An accomplished musician Fan-Chia Tao tests the strings that he makes with both the sophisticated equipment in his lab and the old-fashioned way.

THE TAO OF STRINGS

By Michael Rogers

Ever since Egyptians and Sumerians first began plucking away on harp and lyre some 5,000 years ago, the development of musical strings has been more art than science, involving trial-and-error methods of design and craftsmanship and highly subjective product evaluations. If a string sounded good to a musician, that was usually proof enough that it was “good,” and no one ever bothered to figure out exactly what it was that made one string ideal for a Stradivarius and another suitable for dental floss.

Enter Fan-Chia Tao ’81. Tao, the director of research and development at J. D’Addario & Co.—one of the world’s largest manufacturers of strings for musical instruments—is on a quest to find out what qualities make one string better than another and to develop highly precise and customized materials and manufacturing techniques to improve strings. The role seems tailor-made for Tao, a Caltech- and Princeton-trained engineer, who began playing the violin when he was five years old, and added the viola to his repertoire when he was at Caltech. But he admits that he never paid that much attention to why his instruments sounded the way they did until he took a job that required him to think about it pretty much all the time.

“When I first started at D’Addario, I thought, ‘What is there to strings?’” says Tao, noting that strings for musical instruments are basically just strands of sheep gut, wire, or nylon that make a distinct sound when they vibrate. “But strings are subtle and they have all sorts of complexities like sound, feel, and response that can be detected by musicians. And it’s difficult to determine what causes one string to sound so much better or different than another.” While textbooks are filled with technical descriptions of how strings vibrate, Tao says, “Real strings don’t behave in textbook fashion. There is no perfect string for every person or instrument. Every instrument is different, and different players have different playing styles and a different sense of what’s good.”

Born in Taiwan, Tao moved with his family to Connecticut in 1966 when he was six. At Caltech, he majored in electrical engineering, played violin in the Caltech-Occidental Orchestra, and sang with the Men’s Glee Club, also serving as its president for a year. After earning an MS from Princeton in 1982, he joined Raytheon in the Boston area, designing hardware for several laser radar systems, and went on to hold a succession of engineering jobs during the go-go years of the tech boom.
“I’m practical minded, and engineering is a lot more practical than music,” Tao says. “Both of my grandfathers were chemical engineers, and my father became a computer programmer after 15 years as a research scientist. I never desired to be a research scientist. I wanted to be able to touch things I work with.”

But Tao also kept his hand in musically, playing violin and viola in Boston-area chamber and orchestral groups. While he says that he’s a fan of all classical music, he prefers to perform in chamber groups. “In an orchestra, the conductor tells you what to do and you feel like you’re part of one mass,” says Tao. “With chamber groups, you’re responsible for yourself, but you’re also responsible for interacting with other musicians. There’s a wonderful sense of collaboration.”

In 1991, Tao began attending a chamber music retreat each summer in Bennington, Vermont, where he eventually met his future wife, Tara Kazak, a flutist from New York. When the two decided to marry in 1999, Kazak, who wanted to stay in Long Island, was firm that Tao be the one to move. Long Island isn’t exactly awash in engineering jobs, but Tao discovered through a want ad that D’Addario, which is located there, was looking for an acoustical engineer. He says that his résumé was plucked out of a pile of more than 200 when the company’s acoustical engineer, Norman Pickering, saw that Tao was the only applicant who played a bowed instrument. “Fan’s knowledge of the field was zero,” says Pickering, “but he was extremely intelligent and he played the violin quite well.” Tao started work there in early 1999.

In joining D’Addario, Tao found that he had moved from a high-tech engineering environment to a family firm steeped in Old World tradition. According to the official company history, the D’Addario family had been making violin strings in Salle, Italy, since at least the 17th century. When family members immigrated to America in the early 1900s, they brought their string-making expertise with them. The company they founded in New York remained a small operation until the 1950s and 1960s, when the growing popularity of rock music prompted it to switch, very profitably as it turned out, to manufacturing guitar strings. D’Addario returned to the bowed-string business when it acquired the Kaplan Musical String Company in 1981, but still earns most of its money from making guitar strings. Today the company, which employs more than 500 people and counts Bruce Springsteen, Carlos Santana, and Dave Matthews among its customers, claims to be the world’s largest manufacturer of guitar strings and among the leaders in the world in bowed-string sales.

