Show notes
In the 1950s, a schoolteacher named Carleen Hutchins attempted a revolution in how concert violins are made. In this episode, Craig Eley of the Field Noise podcast tells us how this amateur outsider used 18th century science to disrupt the all-male guild tradition of violin luthiers. Would the myth of the never-equaled Stradivarius violin prove to be true or could a science teacher with a woodshop use an old idea to make new violins better than ever? We also learn about the mysterious beauty of Chladni patterns, the 18th century technique of using tiny particles to reveal how sound moves through resonant objects–the key to Hutchins’ merger of art and science. In this episode, we hear the voices of: Quincy Whitney, Carleen Hutchins biographer and a former arts reporter for the Boston Globe. Myles Jackson, a professor of the history of science at Princeton. Joseph Curtin, a MacArthur-award winning violin maker. Sam Zygmuntowicz, an extremely renowned violin maker and creator of Strad3D. Carleen Hutchins herself. You can subscribe to Craig Eley’s Field Noise podcast to hear the original version of this story. This episode was edited by Craig Eley and Mack Hagood. Music is by Blue Dot Sessions and Marc Bianchi. The archival interview clips of Carleen Hutchins were provided by filmmaker James Schneider. The interview with Quincy Whitney was recorded by Andrew Parrella at New Hampshire Public Radio. Transcript [ominous music plays] [CRIS CHEEK] This…is…Phantom Power. [MACK HAGOOD] Episode 14. [CRIS] Resident grains. [a whirring sound plays, then a string being plucked] [CARLEEN HUTCHINS] What I’m interested in now is to see what the waves that are traveling through the woods are like. And those are the things that I think are making a lot of difference in the way, energy and the waves of energy can go through the wood itself. And wood is all sorts of sort of discontinuity, if you will, that will make the energy have to slow down or go around something, it’s a little bit like a river flowing. And if you put some rocks on the edge of a river, you’ll change the whole flow of the river downstream. Think that’s what’s happening in violins. There are certain ways that those blockages, the discontinuity can be worked out. And that’s the kind of thing I’m looking for us to see what happens. Because some of the beautiful issues that I’ve been working with and testing show that there’s a good deal of this sort of thing going on. [CRAIG ELEY] Well, let’s just back up a little bit. There’s a line of thought, which is that every object vibrates according to its nature. [A more persistent humming, then fades out] [MACK] Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power. I’m Mack Hagood. [CRIS] And I’m cris cheek. [MACK] Today we have the pleasure to speak with one of our collaborators, Craig Eley. Craig is a producer on Phantom Power. And he’s also the producer of his own podcast, a podcast called Field Noise. Hi, Craig. [CRAIG] Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. [CRIS] Yeah, thanks for being with us. [MACK] Alright, so Craig, we’re doing a little bit of a swap-a-roo this week. We’re going to hear basically an episode of your podcast Field Noise. Do you want to tell us a little bit about your show? [CRAIG] Yeah, you know, the idea has always revolved around my own research interests: sound studies, history of technology, environmental history, and just the sort of relationship between sound and technology in the environment. You know, when I finished graduate school, I actually did do a research postdoc for a year, but then I ended up working in public radio. And I’m trying to incorporate some of my own research, but also just do some original reporting and just kind of follow my ears as it were for some stories that I’m that I’m interested in trying to tell. [MACK] So today, you’re bringing us an episode of Field Noise that is about an outsider who revolutionized the field that she entered. [CRAIG] That’s absolutely right. This is a story about a woman named Carlene Hutchins. She wasn’t exactly self taught as a violin maker, but in some ways, she was an amateur who entered this field. She was a school teacher, she was very intellectually curious. And she drew on this old technique of vibrating plates. These are called Kauladney Patterns from this guy, Ernst Kauladney, and she applied that technique to violin making. This work starts in the 1940s and into the 1950s. And the results, frankly, turn the entire violin world upside down. [CRIS] So, let me just say up front, Mack said you can either listen to it in advance or it might be interesting if you don’t, I have no idea what you’ve done. So this is gonna so I’m kind of like you’re very weird listener. [CRAIG] Yeah, that’s great. Well, you know what, it’s the more I listened to it, I think it’s like a totally weird piece. So maybe between the three of us, we can try to make some sense. [violin music plays] [QUINCY WHITNEY] She was at a point in her career where she had a chance to take on about five jobs. And this is the way she told it to me, that she could have had, but she realized that she couldn’t stay married in that time, in the late 1920s, 30s. She couldn’t have that domestic life too and do these jobs. So there was a frustration there was a tension always building in her. [MACK] So who are we hearing right