"killer octave:

[Ron Nossaman]

>I would be glad to help out with measuring any data you need for your
inquiries
>Ron. I have 17 good to excellent quality grands, and 26 varying quality
>uprights at my disposal for very frequent measurements at the university. You
>just tell me what you want measured, and I'll send it along to you. I have the
>RCT, and Tunelab to work with in this regard.
>Richard Brekne

I appreciate the offer, and from others who have also responded positively,
but I'm not entirely sure at this point what I need. I was planning on
starting with a couple of pianos with my soundboard designs (not exhibiting
killer octave problems), and taking a series of pitch readings to determine
pitch drop in each tested unison as the second and third strings are tuned
in. I then wanted to compare the results against a piano exhibiting
definite killer octave problems to see if there was any correlation. The
RCT would be a better choice for this since I could get some spectral
analysis information from the pianos tested to, again, look for any
correlations. I don't really (yet) have a great enough number of boards
with known high impedance killer octave and treble areas for controls, but
I have to start somewhere. For now, I probably need to be able to hear the
tested pianos as well, to help set up the control criteria for further
defining the experiment. I'm not sure where this will end up, or if it will
tell me anything useful at all, but I can't help but think all these
bizarre phenomena in this area of the scale connect at a common source. If
I turn up anything promising, I'll issue the request for help with a
broader sampling and we'll see where it leads. Meanwhile, thanks for your
interest and... stay tuned (it may be a while).

Ron N