Tao says he spent much of the first two years on the job learning the ropes from Pickering, an internationally known acoustician who, among other professional credits, developed the first lightweight pickup cartridge for phonographs. Besides teaching Tao about strings, Pickering, who has himself built several dozen violins, introduced him to violin makers—a group that any conscientious string maker would want to cultivate if he wanted to get new products into the marketplace.

A colorized image at 40 times magnification of a D'Addario violin string in cross section reveals its complex construction of entwined steel, copper, and silver wire.

Although Tao contributes his engineering expertise to all of D’Addario’s enterprises, which include reeds and drum heads, his main focus is bowed-instrument strings, a field that, to put it mildly, has never been a hotbed of innovation. “The whole market in violins and strings is very conservative,” he says. “People are reluctant to change. They usually use what their teachers recommend.” About the only development of note in bowed strings has been the switch from strings made of gut, silver, and copper to those fashioned from more exotic metals or nylon. And over the three centuries that those changes evolved, “a string’s basic construction,” says Tao, “has remained the same.” Whether you’re playing an Amati violin or a country fiddle, your instrument’s strings are likely made in only one of two ways—either as a single filament, or as a string core around which windings are twisted in a manner that is supposed to preserve the string’s flexibility and lower its pitch by adding mass.

In designing new strings that address musicians’ needs, “I spend a lot of time delving into strings, trying to figure out why they behave certain ways and what are their properties,” Tao says. “I look at the competition’s strings. I take strings apart and look at them under the microscope. I play them. I try to correlate their construction with their sound, trying to find patterns that make sense.”

One of his earliest projects was solving a reliability problem with a new line of bass strings that were breaking prematurely. Tao helped develop a new machine that wound the strings differently, eliminating breakage 99 percent of the time. “Even though only one percent of players could break it, those players were our star endorsers,” says Tao. So he kept working on the problem. Once he figured out that the strings were breaking because of stress points in the center of the core, Tao designed a new core that relieved the stress points and virtually eliminated all premature breaking.

At roughly the same time, he took on the challenge of developing a new damping system for violin strings after a supplier stopped making the material that D’Addario had previously used to facilitate damping. Unlike guitar strings, which are intended to vibrate strongly and which sound best when they emit a “bright” or crisp sound, violin strings should not be bright, since violinists favor more mellow tones with strings that cut down on free vibrations. To dampen a string during the manufacturing process, different materials are used to coat the strings’ cores, helping to diminish the vibrations of the strings.

Tao called on fellow Caltech alum, Bernard Malofsky ’59, a chemist whom he had read about in the Caltech News Class Notes, to help him, and together they devised a new material. “We had a six-month supply of the original material when it was discontinued at the end of 2002, so it became an urgent project,” Tao says. “We changed to the new formula last summer.”

“It was a unique project and a lot of fun,” says Malofsky, who never imagined before meeting Tao that the industrial materials he worked with could be used in a musical string. “He’s an engineer and I’m a chemist, and together we did more than either of us could have done alone.”

The new material has also helped Tao develop a new design for a violin E string. “Until now, all E strings have been solid pieces of wire,” he says. “If you play an open E, you hear a high-frequency whistling sound caused by the torsional properties of the string. I made a wound string on a stranded core, which lowered the frequency and eliminated the problem. I noticed that Pickering tried to do this 10 years ago, but he dismissed it because he didn’t have a good damping material and it didn’t sound good. But with our new damping material, I was able to make the first nonwhistling E string.”

Tao unveiled the string in November at the annual convention of the Violin Society of America (VSA), and D’Addario plans to begin selling it soon.

Tao is currently working on a project involving guitar strings. During the lifetime of a string, it gradually deteriorates as its windings get clogged with dead skin cells, dirt, and sweat. It is suspected that these materials promote string corrosion, or at least affect the strings enough so that professional musicians claim that they can hear differences in string quality even after limited use. In fact, most professional musicians typically change guitar strings before each performance.

To improve durability—and their own bottom lines—D’Addario and other string makers are competing to develop coatings for extending the life of strings without affecting their sound quality. To test the strings, Tao has designed a system that he says allows him to make quantifiable evaluations of strings rather than relying solely on how they sound to the human ear. He has written a software program that helps him measure the brightness of a plucked string, tracking how the harmonics of the string decay with use.

The string tester looks like an electronically souped-up version of a pedal steel guitar. When Tao plucks a string, the vibrations are picked up by optical sensors and recorded in his computer by a sound card. With his software, he is able to estimate the decay rates of all of the partials or musical tones. The equipment has helped him analyze the sounds of different coated strings, providing an objective measurement of their sounds. Although D’Addario has coated strings on the market, Tao and his colleagues are still developing coatings. The process, he says, doesn’t work for bowed strings, since the coatings make it difficult to bow.

