Listener preference towards a real and emulated violin

An account is provided of a double-blind experiment in which musically trained and untrained participants listened to recordings of a real and emulated (virtual) violin and rated them according to their personal preference. Post-experiment the participants were also asked to identify which one was the real instrument. The emulated violin was developed by convolving the impulse response from an acoustic instrument with the output from an electric violin. The real violin was preferred by both groups with no significant difference between scores for each group. However, more of the trained musicians correctly identified the real violin.