic elasticity, and viscous damping—the same parameters that define tendons and vocal cords. The string’s microstructure introduces frictional losses that attenuate higher partials, resulting in a sound that is less directional and more enveloping. This resonant, omni-diffusive character corresponds to what McLuhan (1962) called “acoustic space”—a field experienced from within rather than observed from without.
Bergson’s Creative Evolution offers a metaphysical parallel. His notion of élan vital—the creative impulse immanent in life—stands against the mechanistic determinism of Darwinian or Newtonian models. For Bergson, life is not reducible to material causation; it is duration (durée), a continuous unfolding of novelty. The gut string, as a product of organic matter shaped by human craft, exemplifies this idea: it is not fabricated by external design, but evolved from the very tissue of life. It carries within its fibers the historical memory of its organism, a temporal thickness that echoes Bergson’s conception of biological creativity as “a vital differentiation that is always invention.”¹
The Baroque instrument thus incarnated a metaphysics of participation: sound was not projected at the listener but radiated through space, mingling with the architectural and human environment. The cello’s low register was prized not for volume but for depth and warmth—qualities that signify belonging rather than mastery. The ideal of sound in this context was one of resonance, of communion.
3. The Mechanization of Sound: Steel, Energy, and Enlightenment Power
By the late nineteenth century, the ideal had shifted. Steel strings—products of industrial metallurgy—offered higher tension, greater loudness, and more stability. But their acoustic character was profoundly different. Steel, with its crystalline lattice and low internal damping, converts vibrational energy into sound with minimal loss. The result is not an immersive field but a beam: concentrated, directional, and forceful.
Here we find the auditory analogue of what McLuhan called “visual space”: the perspectival, bounded world inaugurated by Euclid and perfected by Newton. In this visualized acoustics, sound becomes a projectile, a measurable vector aimed at an audience arranged before a stage. The transformation of concert architecture from intimate salons to grand halls mirrors this epistemic shift. The instrument no longer resonates within a community; it projects to a public.
Philosophically, this shift corresponds to the Enlightenment’s representational rationality—the faith that the world is an object to be measured, mapped, and controlled. Steel embodies this logic. Its very production—requiring blast furnaces, standardized alloys, and tensile testing—depends on a metaphysics of domination: nature as resource, energy as commodity, sound as signal.
From a Bergsonian perspective, this marks the triumph of spatialized time, the reduction of durée to measurable intervals. The steel string’s brilliance, its resistance to organic irregularity, becomes a sonic metaphor for the mechanization of creativity. As Bergson warned, “Intelligence, by its nature, is constructive and mechanical; it fabricates closed systems where life invents open ones.”²
Thus the steel string is not simply a technical improvement—it is an ontological declaration. It asserts that the highest good in sound is power, projection, and reproducibility. It turns the élan vital outward, into the world of control.
4. Philosophy of Biology and Material Science: From Vital Form to Structural Function
The transition from gut to steel parallels the evolution of biology itself—from a vitalist to a mechanistic science. Early naturalists such as D’Arcy Thompson (On Growth and Form, 1917) and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire saw living forms as expressions of dynamic equilibrium, shaped by internal tensions rather than external imposition. The violin’s curved plates, tuned by intuition and ear, are products of the same logic: form arising from flow, not geometry.
Modern materials science, by contrast, isolates and replicates structure abstracted from life. Steel’s homogeneity is the triumph of control over variation. Where collagen fibers exhibit hierarchical anisotropy—microstructures resonant with the complexity of protein folding—steel enforces uniformity. The gut string lives; the steel string functions.
Recent developments in computational biology, such as DeepMind’s AlphaFold, ironically reintroduce Bergson’s insight through technology. AlphaFold does not derive protein structure through analytical deduction but through non-representational pattern recognition—mirroring the violin maker’s intuitive shaping of wood. In both cases, intelligence operates not by explicit reasoning but by immersion in relational complexity. The algorithm’s “understanding” of folding is not conceptual but experiential: it learns how forms emerge, not why they must.³
This non-representational intelligence revives the élan vital under a new guise. The very success of machine learning in predicting organic form reveals the limitations of mechanical causation and suggests that creativity—whether biological or artificial—depends on holistic relationality, not analytical reduction. The gut string, with its living irregularities, already embodied this truth; the steel string, with its engineered perfection, obscured it.
5. Sociology of the Sound Ideal: Homo Ludens and the Loss of Play
Richard Taruskin’s observation that classical performance has become a “chill museum”⁴ crystallizes the sociological dimension of this shift. As Randolph Coleman lamented, the “exorcising of homo ludens” from musical pedagogy has extinguished the creative play that once animated performance. This loss of ludic vitality parallels the transformation of the instrument from resonant partner to mechanical tool.
The Baroque luthier, operating within a living tradition of improvisation and dance, built instruments attuned to participation. The modern factory and conservatory, by contrast, demand repeatability and precision. The steel string, standardized and industrially manufactured, becomes the sonic emblem of this pedagogy: stable, predictable, controllable.
From a philosophical standpoint, this is the alienation of élan vital into what Horkheimer and Adorno called the “instrumental reason” of the Enlightenment. The violinist’s expressive gesture becomes subordinated to the score; the luthier’s craft becomes regulated by specifications. The ideal of sound is redefined as perfection without life—a projection of clarity that sacrifices resonance.
6. Toward a Phenomenology of the Contemporary Instrument
If the violin once served as a vessel of resonance, it may now serve as a mirror of our technological condition. Heidegger’s The Thing (1950) asks what it means for an object to “thing”—to gather and hold the fourfold of earth, sky, mortals, and divinities. The violin, in its organic state, gathers: it transforms material (wood, gut) into an event (sound) that connects body and world. But the industrialized violin disperses: its sound projects outward, severed from its origin.
The phenomenological task is thus to reawaken the violin’s “thingness”—to restore its capacity to hold together the living and the material. Bergson’s open evolution offers a way forward: creativity as dialogue between continuity and invention. The luthier of the future must think like AlphaFold: learning from complexity without reducing it.
Material science, too, points toward synthesis. Modern composites such as carbon fiber can mimic organic anisotropy while offering structural stability. When used with sensitivity, such materials can recover the violin’s original vitality—its resonance as participation, not domination. The question is not whether we can make instruments louder, but whether we can make them more alive.
7. Conclusion: The Future of the Ideal
The history of the violin’s ideal of sound is the history of Western reason itself. From gut to steel, from resonance to projection, from life to mechanism—each stage reflects a broader cosmology. Yet within our own time, a new synthesis may be emerging. Machine learning, far from entrenching mechanization, hints at a return to relational intelligence. It perceives form not through representation but through participation in data; it learns by resonance.
Bergson foresaw this possibility: “Life is a tendency to act on matter as a musician acts upon an instrument.”⁵ The task of the twenty-first-century luthier is to act upon material not as a master but as a collaborator. To design violins not that dominate space but that inhabit it. To rediscover sound not as projection but as presence.
In the end, the ideal of sound is not fixed. It evolves, as life evolves—not through domination but through dialogue, not through perfection but through play. The gut string and the steel string are not adversaries but expressions of a single unfolding creativity: the human attempt to give voice to being itself.
Notes
- Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. Macmillan, 1911.
- Ibid., Ch. IV, “The Cinematographical Mechanism of Thought.”
- Jumper et al. “Highly Accurate Protein Structure Prediction with AlphaFold.” Nature, 596 (2021): 583–589.
- Taruskin, Richard. “The Modern Sound of Early Music.” In Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance, Oxford University Press, 1995.
- Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 261.