[baerrie]

Furthermore, there are many intangible qualities of the way an instrument resonates and feels while playing that often contributes more to the better playing than the raw sound itself. It’s strange to say but instruments have a sort of soul and that can inspire musicians which leads to better sound

[danielbln]

Sounds to me like a bunch of physical and therefore measurable (and tangible) properties and some placebo effect on top.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I understand what you're getting at, and I can appreciate it, but it's also kind of bullshit. You say "instruments have a sort of soul and that can inspire musicians which leads to better sound" - well, if that's the case, then people should be able to hear the difference in that sound in blind tests, which so far they basically haven't.

[baerrie]

A relationship with an instrument takes time. There are more factors than the mechanical use of an instrument, our hands and bodies feel things on subconscious levels, leading to emergent qualities that don’t fit neatly into “sounds better or worse”. For musicians and artists this is a no brainer, for those that haven’t experienced this I understand why you are incredulous but it doesn’t mean it is a throwaway factor.

[bondarchuk]

But a cello is not a machine on which you press one button and then one sound comes out. You can't just press the button on both machines and then check which makes the better sound. Playing a cello is a feedback loop between the instrument, musculature, nerves/brains, emotions, culture.... It's not unthinkable to me that something like that would take a couple decades of work by highly skilled people to lead to an extraordinary outcome.

[vscode-rest]

Are the studies blind or double blind? If the musicians do not know what they are playing, they will not be able to “respond” to it.

[dyauspitr]

You’re going to run into a bunch of trouble using “soul” for anything. It serves a purpose but that’s usually either laziness, inability to measure some physical quality or a placebo effect. Generally pointing that out will end up putting someone in the pedant bucket but I’m risking it.

[baerrie]

It is none of those things despite being not easy to measure. There are many phenomena not empirically proven that science still mentions and theorizes about. The quantum theory of cognition points to something like a soul mattering more than it used to for example. There are countless scientific discussions involving unknown unknowns of our universe yet as soon as we go the opposite direction, into the unknown unknowns of our own experience, that is somehow unscientific?