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The floor of my dining room resonates somewhere between low B and low C. The floor of the front room upstairs resonates between C# and D. Endpins: they're not just for holding the instrument up.

I have to make sure I don't start compensating for the extra loudness of the notes my house amplifies, since anyplace else I play is going to have a different resonant peak, if any.

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There are 7 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

Now for devising a mechanism for tuning them. Perhaps strategic addition or subtractions of book weight or moving the furniture.

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That's hardly practical. I'd suggest a system of winches, pulleys and ropes to tension the floorboards. It'd probably need to have something fairly large to fix it to, and the ropes would need to go through a hole in the wall to get at the ends of the boards, but you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

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I think I need to deal with fixing the leaky roof and replacing the damaged ceiling before I start making major acoustic mods to the floor.

I think the ideal would be an untuned floor (no peak), or a room in which different parts respond to different frequencies (all get boosted, just not from one place).

Hey, is designing concert halls still a black art these days? Last I heard, there was a whole heck of a lot of knowledge of what mathematically ought to work based on the science of acoustics, but halls designed by the numbers still usually had sound problems and needed to be modified by some massively experienced expert who usually couldn't completely explain why his design sounded better. Has the math finally caught up, or are concert halls still a little mysterious?

I mean, considering how recent some of our understanding of guitar and violin soundboards is (in the latter case making sense of why generations of practice are correct, in the former case leading to some new designs like off-center soundholes) ...

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maybe you could solve both problems at the same time by mechanisms that divert roof leaks into buckets on the floor till it is in tune and then deflects extra water outside.

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At least the upstairs resonance is euphonious. The downstairs one is growly and dissonant.

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Take a piece of floor tile or something similarly hard and non-resonant, and put some foam as backing on it. (carpet padding will probably do and is highly scroungable) Put the fiddle on that. Less resonance, more incentive for volume. The biggest thing I know *I'm* gonna keep saying (since I've said it for years) is that the bass needs to be louder. Damp those peaks and everything else, and learn to play it LOUD!

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I'll try that -- I expect that there'll still be noticeable transmission to the floor, but it should cut it down dramatically. I'm also planning to buy or make a mute so I can practice with a bow late at night without being rude to the neighbours.

I've already noticed that it seems a lot louder arco than it does pizzicato, even when I'm pulling pretty hard on the strings (though I haven't compared the bowed volume to slap-and-pop technique, only to normal plucking. One more reason for me to get competent with the bow. (And I'm thinking I should try to get ahold of a French bow to see whether it gives me more control when switching strings, before I get completely comitted to the German bow.)

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