Hi Fred.
I look forward to getting some PC time to sit and listen you your
recordings. I've up to this point never had a problem discerning between
an ET and a Well, and have run into so far 2 pianists at the U that
immediately pick up on the difference as well. Still I rose your exact
point in a similar discussion a couple years back and Ed Foote was
immediately on line with a reply claiming his classes on the matter show
conclusively the majority of techs Do hear the difference. I defer to
him on that issue.
As to what the Tuneoffs show or not. I Dont think they can show anything
even close to conclusively as to whether it matters or not. They were
not designed to do so. In fact, they weren't really designed to show
anything at all directly. As to whether it matters or not. This
immediately depends on the arena we are in. Clearly for most listeners
it makes no difference... not even indirectly. But to show whether it
matters or not, you have to design a test which first shows whether or
not any significant number of people can notice such nuances in
tunings. I would be very very surprised, given the amazing quality of
the humans senses when first really put to tests to find there were not
some significant numbers of people who are capable of hearing such
differences right off, and even perhaps a few at this point who
consciously can identify what those differences are about.
I'll turn your other reasoning around on you just for the sake of making
a point. We could just as easily say "It is a hard concept for piano
techs to accept that it DOES make a difference since we have invested
so many resources in acquiring and using ETDs, and find so many easy
shortcuts in their use that provide large amounts of motivation to
justify saying... it doesn't matter".
Let me stretch the point just a bit further... in perhaps a bit over
obvious direction but one that illustrates my point. At this stage in
keyboard development and for the greatest percentage of listeners...
most can not discern the difference between the keyboard and an acoustic
piano. So really.. by the same reasoning it really doesn't matter
whether we use a Clavinova, or a piano... with rare exception.
Case in point... just tuned for the Eagles a week back. They had this
Yamaha C7 equipped with factory installed just about ever midi / effects
electronics you could imagine, and built in Helpenstill (Sp?) type
microphones. The thing sounds just like an electric piano. Perhaps the
pianist himself sitting on the stage may have been able to notice some
real acoustic properties... but most certainly no-one else in the
audience would hear those.... yet that sound was immediately accepted as
piano sound. Piano sound is getting morphed slowly but surely into a
synthetic reconstruction of it in the minds of more and more people all
the time.
Your question as to whether it matters or not really and very quickly
evolves into a much larger question that get right into human evolution
/ philosophical issues to begin with. I'd say right off the top, yeah...
it does matter. Not necessarily in a sense that requires me to place
some value comparison on the "matter-ness" of it all. But there are
noticeable differences, and they most certainly do matter.
Cheers
RicB
> 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
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