Pickering, who has gradually turned over his work at D’Addario to Tao, but still talks on the phone with him every day, says that his colleague is persistent about his strings research, working for months or more on problems until he can come up with a solution. “He’s probably now the foremost authority in the area of string technology,” Pickering says. “Everyone today wants quick answers, but he has the quality of being able to follow something through to its conclusion. When he has a problem, we discuss it, and his ideas generally turn out to be accurate.”

Situated one level above the swirl of activity on the D’Addario shop floor, where dozens of workers operate rows of string-making machines, Tao’s office is a cozy environment with a unique aesthetic that can best be described as garage band meets garage tinkerer. The only room at D’Addario protected by a combination lock, the space houses a collection of musical instruments and state-of-the-art scientific equipment. Tao is most proud of the anechoic chamber that he built into an adjacent closet-size room, where he can test new strings without the interference of outside noise.

One problem with designing new strings is that the raw materials come from suppliers who typically provide their materials for larger industrial applications. Concertgoers who thrill to the strains of an exquisitely played cello may find it interesting to reflect that the metal strings on many of these instruments are actually produced from the same wire used in steel-belted radial tires. The string market is minuscule compared to the tire business, so wire producers are reluctant to adapt their product to suit the needs of string makers. String makers basically have to use whatever they can get off the shelf. Despite the use of “store-bought” materials, if the competition is making a better string, it’s not so easy to copy it.

“It’s difficult to duplicate a competitor’s string,” Tao admits. “You can’t tell exactly what materials they use. For example, there are hundreds of different types of nylon. Dimensions matter. And then we don’t know exactly how the string has been wound. That’s important, since how you put a string together affects how it sounds.”

Even if you can come up with a new and improved product, in the string business, that’s no guarantee for success. “We have to be careful,” Tao says. “In this market, newness is not considered an advantage. Whatever new string you develop, it has to be clear what it does and the benefit it has.”

The benefit, in fact, is often more about ease of use than sound. “A great violinist will make any string or instrument sound really good,” says Tao. But with just the right instrument and just the right strings, “a great violinist won’t have to work as hard. If we give musicians a good string, they’ll be able to get the sound they want much more efficiently.”

While D’Addario occasionally brings in musicians to test its strings, Tao gets most of his feedback from violin makers. “A lot of musicians are not that knowledgeable about their instruments, and when they have a problem, they usually go to violin makers, who also repair violins,” he says. “Often, the problem is in the musicians’ heads. Violin makers say that the most common time for a violin to go bad is right before a concert.”

To reach out to violin makers, in 2001 Tao cofounded and now directs the VSA-Oberlin Acoustics Workshop, a five-day summer program held at Oberlin College in Ohio. The sessions are designed to provide violin makers with an overview of violin acoustics so that they might be able to produce better-sounding instruments.

“The main problem with violins is that wood is completely inconsistent,” Tao says. “If there was a predictably reliable material, violin makers could have figured out long ago” how to consistently make great-sounding violins. “Traditionally, violin makers have viewed violin acoustics researchers with suspicion, even some animosity,” Tao says, since they typically honed their craft through apprenticeships in which carefully guarded information was handed down over generations. “However, I think this workshop is helping to change that attitude, and perhaps will make a significant impact in understanding how to make better-sounding violins.”

And he already knows firsthand that increased technical knowledge of strings and violins can improve performance. “As I’ve studied violin acoustics and learned about the physics of how the bow interacts with the strings, I’ve improved my violin playing. My bow arm has improved significantly in the past three years.”

At D’Addario, Tao hopes to make a significant impact too, helping to transform the company into the world’s leading manufacturer of bowed strings and to maintain its lead in guitar and other fretted strings. “I love what I do because it combines my interests in science, engineering, and music,” he says. “Learning about new technologies is always fun. Combining the different subjects together is a real challenge. And I love working with musicians and violin makers.” And then, switching into an idiom that would certainly please his Caltech professors, this musically inclined engineer outlines his current professional goal: “To transform the design of strings from trial and error into an engineering discipline.

“Today, we try a whole lot of different things, and maybe one is usable,” Tao says. “But that’s not engineering. I want to find the best way to design new strings and other musical accessories that satisfy the specific needs of musicians so they can better express themselves through their instruments. If a musician or violin maker comes to me with a problem, I’d like to be able to say, ‘Give me two weeks and I’ll come up with something.’”