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From: Ross
Remote Name: 76.101.10.136
Date: 26 Mar 2007
Time: 07:17:19 -0500
Luthier’s Weblog 3/26/07 I’ve just been reading about Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s science of networks. It discusses how people, ideas, and groups link up. Much of this is directly applicable to the internet There appear to be about 2 to 4 million blogs extant, most of them linked to other blogs, but only a few of which are large nodes, or centers of linkage activity. Very interesting. I often get sidetracked by following links to new ideas (new to me) and end up clogging my brain’s limited bandwidth with irrelevant content that is hard to delete. Like the contents of my shop attic, I always think that I’ll find use for this or that piece of refuse one day. It is always a small victory when I actually do. Justifies my propensity for accumulation. Endless RAM, no need to discard anything. How American. Last entry, my robot luthier was examining sound hole design. He located the two ports, but reserved determination of size until the volume of the box was known. He probably also decided to make the ports of equal size, with no scientific reason, just gut feeling. I suspect he often does this. This robot iteration incorporates “fuzzy logic”. As does his creator. His attention turns to the volume of the box, and to figuring out the ratio of plate area to depth that will contain it. Here, empirical reasoning takes place, calling on long experience as both player and repairman. My luthier is, um, peripatetic. Large box volume has drawbacks. Foremost is the mass of the structure to make it relatively large. More material on the top means more inertia for our poor vibrating strings to overcome in their gallant struggle to persuade the top to mimic their movement. Thinning the top or bracing to provide less mass with more area compromises structural integrity. More material in the back and sides has an ergonomic impact. Also, larger-than-common box volume can result in a “tubby” sound or an unfocused sound or both. The builder wants to build as large a top as can be made structurally sound so as to support the lowest feasible fundamental. However, in order to maintain an interior volume commensurate with the typical “finger style sound”, he must not build a large area top that dictates on overly shallow box. The shallowness of the box will affect the movement of the air column moving in and out of the sound hole(s). Too shallow and the air movement is limited; too deep and a lack of damping occurs, producing a mushy, indistinct bottom end. He decides on 4 ¾” depth at the endpin and 3 ¾” at the neck block. He hasn’t confided to me any physics-based reason for varying the box depth. The poor thing uses an amalgam of science, intuition and guesswork on a lot of this, and is an amazingly slow learner. But methodical. Ross Teigen 12:01 pm