tl;dr: Study seeks to determine if Old Master violins actually sound "better", media reports misleading headlines (shocker), musicians are angryface.
I remember when this study was first concluded and reported on. The CBC had a woman who participated in the study (maybe this very woman) on the program and it was so extremely obvious that her professional pride was wounded, and she really wanted to make herself feel better by telling the world that she really could pick out the Stradivarius.
I have no reason to doubt her; she's a professional violinist.
But it seems to me that the study was actually very effective at showing that masterwork violins do not necessarily sound better than modern violins, contrary to the regurgitated opinions of hundreds of thousands of novice violinists out there.
> actually very effective at showing that masterwork violins do not necessarily sound better than modern violins
Really, it's only effective at showing that an unadjusted violin with strings of an unknown age doesn't necessarily sound better than a younger violin with younger strings, that has been recently adjusted...
Really, it's only effective at showing how violins compare when being played by blind musicians in hotel rooms, while being observed by researchers. But at some point you have to stop finding caveats and find some evidence for the contrary position.
What is the contrary position? That older violins have some kind of superior magical design that can't be replicated? Has anyone validated the claims for why these old violins are supposed to be better?
Well, I don't subscribe to the idea that old violins are better than anything we can make... but you can't simply compare an adjusted violin to an unadjusted one.
I found this article [1] from another participant in the study a much better read. He also is a violin maker which could explain why he is happy with the results, but he isn't trying to justify any of the results. His closing words say exactly the same as the linked article, but in a very sober fashion.
It may not logically follow, but in the real world it is not a strange thing to trust an actual expert on these topics over, say, a writer at the Daily Mail. Why object?
So you don't think that I, a lousy trumpet player who hasn't picked up an instrument in almost a decade, have reason to give a professional violinist the benefit of the doubt when she said she could pick out the Stradivarius?
"Appeal to authority" is a shorthand form. The thing people object to is more formally known as "appeal to false authority" (think "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV").
This is not so; we rely on authorities because we can't judge everything ourselves. If you show me some new evidence on the role of free protons in the aging process or whatever, it's not a mistake for me to say "I'll ignore that until such time as <someone I trust> addresses it". I might be wrong as to reality, but I can't avoid using that exact strategy in almost all of my life.
But that's not an appeal to authority, really, is it? That's your relying on an authority to inform yourself, rather than pointing to authority as why others should believe what you do. These strike me as subtly different, though there's clearly some overlap in considerations...
There's a difference between using authority status as a filter to find likely-to-be-valid arguments and using "so-and-so says X is not true" alone as a rebuttal to evidence that X is true. The former is a pragmatic research tool, the latter is the fallacy of appeal to authority.
I remember when this study was first concluded and reported on. The CBC had a woman who participated in the study (maybe this very woman) on the program and it was so extremely obvious that her professional pride was wounded, and she really wanted to make herself feel better by telling the world that she really could pick out the Stradivarius.
I have no reason to doubt her; she's a professional violinist.
But it seems to me that the study was actually very effective at showing that masterwork violins do not necessarily sound better than modern violins, contrary to the regurgitated opinions of hundreds of thousands of novice violinists out there.