[CAUT] temperature and pitch

[Jeff Tanner]

That's what I encountered on a daily basis in our recital hall. Morning 
temps were cooler, before the lights were turned on and it served as a 
classroom for 197 students, with class changes every hour or hour and a half 
for 6 hours until my tuning time in the afternoon, just before recitals 
began at 4:15.

That's why tuning in the early morning at a university doesn't work.
Jeff

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Fred Sturm" <fssturm at unm.edu>
To: "College & University Technicians" <caut at ptg.org>
Sent: Friday, December 11, 2009 11:17 AM
Subject: [CAUT] temperature and pitch


> This morning I had the opportunity to see a pretty precise picture of 
> what temperature change does to pitch. I tuned a Steinway A (old, 
> rebuilt) yesterday in a performance space, and came back this morning  to 
> tune it again (two night show). The temperature today was about 10 
> degrees F lower than yesterday (heat turned down overnight). The  tuning 
> was as expected for a next day (unison tweaking), but the pitch  was 
> pretty consistently 2 cents sharp throughout. Tenor was maybe a  bit less 
> (1 - 1.5), but otherwise quite consistent. The piano had  obviously cooled 
> down slowly overnight, and was stable.
> So there you have a field observation under more controlled  conditions 
> than we usually see, for the record. (I tuned it where it  was).
> Regards,
> Fred Sturm
> University of New Mexico
> fssturm at unm.edu
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