Carleen Maley Hutchins (1911–2009)

Carleen Maley Hutchins was born to a middle-class family in Springfield, Massachusetts and grew up in Montclair, New Jersey.
Her neighborhood was still full of woods and open fields, and she developed a love for nature and the outdoors. She played the trumpet in high school, an unusual choice for a girl of that era. In 1933, she graduated from Cornell University with a bachelor's degree in biology. She wanted to go to medical school, but lack of funds in the Great Depression and societal opposition to female physicians ended that ambition. Instead, she became a science teacher in private New York City schools. In 1943, she married Morton A. Hutchins, a chemist, with whom she had two children. A few years later, she bought her first viola in order to join a chamber music group, and was disappointed in the instrument, declaring that, as an accomplished woodworker, she could make a better one.
Eventually, she decided to change careers and began to study with prominent luthiers in New York. She and her family moved into her childhood home in Montclair, where she conducted innovative acoustical research in the basement. Together with friends, in 1963 she co-founded the Catgut Acoustical Society, dedicated to scientific insights into the construction of new and conventional instruments of the violin family. Carleen built more than 400 string instruments by hand, and developed an entirely new family of violins, eight proportionally-sized, acoustically matched instruments known collectively as the violin octet. Her greatest innovation, still used by many violin-makers, was a technique known as free-plate tuning. She was the author of more than 100 technical publications and the editor of two volumes of collected papers on violin acoustics, as well as Who Will Drown the Sound? (1972) and Musical Acoustics (1976).