EBVT Offsets (compilation)

Kent Swafford kswafford@earthlink.net
Sat, 5 Oct 2002 18:51:12 -0500


My concerns about the availability of aural descriptions of the various 
temperaments may very well be rendered moot if Jason Kanter's graphs 
prove to be authoritative, and stay generally available.

I don't have a problem working to tolerances that are beyond some of 
our customers' abilities to perceive and/or understand. Historical 
temperaments themselves are beyond what some of our customers are 
capable of hearing and appreciating. A piano professor at one of the 
colleges where I occasionally work dismissed historical temperaments in 
general with a wave of her hand, saying, "Oh, that's just a _tuner_ 
thing."

Right. Well, we're the pros. Our customers have varying needs. A few of 
our customers can hear and understand right up to the highest level 
that we can produce, and I think we need to be ready for them -- up to 
and including having the ability to explain the relative beat rates 
that are forming the key colors they are hearing in the esoteric 
temperament we just tuned for them.  :)

Kent S


On Saturday, October 5, 2002, at 02:25 PM, A440A@aol.com wrote:
> Greetings,
>    There is a point of diminishing returns involved in these 
> decisions.  If a
> particular harmonic quality depends on distinctions of less than one 
> cent,
> there are going to be few pianos or venues where they will make any
> difference.  Pianos move around.   Octaves that vary by 1 cent will 
> usually
> not be noticed by musicians, and the effect of an equal beating triad 
> is
> rarely altered by the amount of divergence a machine-only tuning 
> allows.
> This is more true of well-scaled pianos.  Any short scale spinet can be
> better tuned by ear, since the machines don't make compromises very 
> well,(the
> VT may do better than the others, depending on operator skill).
>    Also, the difference between a fifth that is Just and one that has 
> 1 cent
> of tempering in not a difference that can be heard in the music, 
> unless there
> is a particular use, in isolation, that sustains long enough.  Or, to 
> put in
> another way, in fast passage work,(Scarlatti?) the tuning is almost
> irrelevant.
>     It is also seen that due to the coupled nature of piano strings, 
> they can
> "draw" one another away from the pitch that would be produced in 
> isolation.
> (hold down an ET C3-E3 and strike a staccato on the E5.  You will not 
> hear
> the beating for a couple of seconds, then the "drawing" created by the 
> single
> frequency of E5 will be overcome by the resonant periods of the lower 
> strings
> and you will hear the beating begin).
>     As we tuners go through measuring intervals, we are hearing 
> phenomena on
> a degree of scale that musicians don't.  I have seen this in changing 
> the
> stretch for studio engineers and musicians.  Even the most astute ears 
> didn't
> hear the difference between two tunings where the final C's ended up 
> 10 cents
> apart.  I have tuned the top octaves of a piano with so much stretch 
> that it
> almost sounded like two different notes, but the group of techs in 
> front of
> me didn't notice anything until I pointed it out.  Only when the single
> octaves were played in slow movements did it become apparent.
>
>     It has become evident in the last 9 years that the arrival of the
> programmable machine has had a lot to do with the increased use of the
> temperaments. Though the knowledge required has been out for decades, 
> working
> tuners never took up the cause, and I think it had to do with the 
> amount of
> work involved.   However, there have now been far too many pianists
> successfully playing many venues and pieces, on machine-based non-ET 
> tunings
> to think that the ETD can't produce.  They can.  I have seen world 
> class
> artists blown away by a straight FAC, so I wonder if my 1 cent 
> "tweaks" are
> really worth the effort.
>     (I am reminded of the first Sight-O-Tuner, which produced a tuning 
> that
> Arthur Fiedler thought highly of!).  I also believe that Jim Coleman 
> has
> demonstrated a machine only tuning that compared nicely with the best 
> of the
> best ET tuners we have.
>    The machines aren't perfect, but they don't need to be in order to 
> produce
> results that far exceed musicians ability to discriminate.  Many of us 
> that
> learned to tune strictly aurally will always believe that the ear will 
> always
> outperform the machine, but you will have a hard time finding 
> musicians that
> can tell any difference between highly skilled techs using either.  ( 
> I will
> be giving an aural demo at the chapter meeting this week and will try 
> to
> record what differences are noted between the machines interpretation 
> and my
> own).
> Regards,
> Ed Foote
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