[QUOTE=Scott van Linge] Mattia,
My anal reference was to the established fact that early or severe toilet training can produce a rigid, inflexible uptight mentality that lends itself well to scientific method.
You have cleverly twisted that around to say that my model is a bunch of crap.
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It was there, and the pun just HAD to be made!
I'm not passing judgement either way on your model. Just assuming a deeply skeptical position until I get, y'know, evidence of it. I'll settle for correlation, even though I'd prefer causation...
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The results of my work are completely reliable and reproducable. That is certainly one of the requirements for knowing one is at least close to the right track. You have missed my point about scientific method. I am well versed in those ideas, standards, and have used them in re-voicing guitars from the very beginning, to the extent that I am able to apply them. It's just that I do not see how I can prove anything to anyone with a closed mind. If you're having fun and great results with your approach, that's great.[/quote]
For the sake of clarity, I'm playing devil's advocate in this thread, and while I'm a scientist at heart, my building's been very 'touchy-feely' to date, although I'm going to try my hand at free plate tuning on the next few, see if it agrees with me. I don't have the experience or data to make claims about veracity of one view or another, so I don't.
I still think we're 'langs elkaar heen praten', as they say here; we're on two different tracks. Your results are reproducable, consistent, reliable, but that tells me everything about your skill, but not so much about the validity of the 'edges are bad' and 'sound is round' hypothese. That's all. There are other explanations for it (mass being the 'obvious' one) and until I see them tested, I'm not going to buy into any of them completely. I think it's the language you've used, indicated 100% certainty, that makes me put my guard up.
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But my description of changing one variable and noting the results apparently does not satisfy your strict standards. This almost seems as though we are revisiting the battle between hippies and nerds. "Who won?"[/quote]
What I said above applies: is it roundness? Mass removal? I don't know.
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Mario has repeatedly criticized me for not answering his challenges. I think I have answered them. I challenged Al, as a recognized member of the scientific/luthier crowd, to tell me how to increase the volume of a hypothetical B string, but have not been answered. I challenge any of you to tell me which braces would most likely be responsible for dampening that string, but this just rolls off your collective scientific back. That is because there is no way that any of the models your graphs and other scientific data have produced can tell you this. If you don't mind building a guitar with quiet strings and louder ones, and if your customers either don't hear that or care about it, then you will have no reason to look into what I have "discovered". [/quote]
What's between you and Mario stays there, but I'll say this: many a time have I seen Al Carruth comment on ways to 'fix' unbalanced instruments with louder/quieter strings, including via adjusting braces. Mass, primarily, saying nothing about shape. Blue-tac on the guitar, see what changes, and position indicating where to 'work' on the guitar. I see this as analogous to your working on 'dead' spots that you feel in the top's vibrational pattern, but the explanation for why is what differs; an issue of mass and stiffness vs. angularity being the root cause of all evil
As for the nodes, patterns, etc. are but visual representations of the guitar's vibration, and some of them represent your 'ideal' of a round pattern, such as the ring mode, centered roughly around the bridge, symmetrical, indicating even stiffness/mass distribution if it's all even. At least, that's my understanding of it. Deflection testing and chaldni patterns certainly do allow some builders to achieve a level of consistency in their designs, but given that wood is still a natural material, even when accounting for differences, the unexpected can occur, and that's where various fine-tuning methods come in.
A question here: would you say that a weak B string is symptomatic of the same 'fault' in each guitar you deal with that has it? That the same piece of brace needs adjusting? Because if the answer to that is 'no', I don't see how you'd expect a concrete answer out of anyone. Particulary when we're looking at a complex of variables such as are found in an acoustic guitar.
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I have substantiated my claims many times over in my work, and feel no need to reproduce them. I just use them. I am also open to exploring new ideas on my own guitars and to making mistakes there. Last year I replaced tops on three guitars because an experiment had not only produced the expected results, but a G string that was so much louder than the rest that dampening it killed the life and fun of playing them. They ended up balanced, but dead to my ears and fingers. But I need to make a living at this, and get the feeling that many of my critics have day jobs, giving them the luxury of their scientific method. I do recognize that Al and maybe Mario do not fall into this category.[/QUOTE]
I think the contention here is to how, exactly, your results in anyway substantiate the 'sound is round' model you've created. It's attractive, surely, but I cannot in good faith view it as any more than a conceptual representation backed by intuition, but not science. It sounds good, it's good marketing, but it is not science. Your description of what you do can still be used effectively, I'd wager, without buying into it. Say, explaining it via stiffness/mass ratios.
Many critics may have the 'luxury' of a day job, and I suspect Al will be one of the first to admit that a lot of the basic science, the basic research into guitars, the results of which he freely shares, does little to put money in his bank account. And while the findings may not lead to solutions to problems immediately (although free plate tuning seems like a fairly straightforward, applicable technique to me), the fundamental research data hopefully will do just that, at some point, when science is taken, and applied, and made useful.
I feel the techniques you describe, the results you get, the experiences you share are interesting, valuable, and worthwhile, and I thank you for those. But that doesn't make me believe that 'Sound is Round', and that's fine. It also won't stop me expressing skepticism at claims to that effect. Because I believe that the discourse and challenging of, well, pretty much everything is valuable in and of itself.
Different folks will get different things out of the theories and information that folks throw out there, and I think its entirely up to them, not the person sharing the information, to determine whether they get anything at all out of it.
Mattia
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. If you’re going to argue the philosophy of science, then it is quite possible Scott is doing exactly what should be done according to Karl Popper (one of the critical thinkers in the philosophy of science). Anyhow, he suggests that there is no such thing as induction. Everything is deductive and you can never prove something as absolutely true. You can only prove something that is not true. Therefore, the Popperian school of thought says to get as many hypotheses out there and let the scientific community falsify them. According to Popper, Scott is doing a great service by introducing new ideas and hypotheses because it allows the rest of the community to prove them false if they truly are. Scientific knowledge only grows through trial and error-elimination. It would be a disservice to tell somebody not to offer an opinion because there is no empirical evidence to back it up. In order for science to grow, we should all offer bold conjectures , even if they run a great risk of being false. Science progresses by trial and error and usually learns a lot more by falsification of theories. Once the ideas have withstood severe tests, then it is closer to being corroborated (not confirmed).