Can the quality of a violin be solely attributed to the violin maker or is it the wood that determines the violin’s tone quality? In our quiz you can hear violinist Matthew Trusler playing Johannes Brahms' Violin Concerto in D Major, once on a violin made from ‘normal’ untreated wood and once on a violin made of wood which Empa has exposed to a fungus for a period of nine months. The violin treated with fungus has a warm and rounded sound – can you tell which one it is?

In an interdisciplinary project currently underway at Empa and funded by the Walter Fischli Foundation, a quality-controlled treatment programme is being developed to reproduce the acoustic properties of resonant wood and improve them under standardised conditions.

Find out more about the blind test with Matthew Trusler here: Fungi go classic

In the Biotechnology group of Empa Wood Lab, tonal woods are systematically treated with rot-inducing fungi. Markus Heeb and Iris Brémaud reularly check to see how the fungal attack is progressing.