Reminds me of Bach's 'The Well-Tempered Clavier' It's written in all 24 major/minor keys so your keyboard needs to be well tempered :)
Piano Tuning
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Re: Piano Tuning
#32Re: Piano Tuning
#33Once, long ago I landed in a house in Poznan, Poland which had the wreck of a Bosendorfer baby grand piano sitting in one of the rooms. I had a lot of time on my hand and tried to figure out the story behind the piano. After tracing the owner it turned out that he was trying to 'restore' the piano but in the process had butchered it and had sent parts all over Poland for refurbishing. For some strange reason the Acti…
I had a friend, Jim, who was blind. He went to school to become a piano tuner. Once, we were at another friend's house who had a piano. The friend played a short piece on the piano and Jim mentioned that it could use some tuning and went on to claim he had perfect pitch hearing. Well, of course, we had to test him. We hit one key. "That's D!", he said. We hit another. "That's G!" With a smirk, my friend pressed three…
Of course, once he'd got the first note right, he didn't need perfect pitch to get the second one. Is there a reset procedure for testing perfect pitch? Some confusing sequence of slidey trombone sounds? Just listen to Shepard tones for a while?
Re: Piano Tuning
#34Once, long ago I landed in a house in Poznan, Poland which had the wreck of a Bosendorfer baby grand piano sitting in one of the rooms. I had a lot of time on my hand and tried to figure out the story behind the piano. After tracing the owner it turned out that he was trying to 'restore' the piano but in the process had butchered it and had sent parts all over Poland for refurbishing. For some strange reason the Acti…
This is an extraordinary, lovely little story that implies all sorts of interesting sub-stories.
It is a sub story itself of a much larger one:
https://jacquesmattheij.com/a-western-kid-living-in-communis...
Re: Piano Tuning
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's easy to set up just intonation digitally. The problem is that most classical music modulates to other keys. So why not just set up some switches or programmed changes? Because as you modulate there's a grey area in which you're not fully in one key or the other. If you interpolate the intervals as you go through this area, it sounds wrong. If you switch to a new tuning when you land in the new key, that sounds w…
Note that violinists (and cellists, and others) are not constrained by their instrument and can play in different temperaments depending on the situation.
Can and do are two different things. I rarely hear string players talk about more than "sweetening" a note that is an important arrival in a phrase.
I've also never heard about a systematic strategy string players use to a) analyze a tonal piece for pivot points in a modulation, b) temper all the notes going forward from that pivot to fit whatever tuning system they are using.
I've seen various approaches for microtones and idiosyncratic tunings for single pieces of modern music, but those are fairly static things that the players practice and perform. It's not a system they apply dynamically to the standard rep.
Also keep in mind that string players have an added constraint that the keyboard does not-- if you give a cellist a sudden, large leap it can be difficult for them to even find the note at all.
Re: Piano Tuning
#36Our old piano tuner explained to me how in practice when tuning you must stretch the high notes higher and the low notes lower so as to make the piano sound right. He didn't explain why. It was obvious if you played octaves and listened to the notes, and he was an excellent piano tuner and the piano did sound good. The first comment in the article describes it nicely and links to the excellent Wikipedia section which…
That came up on HN 39 days ago "Why are pianos traditionally tuned “out of tune” at the extremes?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18988774
As an aside I wonder if you could make a digital piano sound better than a real one by correcting for that? And also perhaps auto tuning to the key the music is in, in the manner that a singer will do automatically. So far the digital pianos I've heard don't sound as good as a decent concert grand.
Re: Piano Tuning
#37Reminds me of Bach's 'The Well-Tempered Clavier' It's written in all 24 major/minor keys so your keyboard needs to be well tempered :) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well-Tempered_Clavier
It's 48 because Bach did it all again in book II of the Well-Tempered Clavier.
And really, it's 96 because there is both a prelude and a fugue for each key.
And if you think about it, it's 48 + (48 * x) where x is the average number of voices in the fugue.
And then at least a few of those are double and triple fugues, so I guess a forEach statement in there to multiple by 2 or 3 for those cases.
So if you were an organist who was opposed to this tuning method, you'd have a pretty difficult time making a persuasive counterargument against all that.
Re: Piano Tuning
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note that violinists (and cellists, and others) are not constrained by their instrument and can play in different temperaments depending on the situation.
Can and do are two different things. I rarely hear string players talk about more than "sweetening" a note that is an important arrival in a phrase. I've also never heard about a systematic strategy string players use to a) analyze a tonal piece for pivot points in a modulation, b) temper all the notes going forward from that pivot to fit whatever tuning system they are using. I've seen various approaches for microto…
> Also keep in mind that string players have an added constraint that the keyboard does not-- if you give a cellist a sudden, large leap it can be difficult for them to even find the note at all.
A professional cellist? No. They'll find the note. And that goes for all pro (or just good) string players, fretless instrument or fretted instrument.
Re: Piano Tuning
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And, most importantly to me, since it’s the question I can find the least solid information on: why do we take for granted that one note with twice the frequency of another note sounds so similar that we call both notes by the same name? I have a pretty good understanding of other details of music theory, but I’ve never gotten a straight answer on why (and indeed to what extent) octave equivalence exists. I don't k…
That’s the usual explanation I read, but I don’t fully buy it. Yes, two notes an octave apart have lots of overtones in common. But that’s true of two notes a perfect fifth apart as well. Or even better, two notes an octave and a fifth apart.
People have experimented with alternative "octaves". For example the Bohlen-Pierce scale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohlen–Pierce_scale) has an "octave" with a 3:1 ratio (and thirteen notes to the octave).
Re: Piano Tuning
#40Our old piano tuner explained to me how in practice when tuning you must stretch the high notes higher and the low notes lower so as to make the piano sound right. He didn't explain why. It was obvious if you played octaves and listened to the notes, and he was an excellent piano tuner and the piano did sound good. The first comment in the article describes it nicely and links to the excellent Wikipedia section which…
Indeed, if one tuned a piano like the article describes it wouldn't sound good. As far as I undesrtand it has to do with the thickness (i.e. the real world physicallity) of the lower octave strings. The strings are not trully one-dimensional. this makes their timbre deviate from the ideal harmonic series. This is specially true for the thicker strings of the lower notes. If we could make a piano using very thin strin…
Indeed it's generally true for thicker strings at all pitches, though perhaps more so for lower ones for this case. The longer the strings, the better the sound in general, too, for related stiffness-timbre reasons. Even a tall upright you can tell can sound better than any short upright, and Grand pianos take this to greater extremes of length.