In his review of my book Cremona Violins: A Physicist’s Quest for the Secrets of Stradivari, Gabriel Weinreich dismisses Jack Fry’s violin research, saying Fry never published anything on the subject in a refereed scientific journal. I am surprised, since in my extended conversations with Weinreich on 7 December 1996 he said, “Violin physics [we both understood that to mean physics published in refereed scientific journals] is directed by its very nature toward an understanding of how a violin works, by definition. And it is addressed to an audience of people who are excited by the prospect of finding out how a violin works. Violin physics perhaps can be, but certainly need not be, directed to the question of what makes violins good.”
Fry is interested in what makes violins good. Although based on sound physics principles, Fry’s decades of semi-empirical research on what he calls “old junk violins”...
