Elastic constants of Ti 50 Ni 30 Cu 20 alloy prior to the martensitic transformation B2 B19 was measured for the ® rst time by using the rectangular parallelepiped resonance method. The softening in both shear modulus c and c 44 was found with approaching transformation temperature. As a result of soft c 44 , the anisotropy factor shows a low value of 2.8 in the vicinity of the transformation temperature. c 11 , c 12 , and bulk modulus were found to show little temperature dependence in the vicinity of the transformation temperature. Compared with the binary Ti 50 Ni 50 alloy, Ti 50 Ni 30 Cu 20 alloy exhibits a 40% higher and increasing anisotropy with approaching transformation temperature. Based on the experimental results, we explained why Ti 50 Ni 30 Cu 20 transforms into B19 martensite, while Ti 50 Ni 50 transforms into a strange monoclinic B19 martensite. §1. Introduction Despite the fact that Ti± Ni is the most important shape memory alloy for various technological applications (for example, Otsuka and Shimizu (1986)), its martensitic transformation (MT) mechanism, which governs its properties, has remained poorly understood for many years compared with other shape memory alloys. The central problem is how to explain the abnormal structure of TiNi martensite B19 .In contrast to other martensites of b (B2) phase alloys which are invariably formed by di erent ways of basal plane stacking (see Nishiyama (1978) for a review), B19 martensite exhibits a large and strange non-basal distortion ({001} 110 B2 shear) to the well-known basal plane structure B19 (Heheman and Sandrock 1971, Kudoh et al. 1985). This non-basal shear gives a monoclinic distortion to B19 structure and lowers the orthorhombic symmetry of B19 to monoclinic, thus the distorted martensite is named as B19 . The reason for such a non-basal distortion is unclear. On the other hand, the addition of 20 at.% Cu into Ti 50 Ni 50 alloy changes the transformation product into common B19 martensite for Ti 50 Ni 30 Cu 20 alloy (Nam et al. 1990b), although the parent phase for both alloys has the same B2 (CsCl) structure. Accompanying such a change of transformation product, the