[pianotech] inharmonicity in piano wire

[Ron Nossaman]

Bruce Dornfeld wrote:
> The sound of a piano is, as we all know, a very complicated system.  The 
> inharmonicity does not come from the piano wire alone.  If you bow (if 
> your violin bow doesn't fit, rosin up a scrap of old felt) a piano 
> string, the inharmonicity will be less than striking the string with a 
> piano hammer!  The formulas we have for inharmonicity in a piano do not 
> show these things; they assume the piano will have felt hammers, bridges 
> and a soundboard fixed on all sides.  How much these other 
> things influence inharmonicity, I don't know, but the image we like to 
> hold in our mind to understand it normally simplifies things too much.    
>  
>  
> Bruce Dornfeld, RPT

Simplifies things too much for what? The available math is 
quite sufficient for scaling purposes, and we don't typically 
personally calculate inharmonicity for tunings. Beyond a 
nominally practical approximation, of what further use do we 
have for ever more minutely accurate inharmonicity calculations?
Ron N