Resonance-wood

[Lars-Ake]

Recently I had a discussing with Olivier Bouriaud about crossdating of a violin-type instrument:
Olivier wrote:

"There are very few coniferous forests in Hungaria and the ring series are more likely to come from Romanian Carpathians (there are quite many known resonance-wood spruce sites), or maybe from Slovenia.
It is common that Hungarian factories import wood from Romania. This is why I am looking at the Romanian sites, they are just much more likely. But there were also famous resonance-wood sites in Italy.."

So question from me: what is resonance-wood? - A concept I've never heard of.

Got this interesting answer:
As you can guess, resonance wood is whenever a set of sometimes contradicting characteristics are present in the wood.
More than one condition is needed to qualify as resonance wood - from what I know:

large ring width (say around 5 mm),
shallow cell walls (reduced density), and a
radial growth with as little variations as possible. Things like this.

That should lead to a wood with a large ultrasonic velocity in fiber direction. Trees growing in high elevation are more prone to containing that so-called resonance wood. The regularity in rainfall amount during summer is a key and places Romanian Carpathian in a good position.

Most interesting! Thanks for the explanation!
/Lars-Ake

[Lars-Ake]

Got the comments below from Roberto Furnari of the Netherlands when discussing strategies for crossdating.
Roberto has put all his samples from instruments into one single big collection to make it easy to check the crossdating quality of every sample towards a new sample of unknown origin.

... sometimes a new incoming sample has no significant correlation with my regional chronologies, but when checking it against every single sample of my Dated samples collection, I can find one or more samples that correlate, for instance, with a T-value of seven or higher.

This means that the sample in question comes from an area from which I don't have yet enough samples to make a chronology.

[If].. ckecking this kind of samples only against my regional chronologies, I would miss these matches!
Admittedly, this doesn't happen very often, but these are just the interesting cases, as this could be the start of a new chronology.

But there is also another good reason to check new samples systematically against my Dated Samples collection, which is probably specific to violin dendrochronology.

A violin is, unlike an anonymous piece of wood collected with an increment borer, an entity of its own, with a history, a person who made it, a place where it has been built. And therefore it is of great interest to know how it relates to other violins.

When checking a violin sample against a regional chronologies collection I will most of the times find with a high degree of confidence a date and an area of provenance.

But, on different occasions, when checking it against single samples I will additionally find violins that were made from the same piece of wood! (e.g. tt=15 or, in a single case, tt=21 !!!)

Sometimes these are violins from the same maker, but in other cases they are definitely violins from another maker.
Sometimes from the same town, in other cases from different towns. All this information gives an insight into the relationships between the violin makers of the past, whether they shared their wood or whether they got their wood from the same source.

As a violin maker you don't want to miss this kind of information!