sentences:  In 2000, Townsend founded The Amati Foundation, to help expand the stringed arts, specifically education in playing, making, and preserving the violin.Townsend began studying violin making under the tutelage of Ziang Mei then continued learning techniques from William Hilton (a student of Vhakn Nigogosian), and Alberti Genduso (who has studied with the German masters Horst Kloss and Karl Roy, director of the Bavarian State School of Violin Making in Mittenwald, Germany).In 2005 he introduced a wood treatment system to increase sonority and harmonics in instrument making.