Several years ago I was writing a mystery set in New York that involved a missing husband and some unscrupulous people, when I came across an article in the New York Times, “A Violinist’s Triumph Is Ruined by Thieves”. Frank Almond, a Milwaukee Symphony Concertmaster, was stun gunned in a parking lot after a concert and his 1715 Lipinski Stradivarius was stolen. Later that year, I saw an article, “The Stradivarius Affair,” by Buzz Bissinger in Vanity Fair, that featured the same crime. Intrigued by the audacity of the crime and felt the universe was telling me something. I switched gears and wrote a mystery, The Ghost Notes, inspired by the violin heist. I wasn’t successful in securing a publisher so set the novel aside. In 2019, I saw an announcement for the Tribeca Film Festival that featured a documentary, Plucked, about the theft of the Lipinski Stradivarius. Tribeca Film Festival
My father was a musician and during high school and college, I worked in his music studio—stringing many guitars. Not having my father’s ear, I wasn’t able to perfect the acoustic tuning technique, using the Tartini Tones, but loved watching my father fine-tune each instrument. The first owner of the Lipinski Stradivarius, Guiseppe Tartini, contributed to the science of acoustics, inventing the “Tartini Tones,” the auditory illusion sometimes referred to as Ghost Notes.
This YouTube video features a violinist explaining the Tartini Tones