now Craig? [CRAIG] Quincy Whitney. She became Carlin’s biographer and published a biography on Carlene and before that, she was an arts journalist for the Boston Globe. So she’s sort of our guide through this episode. [QUINCY] When she’s teaching at the school for the first time, she finds out that her colleagues like chamber music, and they’re all playing stringed instruments. And so they invite her to come to a session one night and she’s a trumpet player from college, right? She studies the trumpet and she brings her trumpet. And after one session, they of course, all turned to her and say, you know, the trumpets too loud for a Manhattan apartment, we really need a viola as every string ensemble always needs a viola. And so she goes out and buys a $75 viola, because she largely wants community, right. She’s tense about the fact that she can’t do what she wants to do. And so playing the viola with this chamber music group, and her friends, that becomes her community. [string music continues] Eventually, it sort of sits in her hand, and she’s been carving, which since she was five years old, she was a master woodcarver by the time she was in high school. So she keeps looking at this viola thinking, gee, maybe I can make one. [CARLEEN] I’ve been interested in wood and loved it ever since I can remember. I learned a lot about woodcraft, which has given me a feel for the trees and the woods and how they relate. This can be used for the half of the top of a violin. And the piece, the other piece we had is, well, this will be one half of it. Here’s the other half. And this will make the top of a viola when it’s put together. Now they’re a couple of knots in here. And the plan is to try to work around those knots so that they won’t make trouble. [QUINCY] And so she made this Viola and she’s showing it around to her chamber music friends, and they’re playing it. And Helen rice says, we really ought to go meet Frederick Saunders. He’s a retired Harvard physicist who lives out in western Massachusetts near my farm, we really ought to go and have him, just look at your instrument. So she does that. She hands him the instrument. Saunders takes it plays it, taps it, looks at it closely, and turns to her and says this is really a great first instrument. I’ll be fascinated to see your next one. And at that point, she had not planned to make another one. And so Saunders hands her a couple copies of his scientific articles that he’s done about violent acoustics, primarily in his retirement as a sort of a passion that he’s following, because he’s an avid string player. So he’s written up some papers. They’ve been published. And now he hands his reprints to Carlene. She’s a biologist, she’s reading these papers written by a physicist, and she’s thinking, you know, I didn’t really understand the jargon at that point. And so she said, but the one thing I do notice, Dr. Saunders, is that most of the experiments you’ve been doing, are putting the weight on the top of a bridge and testing it in a sound chamber. And he said, Well, yes, because I, as a passionate person who loves the instrument, I don’t want to ruin the instrument. And she said, Well, what would you do if if somebody could make you instruments that works expendable that could be used in experiments? And he said, Well, that sounds really rather crazy. Like what Luther would be crazy enough to make instruments that they’re going to be destroyed. And she says, I will. [violin music stops] She ends up doing her research by reading about Felix Var. And what he does, with suggesting about play tuning. And so she’s the first person who sort of puts together this idea of doing the cloudy patterns, or its cloud and he had developed this method of seeing sound bite, putting particles on a plate and vibrating and discovering that there were all these amazing geometric patterns at different frequencies. [a consistent rumbling plays then fades out] [CRIS] This is great, Craig. I’m really enjoying just listening. And fascinated by the idea of making instruments to effectively damage or destroy, but in the cause of experimentation. [CRAIG] Yeah, I mean, this is sort of the beginning of the sense we get, of really just how radical her approach to this is going to be she I mean, she’s, she’s a woodworker first, right? Right. And so she doesn’t really have a sort of reverence for the violin, as a violin, right? To her this is a wood carving project. And then, when she meets this this guy Saunders, it becomes a science project. And, you know, she went to Cornell, I think, got a little taste of acoustics, but also sort of a taste of the scientific method. And that really, really influenced her approach to violins. [MACK] Yeah, she’s an intermediary. She’s got one foot in each of two different worlds. She’s got a foot in the world of music, and she’s got a foot in the world of the scientific method. It actually reminds me of someone that I’ve done research on, which is Amar Bose, the inventor of the noise cancelling headphones and a lot of familiar Bose products. He was an amateur violinist, a passionate amateur violinist, and also an engineer. And it was having a foot in each one of those worlds that allowed him to be such an innovator. [CRAIG] Yeah. What’s great about Carlene too is that kind of depending on who you ask, it’s like, she had a foot in both worlds. But