Wood is at the heart of traditional instrument making. Yet climate change and deforestation is depleting the most sought-after varieties.
Biobased innovations now offer alternatives, including spider silk violins and fungal biotech. But can they compete with the traditional material on sound quality?
The spider silk violin
“‘The world’s first silk violin” is what designer Luca Alessandrini has called his composite instrument, which replaces wood with a mix of biobased silk fibres.
This hyper-modern violin is pale and translucent. Despite its milky glow, Alessandrini’s instrument behaves a lot like its traditional wooden counterparts.
His violin is made from silkworm silk, resin and spider’s silk. The latter has resonating properties – the crucial ability of a material to respond to string vibrations in a way that amplifies their sound.
Alessandrini’s design is a striking example of biomimicry, a field that borrows mechanisms evolved by living beings and applies them to solve human engineering problems.
Spider’s silk is resonant because spiders use their webs to communicate. Using their silken structures, they transmit sounds that are below the range of human hearing.
Yet replacing wood in musical instruments is a formidable design challenge. Even aside from the cultural attachment to traditional materials, it is also very difficult to replace the rich tonal qualities inherent to certain wood species.
Different wood species interact with sound in very different ways, meaning that just a few choice species are coveted for violin making.
Alessandrini’s material aims to replicate this complex variability of natural wood. Manufacturers can customise the amount of silkworm silk and resin. Changing this ratio can make the instrument sound very different when played.
His biotech violin already has a stamp of approval from Peter Sheppard Skaerved, a Grammy nominated violinist who says the new material comes much closer to the “organic subtitles of wood” than carbon fibre – today’s standard substitute for wood.
Scaled biobased substitutes to carbon fibre could tap a valuable and growing market for non-wood instruments. Carbon fibre instruments are estimated to hit 1.73 billion in global value by 2033, representing a CAGR of 15.6% from 2024.
Music and sustainability
If wood comes ready-made with special sonic qualities, why the need for new instrument materials at all?
Right now, the instrument manufacturing industry is implicated in the global problem of habitat destruction. Each year, the world loses a Portugal-sized area of forest, mostly in tropical zones.
With illegal logging accounting for 15 – 30% of global timber production in 2019, it is almost inevitable that some of the industry is sourcing from the black market, whether knowingly or not.
The industry is problematic from a biodiversity standpoint. Certain woods are highly sought after in instrument-making. Known as ‘tonewoods’, they are usually old and rare trees located in the tropics, home to hyper-diverse forest habitats and among the most vulnerable to logging.
Demand for the tonewoods has already led to the destruction of forests and the overexploitation of certain species, such as the rare Brazilian rosewood.
Its ties to deforestation are not just an ethical concern. The music industry is also aware that overexploitation will deprive them of their tonewood raw materials altogether.
At the consumer end, musicians are becoming more aware about the sustainability impact of their instruments, knowing that the materials that went into making them may have come from a vulnerable habitat.
A new generation is demanding fresh approaches to instrument production that doesn’t come in tension with biodiversity.
A warmer, less musical world
The hunt for sustainable materials that convincingly replicate the sonic properties of tonewoods is driven by aesthetics too.
The golden age of violin making was back in the 17th and 18th century. Well-preserved antique violins from back then now fetch millions.
The reason is not just their age. These instruments have sonic qualities that are rare and mysterious, surpassing contemporary factory-made equivalents for their richness.
What makes these baroque-era instruments so special? Scientists have proposed that the answer is climate.
A slight dip in global average temperature during those centuries meant that European spruce, used to form the bodies of these instruments, grew in a more uniform pattern.
It is no accident that the famous violin maker Stradivari used alpine spruce from higher up in the Italian alps. Cool climates are better for instrumental wood because it encourages regular growth patterns. This produces a fuller, more consistent sound.
Today, the reverse is happening. A rapidly warming climate is reducing the amount of high-quality tonewood available in the world. Changing weather patterns are degrading the resonant properties of wood, even in colder habitats.
Violin-eating fungi
Not all biobased instruments involve replacing wood with exotic new materials. Some designers have found a way of using fungi to make ordinary wood fit for high-quality instrument making,
In 2008, researchers Francis W. M. R. Schwarze, Spycher, and Fink revealed a new violin material they called Mycowood. Using living microorganisms, Schwarze and his colleagues managed to recreate the effect of a much cooler growing climate on low quality contemporary wood.
Mycowood starts off as ordinary wood but the fungi are used to pare down contemporary wood to mimic 17th and 18th century alpine wood – the gold standard in violin manufacturing.
For their pioneering research paper, the researchers applied two wood-eating fungi to contemporary European spruce and sycamore maple, which made up the top and bottom plates of a violin respectively. The fungal species were Physisporinus vitreus and Xylaria longipes.
These fungi decompose thin, targeted layers of the wood known as ‘latewood’. The best violin woods contain very little latewood growth as their thick secondary walls dampen overall resonance. Warmer climates encourage more latewood growth, resulting in lower-quality violins. Removing some of it creates a more acoustically pleasing material.
Audience favourite
In their blind test, the researchers got British violinist Matthew Trusler to play five different violins in front of a general audience of 113 participants.
One of the violins was a $2 million Stradivarus made in 1711. The other four were Mycowood violins, all made from a single tree of Norway spruce and sycamore maple but treated with the unique fungal thinning method laid out in Schwarze’s paper.
Amazingly, the biotech violin passed with flying colours. Only 39 out of the 113 participants identified the Stradivarius while a significant majority favoured one of the other biotech violins for the sound they produced.
In the years that followed the publication of the paper, the researchers screened 20 different species of fungi for optimal results. They found two organisms: the best results for top and bottom plates of the violin respectively: the P. vitreus and the S. commune. Their strains have now been deposited at the Westerdijk Fungal Biodiversity Institute, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
The originators of this fungal manufacturing method claim that with the proper backing, they could manufacture superior instruments at a fraction of the cost it does today. They believe that their fungal biotech can replace the dwindling stocks of high-quality tonewoods brought on by climate change.
As with all biotech innovation, this one raises ethical concerns. Will traditional makers be able to compete? For now, at least, the price tag for a mass-produced Mycowood violin is forecast to reach up to $30, 000 – similar for a premium-quality modern violin.
Fungal guitars
Guitars are another string instrument that could benefit from a fungal revamp.
Luthier and designer Rachel Rosenkrantz of Rhode Island have been using biomaterials to make sustainable instruments in keeping with her ethical values – no plastics, no rare woods.
Her ‘Mycocaster’ guitar for example features a body created from fungal fibre networks (or mycelia) embedded inside a more solid matrix made of filler materials like dried corn husk.
Like spider’s silk, mycelium works so well as a musical material because the fibres are hollow, allowing it to amplify sound.
The production process is relatively straightforward: the filler material and living fungal fibres are both placed in a mould. For a few days, the fungi is allowed to grow and entwine its delicate networks around the filler material. The result is a blocky, styrofoam-like material.
Once removed, the body is dried in an oven. It is then placed in a rosewood outline to protect the spongy material when the instrument is being played. Even though rosewood is deployed, the fungal design cuts back considerably on the need for wood.
The new musical biomaterials show that tonal richness is not just confined to rare, overexploited wood species. Other organic materials are ripe for experimentation, offering an opportunity for the music industry to shift towards more sustainable raw materials.
