Photos taken inside musical instruments
55 comments
·May 30, 2025susam
pimlottc
Many more fantastic photos at his website:
HelloUsername
Did you read the very last sentence of the article?
rwmj
The violins looks like the lower deck of a galleon. cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Victory#/media/File:Victor...
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hn_throwaway_99
It's cool to see how much the older double bass and violin have been repaired. Those square/flat pyramid pieces of wood are cleats, which were added by a luthier to repair and secure cracks.
EA-3167
Here's a good step-by-step article on how cleats are made and installed, from stock to installation: https://trianglestrings.com/making-installing-cleats/
analog31
The repairs are hard to discern from the outside...
https://m.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10162184681342501&vani...
The only pic I could find.
hermitcrab
As the son of a mariner who was born a few miles from HSM Victory, I feel honour bond to point out that HMS Victory is not techically a galleon.
rwmj
Honour bound is the best kind of bound.
HarHarVeryFunny
It's interesting how irregular the inside of the violins are - patches, struts, asymmetries, differing textures, etc. I guess these all contribute to the normal violin sound, but it makes me wonder if a perfectly symmetrical interior (& exterior - anything contributing to resonances) wouldn't sound better?
cowanon2222
> if a perfectly symmetrical interior (& exterior - anything contributing to resonances) wouldn't sound better
I'm guessing it would likely look more pure on a frequency plot, but sound sterile if things were perfectly symmetrical. The little imperfections, materials, and design tradeoffs give each instrument its unique tone color (timbre). Often, musicians will chase a certain builder and year, and even within that, only a few instruments will be considered "great". For example, guitarists chasing the perfect Les Paul or most classical violinists chasing a Stradivarius.
CPLX
In acoustics symmetrical and parallel surfaces lead to what are called standing waves, which heavily emphasizes specific frequencies. For the most part in things that are musical (instruments, recording studios) you don’t want that. Except of course where that’s the whole point, like the heads of a drum.
There’s a lot more subtlety to it, but in general, variation will produce richer more complex timbre.
HarHarVeryFunny
Yes, but I suppose the general shape of a violin, curvy, pinched waist, bowed top and bottom surfaces, already avoids those kind of overly simple/concentrated resonances. On a side note, I wonder how much changing any of these shape factors affect the sound? Which are most critical? What happens without the pinched waist, or if it is made even narrower?
izzydata
Why do these photos feel like they are so large? Is it just the lack of anything to reference size? I feel like if I stuck my phone inside of something small and took a picture it wouldn't look like this.
susam
Typically, when we photograph small objects at very close range, only a narrow depth of field is in focus. The rest of the image appears blurred. The further other parts of the scene are from the focal plane, the more they blur. This shallow focus helps us to understand scale and depth.
However, in these pictures, the artist has cleverly avoided the blurring effect by combining multiple pictures taken at different focal distances into a single image. The resulting pictures look crisp and clear throughout, and as a result, lacks the usual depth cues we are accustomed to in macro photography. That's why these pictures resemble photographs of large halls!
A similar effect can be observed in ray tracing as well, where we are free to construct entirely imaginary scenes. While defining a scene that we want to be perceived as small, we need to remember to add focal blur [1] carefully. If we forget to do so, the resulting scene can produce the exact opposite impression, that of a vast space.
Wowfunhappy
I think that's the most interesting part! From the article:
> Every part of his process is intentional because he doesn't want the images to look like miniatures. The focus stacking helps him avoid the typical aesthetic of macro photography by reducing the amount of background blur and focal compression. Creating an image that looks like it was taken with an ultra-wide-angle lens also results in leading lines we associate with normal-sized things, like streets and buildings, which tricks your brain into thinking the subject is not small. He also uses lighting to make it look like the sun is shining down, emphasizing the feeling that you are standing inside something.
geonnave
It's basically the opposite effect of tilt-shift photography [1].
See an example: https://i0.wp.com/digital-photography-school.com/wp-content/...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilt%E2%80%93shift_photography
formerly_proven
Despite being physically quite close to the subject, the ratio of subject-size-in-frame to distance-to-subject is usually still quite small (the angle of view for macro lenses is generally much smaller than what the focal length at infinity would suggest).
So for us, macro shots tend to have two characteristics: 1.) perspective is approaching an isometric drawing 2.) usually narrow depth of field.
These shots on the other hand were made with a very wide field of view and focus stacking produces a deep depth of field. I'm sure that if you worked out the angles and distances in e.g. the violin shot then the ratios will be basically the same as your typical 2.5 story architecture shot or subway architecture done with something in the 14-20mm FF range. Because the photographer went to great lengths to make it look like that.
There's also other cues, like the height of the camera relative to the floor and ceiling of the room, and of course the light.
ubj
Beautiful photos! I'd love to see a concert hall designed to look like something from this gallery.
fatboy
I remember around 25 years ago being in the big music hall in Philadelphia and feeling a bit like I was inside a giant cello.
The cheapest seats were in the coolest place architecturally because you were right up at the back, closest to the ceiling, which really was a bit like in these instrument photos.
Some pictures here from a quick search: https://voithandmactavish.com/projects/the-kimmel-center/
ErigmolCt
Imagine a concert hall where the architecture mimics the ribbed interior of a violin or the layered gears of a grand piano action
hinkley
I wonder if he would have been better off making a device to hold a small mirror steady and used a telephoto lens pointed at it from one of the f holes.
It says he had a 5 mm hole to work with. That would pass an 8 gauge wire with plenty of room to maneuver. Mount a mirror to the end, thread a two or three foot wire through the hole from the inside out, clamp it to a surface the instrument is sitting in to keep it from moving, and set up your camera from a low angle and the light positioned to not cast a shadow.
Alternately you could J hook a long, large diameter scope, and composite two shots with the cable visible on opposite sides of each picture.
yard2010
This is so beautiful. It contrasts really well with the cancerous viagra/fungi ai ads in this page!
gnabgib
Previously - different sources (89 points, 3 years ago, 19 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32862697
(70 points, 4 years ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29389442
antux
The amount of modal popups this website displays made me abandon the site. Such an annoying UX.
ErigmolCt
And the fact that the results look like alien architecture or dystopian cities? That's the cherry on top
A little game for all of you: On Firefox or Chrome, go to Developer Tools (F12) > Console and execute:
Now without the text visible anymore, try and guess which musical instrument each picture represents. Then reload the page, enjoy the article, and check how many you got right. What's your score out of 8? I scored 5.