Well vs. Equal Temperament (2000)
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Well vs. Equal Temperament (2000)
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Re: Well vs. Equal Temperament (2000)
#2Does anyone have links to audio samples where these differences are prominent?
In addition to comments, this video has a decent comparison using sawtooth tones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRlp-OH0OEA
Re: Well vs. Equal Temperament (2000)
#3So this is interesting, I know a piano tuner who has tuned for countless famous artist. He was working on a project to record songs, like Beethoven, as someone would have heard it in his time.
Re: Well vs. Equal Temperament (2000)
#4In addition to the sonic characteristics of the earlier tunings, an important practical factor was that the tuning procedure could be carried out successfully by the keyboardist prior to every performance, since instruments went out of tune quickly before the modern piano.
Re: Well vs. Equal Temperament (2000)
#5So this is interesting, I know a piano tuner who has tuned for countless famous artist. He was working on a project to record songs, like Beethoven, as someone would have heard it in his time.
I actually found it a little odd that Beethoven was mentioned, since it he was a big fan of equal temperment. His 5th symphony was largely written to explore the idea. In well tempered tunings, you have to play around a central "root note" in order to get a harmonic melody. But in equal temperment, the dissonance is equally spread out across the notes. His 5th symphony was able to take advantage of that in two ways: by being an unusually dissonant symphony to begin with and by jumping all over the place, going from very high to very low, playing the same note repeatedly and yet having it sound the same no matter what key he went to. We're so used to it, however, I doubt most people could really hear the difference.
Re: Well vs. Equal Temperament (2000)
#6Does anyone have links to audio samples where these differences are prominent? In addition to comments, this video has a decent comparison using sawtooth tones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRlp-OH0OEA
I went looking.
Re: Well vs. Equal Temperament (2000)
#7Does anyone have links to audio samples where these differences are prominent? In addition to comments, this video has a decent comparison using sawtooth tones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRlp-OH0OEA
Wouldn't that be nice, rather than whining about numbers?
It's an informative article, but the reality is that nobody cares. And I mean "nobody" in the approximate sense of 99.9% of music listeners. The reality is that our brains are more than happy to glue these nasty thirds to their hypothetical frequencies. Sure, they have a little roughness to them, but it's not a big deal, especially considering that most piano music from the 18th and 19th century is composed not to highlight the weaknesses of temperaments.
Also, equal temperament isn't quite the final word on piano tuning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stretched_tuning
Re: Well vs. Equal Temperament (2000)
#8Aside from temperament, I had my piano tuner claim to me that tuning pianos is actually more complicated than that. He said that the high end of the piano had to be tuned different from the low end, with some explanation like how the hammer strike bends the pitch of low vs high strings (I wish I could remember the specifics of what he said, but this was many years ago).
I couldn't decide at the time if what he was saying was legit or if he was just trying to convince me that I needed to hire him again instead of just buying an electronic tuner and a wrench.
Re: Well vs. Equal Temperament (2000)
#9Aside from temperament, I had my piano tuner claim to me that tuning pianos is actually more complicated than that. He said that the high end of the piano had to be tuned different from the low end, with some explanation like how the hammer strike bends the pitch of low vs high strings (I wish I could remember the specifics of what he said, but this was many years ago). I couldn't decide at the time if what he was sa…
legit, she/he was talking inharmonicity and the resulting octave stretching that makes octaves sound truest.
Re: Well vs. Equal Temperament (2000)
#10Does anyone have links to audio samples where these differences are prominent? In addition to comments, this video has a decent comparison using sawtooth tones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRlp-OH0OEA
I went looking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBt6APk21tU
Thank you. That is astounding. I wonder if there is any way to find music performed using original tunings. It sounds SO much better to me.