Most string players can get into heated arguments with each other about the merits of different kinds of strings–steel, nylon, tungsten, gut, and various combinations thereof all have their passionate advocates and detractors. I don’t consider myself much of a set-up nut on the instrument, but even I have my preferences, and, for whatever reason, gut strings have long held something of a gross-out factor for me. String players with cases of arachnophobia might be in for an even bigger gross-out factor, and the rest of us are in for a musical-scientific treat: scientists in Japan have created violin strings made from spider webs.
The strings, created by Japanese scientist Shigeyoshi Osaki of Nara Medical University, are spun from spider silk and have created a buzz in the music world. Osaki, who has been studying the properties of spider silk for 35 years now, has been working on this violin string project for almost a decade, making it a pet project of his. His interest in the project has been met with equally high interest from the scientific and musical communities, highlighting the not-insignificant degree of interest overlap between the two fields. A physicist on the faculty of Cornell University and an amateur violinist, Katherine Selby compared the strings favorably to her experience with steel, gut, and nylon strings. For instance, spider string has strong high harmonics compared to steel and nylon, and the material is more durable than gut for thinner strings, such as E strings. Says Selby, “You could have a thinner string for playing the same pitch, which would be a bit more bendy and responsive — it would hit a note quicker. What people crave about natural gut strings is a certain complexity….Spider strings also have this brilliant sound — even more than gut.”
While the strings have yet to make it into general circulation to be played for the sake of comparison, the early reactions have been ones of optimistic curiosity. The process by which Osaki fabricated the strings has been met with no less curiosity. The full details of the project are slated for publication in the upcoming Physical Review Letters, but the process was described by the online journal New Scientist as follows:
The unique properties of the spider strings come in part from the physics of the natural material, but they also come from the weaving technique employed by Osaki. First Osaki learned how to coax about 300 female golden orb-weaver spiders to spin long strands of “dragline” silk, which are the strong single strands that the spiders use to dangle from. Next he bundled the filaments together and twisted them. Each string is made up of three such bundles, but the thicker strings contain the most filaments. For instance, the G string, which is the thickest, holds about 15,000 filaments.
The end product was a string that is tightly packed and strong. The key seems to be that the individual filaments which compose the spider silk changed shape when twisted to form a string: an electron microscope revealed that their usually circular cross sections turned into polygons. These polygons are able to stack together much more closely than do the cylindrical shapes of traditional strings. “To my knowledge, no one has observed such a change of cross section. I doubted my experimental results,” says Osaki, “The spider silk must be deformed by the twisting process.”
Whatever the reason, spider silk strings seem to have a lot to offer as the prototypes that they are. A video from the New Scientist site provides a brief comparison as Jun-ichi Matsuda plays a snippet from Tchaikovsky on a Stradivarius violin strung with spider, steel, nylon, and gut strings in turn. While the video hardly lets the listen get a real sense of the true sound of the strings, the timbre is not only interesting but potentially very beautiful, and, as Selby points out, “It is impressive when you remember these are prototype strings, just out of a material science lab, being compared with commercial strings perfected for years.” Osaki is currently trying to find a way to make the strings, which would be prohibitively expensive as they are being produced now, available for wider circulation, and, in the meantime, the musical community will likely wait with bated breath.
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