51–60 of 184 posts
> If thirds and fifths are so out of tune in 12-TET, why do we use it? The advantage is that all the thirds and fifths in all the keys are out of tune by the same amount. None of them sound perfect, but none of them sound terrible, either. Can't we have a system that is optimized for the notes that are actually played in a song rather than the hypothetical set? And what if the optimization is done per small group of…
I was born with something not quite like perfect pitch, but when something is even slightly off tune it caused physical discomfort for me. My cs department had a cool project class where you built what was basically a raspberry pi with a microcontroller by hand, and you had to use the dumb speaker and controller to make your own music firmware to produce notes. the challenge involved, was basically, the processor’s c…
Do say more! What was the problem with the clock, more exactly? I believe you, I've had issues caused by clock skew and CAN bus for example, when you have a small error that is amplified on beach bit enough time, errors add up and you eventually get out of synch. But in the case if sound, I would have expected the skew to be less of a problem. Also surprised how the orof instantly know. It took me a while to figure o…
Proof is left as an exercise to the student. ;-)
My first guitar teacher told me that someday I'd start to notice that you can't get all strings perfectly in tune. At that point, he said, you'll know you're getting somewhere on the guitar.
Get obsessed over the perfect tuning. Blame the imperfections on the quality of the guitar. Don't play until you get a better guitar. Repeat until you give up. Then actually start playing the damn thing.
Absurd. A guitar within tolerance is in tune. It's a fundamental feature of the instrument. Not a flaw. Music doesn't live in an abstract realm of perfections, it is an expression however formed. The fact that we can measure it is one thing. But the music or instruments do not need conform to discrete measurements to satisfy. I know engineers hate this, but ask any musician. It's like arguing that a sitar and its sca…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, does this explain why singers drift to a different key when there is no accompaniment?
Singers drift because they use relative pitch, because most musicians dont have perfect pitch. With relative pitch music sounds the same even if you deviate from the original equal temperament pitch of the key you started singing even changing the key. For the same reason if there is a fixed instrument playing at the same time, like a piano accompaniment, it's sound would be used as a reference and the singers would…
Absurd. A guitar within tolerance is in tune. It's a fundamental feature of the instrument. Not a flaw. Music doesn't live in an abstract realm of perfections, it is an expression however formed. The fact that we can measure it is one thing. But the music or instruments do not need conform to discrete measurements to satisfy. I know engineers hate this, but ask any musician. It's like arguing that a sitar and its sca…
Just because we live with the trade-off doesn’t make it correct in any other sense.
However if you want more notes than that to be their best you're going to have to compromise and work at it a bit.
Now if you want the instrument to sound its absolute best on its own solo, a slightly different place for some strings.
And then depending on other musicians you are playing with and the way their tuning has achieved perfection (or not), some further tweaking can make a big difference.
And that's after accepting that the "knobs can only be in one place".
For students to get really good at the tuning process can require a few extra years of everyday practice more than it does to learn to play a few pieces.
Part of the limitation is the way only a few minutes of tuning are spent for every hour of practice, if that.
> If thirds and fifths are so out of tune in 12-TET, why do we use it? The advantage is that all the thirds and fifths in all the keys are out of tune by the same amount. None of them sound perfect, but none of them sound terrible, either. Can't we have a system that is optimized for the notes that are actually played in a song rather than the hypothetical set? And what if the optimization is done per small group of…
Absurd. A guitar within tolerance is in tune. It's a fundamental feature of the instrument. Not a flaw. Music doesn't live in an abstract realm of perfections, it is an expression however formed. The fact that we can measure it is one thing. But the music or instruments do not need conform to discrete measurements to satisfy. I know engineers hate this, but ask any musician. It's like arguing that a sitar and its sca…
The only thing that is absurd here is your bizarre strawman that discussing equal temperament is somehow non-musical and that engineers can’t understand what music is because they want to measure things.
> If you watch slow-motion video of a guitar string vibrating, you’ll see a complex, evolving blend of squiggles. These squiggles are the mathematical sum of all of the string’s different harmonics. This is incorrect. If you watch a video like [0], the squiggles aren't real, they're an artifact of a rolling shutter camera. A real slowmo camera will correctly show the entire string vibrating[1]. The rest of the articl…
Actually depending on microphone or instrument interface, you can see stuff that's beyond the range of hearing too.
Also, on a low-frequency long-string like an upright bass, if it is bowed at the halfway node, you still hear mainly the fundamental but the second harmonic is naturally emphasized more than usual, and you can also see half the string making its contribution as pictured, with the naked eye.