Re: Violins/guitars
Purely distilling the quality of an instrument into its recorded sound isn't really a viable thing, either - unless the only criterion you care about is the recorded sound, of course. There are a whole host of other factors that make guitars desirable, such as cost, aesthetics, playability, hardware configuration, wood choices, style/size, comfort...
There are fewer factors of interest for violins. The size is sometimes changed (a bit), and there may be subtle (very subtle) changes in shape, other than that it really comes down to quality of the woods used, quality of the workmanship, and quality of the set-up. Given that the violins being compared are not any old cheap chinese mass produced knock-offs, but are high quality, expert-built instruments, it's hardly a result to find that there's not something 'magical' about the Stradivari. However, there is something desirable about them, because they were all extremely well made instruments, and those that have survived to this day are also antiques! That itself makes them desirable, collectors items so of course they're expensive!!
My viola was made somewhere around the 1900 mark, so in classical instrument terms it's a relative newbie. It's well made, but not superb, but I like the sound it makes. That's as subjective as it needs to be - an instrument that is comfortable to play, makes a good sound to your ears (and looks the part) is what any serious musician is looking for first and foremost. If it also happens to be an antique made by "one of the very finest" luthiers of all time, which also adds to your credibility/saleability as a professional musician (oh, he/she plays a Strad? Wow, I might go along to that concert), all the better!
Re: Music as a science
Beethoven was not a mathematician or a physicist. He was a composer and an artist. I would argue that any algorithm that 'composes' music is based on what has already gone before (well well before computers, or even the formalisation of scales in mathematical terms) and is therefore unable to come up with genuinely new genres or even able to make big jumps between genres which are perhaps heavily interrelated. I would conjecture that an algorithm that 'learned' how to compose having only been fed baroque is absolutely 100% NOT going to compose anything akin to, say Holst's Planets Suite. Let alone more modern music, all of which is built on previous music going back to Baroque and well beyond.
By the same token, what I do in my job is not art, despite parts of it requiring lots of technical skill and practice to perfect.
In addition, while you can describe our western scales in neat integer values of tone frequency, and rhythms and even timbres can also be described succinctly in mathematical terms, the same isn't true of other music forms, such as Indian-rooted music, and probably many tribal musics, too.
Finally, music is an art form that is subjectively appreciated. This is simply not true of science: something is correct or it is not, you don't pick and choose a theorem that you like because it speaks to you, whereas classic drawn/painted art, music, sculpture, creative writing - all of these are subjective.
To take this argument back to a much simpler one, while almost everything can be explained in physical/mathematical terms, that does not make it physics/maths. Chemistry, for example. So to take a huge leap over to music and say it's a science is just nonsense, I'm afraid. It's perfectly fine to be interested in the very real and interesting subject of the science/mathematics of music but that is not the same as 'music' itself and the two should not be confused!!
Just my most humble of opinions, of course :)
Roo
