Yes... excellently stated David ! I think this hits on several central points in the many debates surrounding ETD vs aural tunings, ETD devices in general, and for that matter stretch discussions. Ron N question how on could not listen to everything at once when aurally tuning.... yet those who learn to tune listening to exact coincident pairs, using specific tests to accent these... ghosting techniques and the like learn at first to do exactly that. And this is very close to what single partials ETD's do as well. They judge the inharmonicity to be sure, and then use one or another stretch algorithm to align partials pairs to a certain predetermined width. But they are always "listening" to one simple frequency at a time. And both methods actually result in a quite ok tuning... Still as David point out and as we've talked about many times in both styles... there is a refinement process after getting this basic tuning done... that second pass where you begin listening to more then just how well any set of partials pairs or any other kind of <<rules>> are followed. You listen to how well these things have stayed where you put them, and how well they actually work on the piano... adjusting / tweaking as needed. I think that folks who follow Virgils reasoning simply develop a method of going right to this step... simply by passing (to a very large degree at least) that initial alignment of the tuning. They take it for given that these partials pairs will be in place as needed anyways as a result of getting the more holistic sense of in-tuneness right from the get go. Cheers RicB Or factored out. I think we forget that when we were learning all this it took great effort to hear "through" all the noise and focus our attention where we needed to. At a certain point in our skill development we became able to switch our attention around at will. We can be aware of other things without being distracted from the task at hand. Much like being in a room with multiple conversations, you can only really hear what one person is saying even though you hear everyone else talking. That being said, there is also a sense of whole tone listening that we also develop such as learning to tune unisons "dead". You're not really listening for beats or any particular partials then but rather the general character when one of the two strings disappears and they sound like one. In short we engage in different types of listening depending on what we are trying to accomplish and the circumstances we find ourselves in with different pianos and varying quality or clarity. That is what really defines our particular skill. David Love www.davidlovepianos.com
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