On Jun 11, 2009, at 1:33 PM, Richard Brekne wrote: > "The Tune-Offs" have become legendary. I was not there, but reports > from people who were there convince me that nothing was proved. No > recordings or measurements were made. In fact, the legends are > seriously misleading about what happened. Jim Coleman may have kept > his tuning offsets, and about half the audience felt his tuning was > better than Virgil's. I don't think Jim considered the events to be > serious studies. > > I tend to agree for the most part, tho I might add that if they did > show anything conclusively, it was that the audience(s) of these > tune-offs were not capable of discerning much of a difference from > their listening positions...which may say more about the audience(s) > then anything else. I would also point out that Jims tunings were > not strictly by the dial, by his own admission. It would be more > accurate I think to describe his tunings as ETD assisted tunings. Hi RIk, I don't think you could call Jim's tunings for the tuneoffs "ETD assisted." They were calculated tunings, not altered "by ear" except maybe for unisons, from what he has said. For the first event, in CHicago, Jim used an RCT calculated tuning, the preset #9 stretch. RCT was brand new then, and he wasn't that comfortable using the interface, so he transferred the numbers to his SAT and used that to tune. At the second event in Orlando, Jim says he used his pure fifths concept, emulated mathematically. He wrote about the theory in a PTJ article, but in any case, it was a mathematically calculated tuning, produced by tuning by ETD, not by checking intervals aurally (unisons again possibly excepted). So we had a tune off between a purely aural tuner, and one who tuned using some fairly extreme mathematically calculated tunings, accomplished via ETD. The consensus was that it was a wash. Listeners could really not tell the difference. The notion that the audience was inferior in perceptive ability, or that somehow their positions relative to the piano made it so they couldn't hear well? I think that is pretty silly. Let's be real. These were a bunch of piano technicians, who are better trained at hearing tuning than most musicians. In any case, it can't be taken as "aural versus ETD" in any real way. It is one person's aural tuning versus a couple strange, non-standard ETD tunings. But I think it is suggestive that most people present (I wasn't there) actually found both tunings to be basically equivalent and quite good. I agree with Ed Sutton, that there is far too much mythology about tuning out there. Like him, I prefer the practical to the pie in the sky. My experience tells me there is a very wide variation in tuning styles that is found quite acceptable and indistinguishable by musicians. The one thing they hear is unisons. The rest is much more smoke and mirrors, self-deception, and obsessive-compulsive than actually useful in the real world (meaning actually perceptible to real, ordinary people who play or listen to pianos). Not that I don't obsess myself <G>. Regards, Fred Sturm University of New Mexico fssturm at unm.edu
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