contained everything from eggs and animal pro-
tein to myrrh and amber. But an analysis of five
Stradivarius creations by French chemist Jean-
Philippe Échard found nothing more than finishes
widely available to luthiers at the time.
All of this speculation stems from the fact that
Stradivari didn’t share his methods. He left no
notes, no diaries, nothing to reveal how he built
his instruments or what gave them their tone. Sci-
ence can provide clues, but few believe we’ll ever
solve the mystery. We are left only with the sound.
One night in February 2019, Koritke was sitting
in his small control room when he heard an odd
noise. It took a moment to realize what it was:
the soft snoring of the armed guard who always
accompanied the prized instruments. A kind
word from the musician gently woke the fellow.
“We all had a good laugh,” Koritke says.
The idea for Koritke’s endeavor, dubbed the
Stradivarius Sound Bank, started about five years
ago with sound engineer Leonardo Tedeschi.
The former DJ was working on a project using
a software program from Koritke’s company
e-Instruments that replicates an 11-piece string
ensemble. Tedeschi found it so impressive that
he wanted to create a similar tool for Stradivar-
ius violins, which he was surprised to learn no
one had ever sampled in detail. He pitched the
idea to Koritke. As a fan of acoustic music, Koritke
immediately saw an opportunity to preserve an
irreplaceable masterpiece.
The museum’s auditorium was an ideal
venue. Its designer had tuned the shape and di-
mensions to perfectly reverberate the sound of
stringed instruments. “When I saw the concert
hall, I thought, This is something really extraor-
dinary,” Koritke recalls. Yet he worried about
ambient noise, and proceeded only after city
officials promised to mitigate the interference.
Koritke planned to record a lone Stradivarius
violin, but after discussing the project with mu-
seum staff, chose a string quartet. In addition to
Vesuvio, the combo included a Guarneri violin
named Prince Doria, the Amati viola known as
Stauffer, and a Stradivari cello also called Stauffer.
His team spent three years planning the under-
taking, mapping out the thousands of articulations
required to create a database of every sound those
instruments can produce. “It was all written out as music on
sheet paper,” Koritke says. “This is quite a challenge. Most of
the musicians had never done that kind of an exercise.”
Koritke’s crew spent a day setting up all the recording equip-
ment and another three arranging the array of microphones.
“It became quite difficult because there were so many in quite
a small area,” he says. During each phase, the musicians would
run through scales and arpeggios at varying volumes and tem-
pos, performing dozens of intonations of every note. They
repeated these routines for hours at a time, using different
bowing techniques or by plucking the strings, playing thou-
sands of transitions with exacting precision. “Sometimes the
musicians would stop at a certain note because they weren’t
happy, but we thought it was OK,” Koritke says. “They would
say, ‘No, I don’t like this part; let’s do it again.’”
Outside noise frequently disrupted the process. Although
the city closed two streets near the concert hall and a nearby
parking lot, bicycle tires rolling on cobblestones, barking dogs,
and clinking glasses in the museum cafe all interrupted the
sessions. That prompted the mayor to urge the city’s 70,000
residents to keep quiet in the area, though there wasn’t much
anyone could do about the peal of church bells or the drone of
airplanes occasionally passing overhead.
In the end, Koritke captured 1 million individual audio files,
totaling 8 terabytes. His team will cull the trove to create virtual
versions of the instruments that anyone can add to off-the-
shelf recording programs like Pro Tools. That means choosing
the most musical and precise instance of every tone, a process
he expects will take until early 2020. “You must listen to all of
them and decide how they match,” Koritke says. “How does the
G match to the G-sharp, the C match to the C-sharp, and so on.”
Tedeschi is eager to see what musicians create with the
digitized string quartet. He sees the software, which should
be available for purchase by mid-2020, introducing the in-
struments to new audiences through entirely new styles:
“Maybe Skrillex will do crazy stuff with a Stradivarius violin,”
he says. “You can use it in a lot of genres.”
The question is, will anyone realize it’s a Strad?The premise of the Stradivarius Sound Bank rests on the idea
that nothing sings as finely as the original. Joseph Curtin isn’t
sure that’s true. He took up the violin at age 10 and started mak-
ing them about a decade later, in 1978. Like many luthiers,
he developed an abiding fascination with Stradivari and his
peers, and hoped to replicate the renowned tone of their mas-
terpieces. In time, Curtin began pondering theories to explain
their superiority until a physicist friend suggested he first prove
that Strads truly do eclipse all others. “That’s when I realized
there was no scientific evidence suggesting the old ItalianWINTER 2019 • POPSCI.COM ~ PG 62