The second chapter provides an overview of the history of the viol in Europe, from its origins in Spain and its flowering in Italy, England, France and Germany, until its demise in the late 18th century it also addresses the viol as being more than an ensemble of organological features, as having a specific character, and defines viols with violin traits in relation to the viol and violin families. It begins with a large introductory chapter exposing the objectives of the present work the state of research to the present time specific problems of research (related to the reliability of extant instruments, the limitations of iconography and of terminology, missing instruments) empirical and literary sources and the methodology employed in the research. Volume I addresses History and Organology of viols with violin traits. The thesis supplies theoretical and historical background, extensive iconographical material and a Catalogue of 207 viols with violin traits, with the aim to provide tools to enable the identification of extant instruments which have been altered, and their restoration to the original state.
Made by some of the very best makers in the history of lutherie (among them the Amatis, Maggini, Stradivari, Barak Norman, Castagneri), a significant number of such viols have been transformed into instruments of the violin family, due to their similarity with these. The present thesis provides the first comprehensive study of the quinton and other viols with violin traits, an unstudied branch of the viol family. As the differences between these solutions are on the edge of both mechanical precision obtainable in tuning and human hearing discrimination capabilities, results of these models are presented with both computer-generated tones and recordings of real harpsichord sounds. The scope of this paper is to explore a range of solutions to this problem applied to a single major chord within a single register in a specific harpsichord, given this instrument’s inharmonicity coefficient (Fletcher’s ‘B’ factor). This means there is no longer one single value for an interval that agrees with the ‘natural’ interval concept. This theory is not exact in the case of the harpsichord, as its string stiffness creates inharmonicity - deviations in each harmonic’s pitch varying with its number squared. It relies on the assumption that harmonics frequencies are exact multiples of their fundamental. The theory of natural intervals is based on the coincidence of harmonics and a consistent system of heterodyne components resulting from two periodic tones.
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