[CAUT] String Coupling / SB and Bridge stiffness...and maybe Pure Sound

[Fred Sturm]

On Jun 13, 2009, at 5:12 PM, Richard Brekne wrote:

> Still... they did show one thing.  The audience at hand was not able  
> to make a conclusive choice. Which either says more about the  
> audience then anything else... or that once you get past a certain  
> degree of refinement we move over into the arena of how conscious  
> the tuning was and how well the result matches the intent.


	Or they show that, beyond a certain point of refinement, it really  
doesn't matter. Which is a hard concept for a piano technician to  
grasp, since we spend so much time obsessing over those details. We  
very badly want them to matter to our customers and our audience. I'm  
not at all sure that, beyond unisons, they do. Within a fairly wide  
(to our way of thinking) set of parameters. I know it's a shocking  
point of view, and that I should whisper it and hold my head in shame  
(because I obviously just don't have the chops to accomplish a fine  
tuning, or to distinguish one <G>), but it's the conclusion I have  
come to increasingly over time.
	On a somewhat related matter, I have written more than once about my  
Moore/ET experiments, and about my recordings that use both. I have  
now completed production and release of the CD that is about half and  
half ET and Moore (half the tracks one, half the other), and it is on  
the web at http://cdbaby.com/cd/fredsturm5 with samples (about a  
minute each) of all tracks. This recording was a redo of my first CD,  
which I recorded in ET. For my own amusement, and the possible  
edification of others, I have made a compilation of the two, with  
paired tracks. In each case, the first track is from the first CD, in  
ET. The second is the same music played on the same piano by the same  
pianist in either ET or Moore. They sound different, because one is  
five years later than the other and I changed performance (I certainly  
hope for the better), and the sound quality is better (better  
equipment and recording engineer). But you get a chance to hear the  
piece in ET, knowing it is ET, before trying to judge whether a track  
of the same piece is ET or Moore. I'll bring some copies to Grand  
Rapids in case anyone is interested. At some point I'll post some of  
them them to my web page, when I finally get through with designing  
and implementing it. (Too many more interesting things to do <G>).
	If we can't distinguish between ET and Moore, can we distinguish  
between a "highly refined" "aurally perfected" tuning (ET or whatever)  
and one that hasn't been so refined? It makes one wonder. At any rate,  
it makes ME wonder.
Regards,
Fred Sturm
University of New Mexico
fssturm at unm.edu