[CAUT] ET vs UET was RE: using as ETD

[Jeff Tanner]

----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Laurence Libin 
  To: caut at ptg.org 
  Sent: Monday, April 19, 2010 12:47 PM
  Subject: Re: [CAUT] ET vs UET was RE: using as ETD


  I don't doubt that pre-1880 Continental tuners (we can't know how many) often sought to make all keys sound alike on the piano, but whether their solutions measured up to ET is debatable; we have no way of knowing, and the imprecision of tuning instructions leaves the question open. 
As far as that goes, can we really claim that what we do today measures up to ET? Considering scaling inharmonicity inconsistency, etc.? Our instructions should get us pretty close, but in practice, from tuner to tuner and from instrument to instrument, all kinds of variations exist.  

This is an extreme example, of course, but the Baldwin 500 (spinet) scale, when equally divided with an ETD at the 4th partial, will produce contiguous thirds in the C28-C40 octave which do not progress evenly, but actually will progress in reverse, getting slower as you go up the scale, if the C28-C40 octave is to wind up anywhere close to acceptable.  An aural tuning of this scale will create all sorts of problems if we try to force on it our aural definitions for ET.  The errors in better scales certainly won't be as noticeable, but they will be there to some degree.
Jeff
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