>> > > It may be that the machine is fooled. Who first noticed this > > > "phenomenon" ? a machine tuner or an aural tuner? > > > > It is my understanding that Virgil is given credit for > > noticing this first. > > > > RicB > > Then it is easy. How many aural tuners notice this and care to > demonstrate it to other tuners? Unless this is can only be > shown on certain "high tension scales" methinks it would have > been noticed 100 years ago. ---ric > Ric and list, First I'm not a physicist commenting on this phenomenon but a very strong aural tuner who uses an SAT for comparison tuning. My findings. aurally and electronically, through the years seem to concur that 3 strings tuned together as an unison can and many time result in a combined different pitch. But not necessarily a flatter result. One of the ways I stumbled upon this was one time I decided to tune a piano using no felt temperament strip ( instead of my usual method). This was at the encouragement of Bill Garlick, who for many years advocated tuning in this method. In Europe this is the way the better tuners were taught to tune. So time was not an issue on this one day and my candidate was on a S&S concert instrument that I had tuned weekly. I knew the way the piano tuned intimately. That being said, the resulting tuning I arrived at was superiorly much cleaner and more harmonious sounding than with my usual aural method. At first I thought it was dumb luck but as I experimented with my tuning methods (aurally and electronically) I kept noticing that the tuning (many times but not always) improved if all 3 unisons were tuned as I progressed through the temperament. The resulting tuning represented a better presentation of octave stretch which agreed with the piano better vs. if I used the felt strip muted the piano. Why. At the time I wasn't sure but then I used the SAT to justify my thoughts and sure enough there was some justification of what I was experiencing. Take any 3 strings of an ordinary unison and measure electronically the readouts of each of the 3 strings. Many times the numbers are different. I remember Dr. Sanderson commenting on this as well, stating that if you want to get a better and more representative FAC tuning, measure your 3 notes with the unisons being tuned first and average them out. And sure enough the FAC tuning benefited as well. Why. My theory leads me to think that bridge notching and string speaking length have a lot to do with it. Bridges notched inconsistently will/can, in theory, yield slightly different speaking lengths and thus effect the unison quality of any given note. Essentially the strings can be out of phase and begin to have a canceling out effect. Mind you these are minute differences, but differences none the less. Do all pianos do it. I'm not convinced. But many do and enough so that my more serious concert tunings get the special treatment and unisons are tuned as I go. As far as Ric's comment on why wasn't this talked about 100 yrs. ago, well according to Bill Garlick it was. Which is why places like the Bosendorfer factory taught the tuners to only with a single rubber mute. It yielded better results. So there you go, one anal retentive aural tuner's take on the matter. Tom Servinsky, RPT
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