Protein Folding, Creative Evolution, and the Future of the Violin

For more than two centuries, the violin has been both the most cherished and the most paradoxically frozen instrument in Western music. While new technologies have reshaped every corner of our lives, violin luthiery remains locked in a kind of historical stasis, repeating a golden past rather than experimenting toward new futures. To understand why, and how it might change, it is illuminating to turn not only to the history of music but also to the sciences of life and intelligence: protein folding, evolutionary biology, and machine learning.

Proteins Without Blueprint

Biologists have long puzzled over one of nature’s most enigmatic riddles: how a protein folds into its final three-dimensional shape. The sequence of amino acids encodes the “parts list,” but no analytical method—no rational deduction, no straightforward architectural logic—can predict the final form. Proteins, as commentators remind us, have no inherent rationality; evolution did not design them from the ground up, but stumbled upon irregular, often strange shapes that happened to work. Function emerged not through design but through history.

This is what made AlphaFold, DeepMind’s machine learning breakthrough, so transformative. Where analytical science could not calculate, machine learning could “learn” by pattern recognition, training on vast examples and discovering relational structures hidden to rational analysis. The black box of machine learning mirrored the black box of nature itself: non-representational, non-analytical, and yet profoundly generative.

Bergson’s Élan Vital and the Creative Spirit

Here we can draw upon the philosopher Henri Bergson, who in Creative Evolution (1907) argued that life’s forward motion is not reducible to mechanism or representation. Life advances through what he called élan vital—a vital impulse that cannot be fully captured by analytical categories. Evolution is not a rational architect but a creative improviser.

In protein folding, we see élan vital in action: the living world’s irreducible play, forming structures without blueprint, logic, or fixed notation. Machine learning’s success in modeling this process shows us how progress can be made by embracing non-representational ways of knowing.

Violin Luthiery and the “Chill Museum”

By contrast, violin luthiery has fallen into what Richard Taruskin famously described, in another context, as the “chill museum” of classical music. Performers and makers alike act as curators of a sacred past rather than proprietors of a living present. Where proteins evolve into ever-new forms, violin design has been deliberately frozen, as though the perfection of Stradivari and Guarneri must never be questioned.

This curatorial stance mirrors the dominance of representational rationality—accuracy, replication, preservation—over relational rationality—creativity, improvisation, play. Randolph Coleman lamented the exile of homo ludens (man at play) from elite musical training, replaced by repetition, standardization, and conformity. The violin itself reflects this exile: a relic held in reverence, but deprived of the vital force that would allow it to evolve.

Machine Learning, Music, and Instrument Futures

If machine learning can advance science where analytical reason falters, what might this suggest for music and instrument making? Just as proteins fold without blueprint, so too might musical cultures grow not from architectural design but from relational improvisation and embodied play.

In this light, a violin bow redesigned with indestructible synthetic hair is not merely a technical improvement. It is a challenge to the museum-logic of luthiery. It represents the possibility of aligning the violin once again with the élan vital of its cultural present—where music thrives not in written notation or historical curatorship, but in living, oral, and digital traditions of improvisation, exchange, and play.

Toward a Living Instrument

The lesson of AlphaFold is that knowledge advances when we move beyond rigid, representational systems of thought. The lesson of Bergson is that creativity always exceeds analysis. The lesson of Taruskin is that clinging to heritage without playfulness suffocates vitality.

For the violin to remain a living instrument, it must rejoin the flow of élan vital that moves our age: improvisatory, oral, experimental, technologically entangled. Just as proteins find their shape through non-rational histories, the violin must find its future not by preserving the past but by daring to fold, twist, and evolve into new forms.