Over the years, he said, many hypotheses about the secret properties of Stradivari and Guarneri instruments have come and gone.
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For a while, people suggested that luthiers had simply used trees that have since gone extinct — but in fact those trees still exist. In 2003, Dr. Grissino-Mayer and a colleague said Stradivari’s secret had to do with the fact that he had lived during an extremely cold period, known as the little ice age, and that the trees around him were growing differently. How exactly that may have produced better instruments, however, remains unclear. Another popular theory — that Stradivari was using a varnish with magical sound properties — has not been substantiated by any chemical analyses.
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