Fred- Sadly, and with a sigh of relief, I agree!! But I will keep trying to hear and tune better. It is worth remembering that if perfect tuning mattered that much, pianos would not exist, since they would need daily tuning to be tolerably in tune. Similarly, past a certain point, acute pitch sensitivity may be a musical hindrance. I recall going to school with someone whose claimed perfect pitch was so acute that almost nothing except his own playing was tolerable to him. It may be that those few who do have the ability to hear the difference select themselves out of the field. A violinist friend resigned from the symphony, saying "Fifteen years trying to play with a flat bassoonist and a sharp oboist were enough!" Similarly, I note that with the pedal down, most full, big arpeggios sound very nice to me. It is when I play quiet, simple, clearly voiced harmonies that I am more likely to hear with a slightly more cultured sense of pitch relationships. [So tonight I am weighing and hanging hammers, wondering how much those 0.1 gram differences can really matter.] Ed S. > > 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 > > >
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