What Was Stradivari Pursuing? On Joshua Bell's Experiment, WYSIATI, and the Question of Sound

When I was a third-year university student, I was job-hunting — and carrying a question I could not put down.

Is instrument making something you can only do when you are young?

I brought this question to Professor Naoko Nishimura, a behavioral economist at Shinshu University. Her answer changed everything.

"Even economists think not in Euclidean geometry but in non-Euclidean geometry. Whatever the discipline, all fields of study are ultimately asking the same questions: what is life, why do we follow the laws of the universe, and what does the inexplicable tell us? Every discipline has the same destination."

In that moment, I made a decision. Not to compete, but to commit — to spend my life making instruments, and to keep pursuing the unanswerable questions: what is life, what is music, why does it move us?

Joshua Bell's Experiment

In 2007, Joshua Bell — one of the world's great violinists — played Bach in a Washington D.C. metro station, on a Stradivari. Almost no one stopped.

The same performance in a concert hall would have held an audience in silence.

What this experiment suggests is that our perception of beauty is shaped not only by sound itself, but by context and authority. The behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman calls this WYSIATI — What You See Is All There Is. We judge based on the information in front of us, and we do not look beyond it.

As a maker, I will say honestly: I have been at concerts where, during the interval, I overheard listeners praising not the playing, but the sound of the Guarneri. Responding to the name of the instrument, not to the sound itself.

This is human nature, and I do not say it as a criticism. But the question does not leave me: when we talk about a beautiful sound, what are we actually hearing?

What Was Stradivari Pursuing?

As a maker, this is a question I keep returning to.

Did Stradivari truly understand what he was doing — in the deepest sense?

His career spans roughly 70 years. In his early period, the influence of Amati is strong — higher arching, smaller body. Around 1700, something shifts. The arching becomes flatter, the body proportions change, the f-holes become more refined. This is what makers call his golden period. And then, in his late work, the changes continue.

What strikes me is not the changes themselves, but their consistency and direction. They move toward something — not randomly, but with intention.

When I think about this through the lens of Joshua Bell's experiment: even aristocrats would have experienced WYSIATI. They were responding to the authority of the maker. Whether they could reliably perceive the acoustic differences between one form and another is a separate question.

Which makes Stradivari's continued evolution after 1700 all the more interesting. By that point he had already acquired authority and recognition. From a purely pragmatic standpoint — if the goal was to satisfy aristocratic clients — the rational choice would have been to repeat what was already working.

He didn't.

To keep changing after you have already succeeded takes a particular kind of courage, or a motivation that goes beyond approval. I find myself believing that what drove those changes was a passion for sound — a pursuit of something his patrons were not necessarily asking for, and perhaps could not fully perceive.

I cannot prove this. But as someone who makes instruments, I feel it in the traces those changes leave behind.

Where Does Beauty Come From?

The neuroscientist Semir Zeki has spent decades studying what happens in the brain when we encounter something we call beautiful. His research suggests that beauty is not purely cultural. Certain proportions, certain harmonic relationships activate specific neural structures in ways that are consistent across individuals.

Beauty has a physiology.

If that is true, then what is a maker's task? Perhaps not to produce an acoustically optimized object, but to create the conditions in which the brain can complete beauty — to build the instrument that allows that encounter to happen.

Whether Stradivari understood this in those terms, we cannot know. But I believe the changes in his work point toward exactly that pursuit.

A Final Thought

What I know is this: my work is to keep pursuing the unanswerable question — alongside the musicians who are trying to do the same thing through their playing.

When I listen to Bach's unaccompanied cello suites, I feel the spiral in the music. The Fibonacci ratio present in the ornamentation. The same principle that draws the scroll of a violin, the volute of an Ionic column, the shell of a nautilus.

There was a time when form and spirit were not separated. When making an instrument was, in some sense, the same act as making a place of worship — an inscription of natural order into material form.

That world is gone. But the question it was asking is not.

I want to keep asking it — with the instruments I make, and with the musicians who are willing to ask it with me.