Is It a Stradivarius or Is It a Fungus?
Because wood-attacking fungi create loose, soft wood, scientists often use sound echoes to check tree health. Francis Schwartze, a scientist at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research, noticed that a handful of fungi did not produce widespread rot, though they did slightly decrease wood density. So Schwartze, along with Swiss violin maker Michael Rhonheimer, decided to try to make violins out of fungi-treated wood to see how they sounded.
The spruce top plates and sycamore bottom plates of the violins were treated with two different fungi. Each piece was submerged in a box of water along with a piece of slate inoculated with the appropriate fungi. Rhonheimer created three fungi-infected violins, from wood treated for six, nine, and 12 months, but the 12-month treated violin was discarded when it developed cracks during production.
Then, using five violins in total—two treated, two untreated, and a $2 million Stradivarius—they had British violinist Matthew Trusler play for an audience of 180 people who were asked to pick out the Stradivarius. More than half of the people ranked the nine-month treated violin as the Stradivarius. Trusler’s real Stradivarius came in second, followed by the violin treated for six months. The two untreated violins came in last.
According to Schwartze, treating the wood with fungi artificially recreates the structure of the wood that was naturally occurring during Antonio Stradivarius’s lifetime. The Little Ice Age, a period of abnormally cold weather from 1645 to 1715, made trees create more uniform wood, similar to the wood that the fungi created.
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