more like she actually had like a toe in them. She really was enthusiastic more than anything. I mean, her experiences as a violent builder and a player were very minimal. Her experiences as a scientist were undergraduate. You know, that was her terminal degree. And so, not only is she just very interested in both of these fields, but she’s approaching them with like, almost like none of the hang ups of being a professional in them. [CRIS] You know, there’s something interesting here about somebody who is investing in the sound of the material itself, not necessarily how the construction of the material produces other sounds. [CRAIG] Yes, a violin plate is very lively to touch it. This guy’s described it to me, it’s almost like you’re holding a little tiny xylophone. Like, you can touch it and all these little places and hear it resonate. And so there is, you know, she didn’t totally invent this notion of oh, let’s let’s think about how the plate sound. I mean, there is a history of violin makers doing this sort of tapping and being interested in its own sound as a sort of, you know, what little secrets can those taps reveal to them? [CRIS] Yeah, sure. [CRAIG] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, she has a real keen. I feel like this is sort of a sound studies phrase that that is popular right now. But she has a real keen sense of the materiality of sound. [MACK] I love that this connects to those fascinating vibrational patterns in sand invented by Kladney. Mr. Kladney? [CRAIG] Yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, that’s a great segue, because the next section here that we’re about to listen to, goes back in time to tell us a little bit about Kladney. I did a Skype interview with a really great historian of science named Miles Jackson, who has a book about this stuff called Harmonious Triads. [ethereal music plays] Can you just take a minute or two for someone who’s a total layperson and describe what he was doing in his experiments? [MILES JACKSON] Right, so the experiments that Kladney is interested in and he gets the the idea of doing this by reading the work of a rather famous physicist of the time experimental natural philosopher called (inaudible). And what he did was literally to render the invisible visible, but in this case, electric sparks. So he was interested in looking at kind of the characteristic patterns. So you can see sparks, but you don’t see the patterns that they leave behind. So that if a spark jumps over a non conductive material, and if you sprinkle powder in that area, the non conductive material, if it’s from a positively charged conductor, you’ll see like a really beautiful star tree pattern, and if it’s a negatively charged conductor, the powder will form actually, cloud formation and Klaudney was fascinated by this, and recommend, and it turns out correctly, that, you know, maybe vibrations in the form of sound would leave similar patterns. So what he’s interested in doing is to render these vibrations visible, as well as audible at the same time. So he takes the metallic square plate, puts it on a stand, sprinkles grains of sand on the plate, and then he takes a bow and then he bows the plate perpendicular to one of the edges. And he also places his fingers on various portions of the plate. He takes though he bows with his right hand and touches the plate with his left in order to influence the way in which the plate vibrates. [plate vibration sounds] So what he does is he generates these amazing figures, quite aesthetically pleasing figures. But he’s interested, really, in seeing what the actual patterns are, and how that corresponds to pitch, because he’s first and foremost interested in inventing musical instruments, which he does. And his argument is where the where the dust settles, where you have those Klaudney lines, that’s where there are no vibrations, that’s where the plate is at zero, the vibrations of the play cancel each other out. Kaludney’s interest in the bits of a metal plate that’s not vibrating with the view of locating that bit so that you could put a piece of metal or piece of glass or piece of wood, and he wouldn’t change the volume or the pitch of the instrument. [string music plays again] [MACK] Okay, so these cloudy patterns there, these beautiful, sort of geometric shapes that are made in sand when a plate vibrates beneath the sand, right? [CRAIG] Yep. [MACK] And they’re kind of hard to describe some of them, it looks sort of like a kind of Mandela or a kind of some kind of cryptic symbol. Yeah, they look kind of like that. [CRAIG] Yeah, they’re they’re kind of like haunting. I mean, and actually, people talk about this when they were first sort of revealed people there was this, late 1700s. Well, is it a language from beyond the grave, you know, and so it’s like this sound and the dead thing again. But yeah, I mean, what what’s happening there is that as the plate vibrates as they sort of explain, the the sand settles in the areas of the plate that aren’t vibrating. [MACK] And this is so fascinating, because we think of the sound wave as the natural representation of sound, the natural visual representation of sound today, right? Like, anytime you look on the internet, you know, whether it’s SoundCloud or if you’re working in an audio…
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