pitch drop :was Virgil's natural beats

[Ron Nossaman]

>Hi Ron
>This is really difficult to pin down without knowing what each other is
>listening to.Do you mean that when you add the second string to the
>first,that as it is coming into tune that you hear the "sound" of the two
>strings drop?To me ,that would be the increase of the sound of the
>fundemental of the note rather than the sound of one of the higher partials
>dominence of the total sound.Are we still talking about different things?
>
>Murray

Hi Murray,
The thing is that (in the killer octave area - generally) a unison of three
strings tuned together is often (not always) slightly lower in pitch than
any of the strings sampled individually. That's not just how it sounds,
that's how it measures with an ETD. It isn't a case of the first string
being knocked out of tune as the unison is finished. Tuning as clean an
aural unison as you can achieve, it is often lower in pitch than the
original reference string. Muting tuned strings two and three, and testing
the first tuned, demonstrates that the tuning hasn't moved, but the
resultant pitch has. And yes, the quick and dirty testing I did indicated
to me that tuning the unison aurally produced less cumulative drop than
following the ETD display. No surprise there. This is a coupling effect of
some sort that has resisted explanation for a long time. I had speculated
that it seemed likely to be impedance related, then discovered the dramatic
difference with the back scale taped off. There seem to be a whole lot of
interactions happening at once here, so I don't really know for sure what
we're hearing and measuring. So far, numbers have been produced by direct
measurement my a handful of interested souls that illustrate and verify the
effect, but no one seems to have published information on any sort of
realistic attempt to demonstrate the cause(s). More thorough systematic
testing, with a reasonable set of controls and substitutions, might answer
a few questions. Then again...

Ron N