Had an interesting tuning appointment yesterday morning. A small church congregation had built a VERY much bigger facility, and were chasing the more pressing finishing touches getting ready for their grand opening tomorrow. Their Yamaha C-6 had been moved into the sanctuary about a week ago, and my mission was to tune it and the new P-22 in the even newer choir room. No Problem. It's what I do. The sanctuary turned out to be about a half-acre, octagonal, concrete-walled echo chamber. It wouldn't have mattered where the piano was put with eight reflective wall surfaces at 45° from one to the next. Anywhere in the room was nearly equally as bad as anywhere else. The echo effect was unusual and bizarre too, not at all like the usual annoying "rifle shot" and diminishing ricochets I'm used to fighting everywhere. Oh no, not this one. For the first couple of seconds, there was a general continual (no pulse or ricochet) sound at the same pitch as the note struck, which gradually lost volume, clarity, and organization over the next five seconds or so, and finally died in a sudden total disorganization that sounded like a grubby buzz. Brown noise, very unpleasant. It reminded me of multiple generation Xerox copies that lose clarity, resolution, and detail with each generation, still being mostly recognizable until finally, one copy looks like a Jackson Pollock Rorschach that someone cleaned fish on. That was the buzz that finally killed the sound abruptly in phase cancellations. At least that's what I thought it sounded like. An extremely strange sound. The interesting thing was that it acted like a sort of extended super duplex! A very lively one. I got beats from the echo when I changed the pitch of a string, but the sustain was fantastic! I was getting three+ seconds from C-8 putting my finger on the string immediately after striking it. The mid-tenor was good for over seven seconds with all the dampers down immediately after striking a note. You can't get that sort of response most places, tuned duplex or not. Fortunately, about ten minutes into the tuning, someone started vacuuming in the hall, and I had a familiar enough acoustical point of reference to finish up without severe psychological damage. The lady who set the appointment said the choir was becoming dangerously depressed trying to practice in there where they couldn't tell who was singing what when, and from which direction. I suggested she advertise for a basso profundo and break out the Gregorian chant sheet music. Heck, I'd even attend the service for that. She said she was seriously considering it. I'm told a high-dollar acoustical engineer's disaster recovery team are coming in a couple of weeks to try and conjure up a fix that doesn't involve going back in time and shooting the architect before the thing was built. I hope they get it under control before the Fall tuning, but I expect it's going to be expensive. I can hardly wait to see what they do. Another day in tuning land. Ron N
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