Very late with this comment – but just came to this post via the SGU podcast of November 26, 2011 and the segment on “Food Color and Taste”. In this segment and this post you mention the Morrot, Brochet, and Dubourdieu study regarding white wine coloured red. My out-take (and I think the out-take of other SGU panelists judging by their reactions) was that the wine tasting experts “tasted” and described red wine – when, in fact it was white wine coloured red. This really did seem extraordinary.

However, I’m wondering if you could clarify – did the wine tasters actually “taste” the wine – or were they just “sniffing” the wine? Either way it’s interesting the way the brain tweaks and tries to make sense of the various sensory inputs. But I can accept confusing the the small of red and white wine much, much more than confusing the taste. Are you able to confirm – was it sniffing or tasting?

David.

There were several different flutes available and, since my family doesn’t have much money, there was a small price range we could afford–between maybe $1000-$1500. The shop had maybe 4 different flutes in that price range all with various combinations of silver bodies, silver-plated bodies, gold springs, etc. Now, the clerk set me up in the practice room to test each flute and she would NOT tell me how much each of them cost–she made me play each of them and pick out the one that I liked best based on how it felt/sounded. That way I would not pick one based on the assumption that more expensive flutes are inherently better and would get one I preferred to play. I ended up picking out the middle-quality flute which suited my needs just fine. I ended up hating the most expensive one because the way the keys were cut actually hurt my fingers (I can’t remember why exactly, it’s been a good 10 years).

If you haven’t gotten her a new flute yet I would have two pieces of advice: 1) Open hole flute (I’m sure that goes without saying though) and 2) She should get one with a gold lip plate because the silver ones will leave a gray mark on her chin every time she plays it for more than, say, 10 minutes.

Huge fan of the show but I take issue with the way it was presented on this week’s SGU. A few of the rouges made a comment along these lines:

“I’m surprised(or not surprised) that they couldn’t tell the difference when blinded”

From what I can tell from your post and what was presented on the show- this is NOT what the study tested!

From what I read online(haven’t been able to take a look at the actually study), the study(and everyone writing/talking about the study) makes the false assumption that Strads sound significantly better than other high end violins or that people assume they do- and therefore asking musicians to identify the Strad is essentially the same as asking them to pick the best sounding violin. This is a flawed approach based on a false assumption.

This study “proves” what violinists have known for a long time, good modern instruments are in league with Strads and for many people they are better. Only the uninformed lay person would assume that price correlates exactly with quality and this is the problem I have with the study.

Three important questions:

Does a Strad sound better than a 30k violin? That question is meaningless because it’s up to the taste of the listener and/or player.

Can professional players tell the difference between high end violins when blinded? THAT is a much more interesting question which could easily be tested. Were the Strad owners able to pick out their own violins in this study? My guess is yes- but that hasn’t been answered anywhere.

Does knowing the brand influence perception of sound? This study just doesn’t answer that question despite many people making the assumption that it does. It’s not hard to imagine a study that could show this however. Split people into a test and control group. Tell one group the brands(unblinded) and have them rank in order of preference. Have another group blinded and rank in order of preference. This could be applied to both players and listeners.

Joe

Okay I am still downloading the mp3, and with my backlog I will listen to it sometime tomorrow evening.

slancio, thank you for your observations as a professional musician. All I know about musicians who play for our city’s symphony is that they can be parents at my kids’ high school, basically casual conversation on how our kids are doing in orchestra (my daughter quit) and marching band (our sons both loved it). Plus how how much work is involved (her son had to skip some marching band functions because of repetitive stress problems due to too much practicing).

And we know my late father-in-law’s Heintzman piano was never meant for a concert hall. It is an upright grand (whatever that means). It has much better sound than the basement Yamaha upright (which we kept because two of our kids actually play music!), and seems to stay in tune longer. The latter is what pleases child most who played violin from age five to fourteen. That child does play the piano, but only when she needs to think through issues as an emotional release. I know better to disturb her when I hear live piano music in our house.

I have paid lots of money for music lessons. I knew it was all worthwhile when my two younger kids told me to switch the car radio away from Radio Disney (which I had on to protect them from “Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton” news) because they hated Britney Spears. Then another time they were both bickering in the car and I switched to the local classical station (98.1, KING FM), and they both said “Oh, I like this music!”

Hooray for music lessons! Even better: hooray for marrying into a musical family.

The whole idea that you can reduce the very special case of a musicians relationship to an instrument to a few minutes of playing in a hotel room is silly. Also the question was, which do you prefer… not which is the oldest. I can guarantee the results would have been different if the violins were played on the stage of a concert hall. Or if you asked, which one would you like to play Mozart on, or Bach? It’s very possible there would have been different answers for each question. The other flaw is the length of time they had with the instruments. While ones impression of an instrument might be good initially, it could take hours, or even weeks of playing, to really discover all of the ins and outs.

I recently purchased an older Boesendorfer Piano for my home. This piano has a wonderful rich sound, a full bass, and sweet highs. It’s perfect for accompanying or chamber music in a home. However, it would be useless for playing a big Romantic piece on a concert stage.

This experiment is an example of coming to a conclusion based upon flawed questions and conditions. Just because a test is blind doesn’t mean there aren’t other problems in the execution. Blind doesn’t necessarily mean valid.

Now to the flute. I agree with an earlier poster that a fine professional level instrument would make your daughter very happy. But the best way to choose, is to let her have access to it so she could play in different circumstances before buying it. Some of the very best dealers will allow professional musicians this courtesy. A friend who was a violinist tried out a bow from a dealer for weeks. She initially loved it, but after a time realized that it wasn’t for her.

If that’s not possible, let her have a long session with it at the store. I’m talking hours not minutes. Remember the key word here is relationship. An instrument might be wonderful for one player, and not good for someone else.

It’s a nice problem to have though. Your daughter has progressed to a point in her playing that a professional level flute will make a difference to her, and she will be happier for it.

However, a flute produces sound in a *completely* different manner. The point of the flute body is to *not* vibrate and be rigid, and let sound project from the various orifices. It’s the air inside that’s doing all the wiggling, not the instrument itself. I’ve designed and tested quite a few audio products, and when we want something to be rigid, the acoustical results make virtually no difference between metal, plastic or even hard (closed cell) foam. As long as the material is rigid, sound waves have a hard telling the difference between materials — as long as they are rigid enough. (So, if you’re building a speaker chamber from plastic, you need *lots* of ribs in the right places….)

Okay, a hard foam flute would never sound good, and it might be tough to get a plastic one to be rigid enough. However, I would be amazed if anybody could tell the difference between equivalently constructed metal flutes of different metals. Note the ‘equivalent construction’ requirement is very importnat — even very small variations in hole positions, diameters, lengths, etc. can make huge differences in acoustics, and attention to detail is critical. Which brings us to one of the points brought up above: craftsman will likely not spend the time and effort to make a great flute from pot metal, but they will from silver.

If anybody’s interested, a *fantastic* resource for Science Based audio engineering information is Sean Olive’s blog: http://seanolive.blogspot.com/. Sean & colleagues are all about bringing science and double blind testing to acoustics.

For those who need to feel they have something special, they pointed out that the cheaper mass-produced violins have multiple makers and lots of variation in materials, so every now and then you’ll find a budding master craftsman using a good batch of wood.

We can has “preview” please?