For hundreds of years, choosing musical instrument wood has become a highly skilled skill. For the violin, different parts of the instrument are traditionally made of different types of wood: ebony and rosewood for the fingerboard, maple for the code, and spruce for the soundboard. The amplification of the vibration of the strings by the soundboard greatly determines the final sound quality of the instrument.

Buknowitz and his colleagues selected 84 quality grades of Norwegian spruce samples, which are the best soundboard wood for violins.

They made these into 40 x 15 centimeter wooden boards and handed them over to 14 top Austrian violin makers. Please ask them to grade it based on sound effects, appearance, and overall suitability.

Qin makers have to rely on their senses and experience, using traditional techniques such as tapping wood to evaluate their sound,

Then, the researchers conducted detailed experiments to test the strength, hardness, and acoustic properties of the wood.

Comparing the ratings of qin makers with those of science, researchers found that the ratings of qin makers have nothing to do with the properties of wood that can be used to make good instruments  

Their report was published in the Journal of the American Acoustic Society.

Even when the wood is in the form of a board, relying on tapping the wood to determine its acoustic properties is a poor method.

Their conclusion is that the evaluation should mainly rely on the visual characteristics of the wood, such as color and texture. This is not as superficial as it seems, because some important properties, such as density, are consistent with what can be seen with the naked eye.