[pianotech] phenomana - experiment.

[David Renaud]

Hello

    Interesting hypothesis.

    One set of raw data that relates and would be easy to collect would be inharmonisity
Readings for a set of given notes on the a given piano throughout the year.

    I would suggest C1,C2,C3,C4,C5, and also the bottom couple tenor plain strings, whatever they might be.

    If the inharmonisity readings change from the highest humidity of the summer, to the driest months of the winter on account the board being stiffer innsummer, or more free in winter,  then the resulting "ideal" tuning would also have to change.

   Never tried to test or monitor this, actual numbers on a variety of pianos, old and new would be interesting to look at. 

   I have a Steinway A2 , and a Yamaha U1 at home I can measure any time I want though out the year. If a few others would do the same we could have seasonal sets of numbers on a few dozen pianos, enough to establish a working hypothesis to continue to test. 

   I do think master tunings will evolve as strings age also. They become more brittle, stiffer, more liable to break as the molecular structure aligns itself and the harmonics tend to creep increasingly sharp with the increased stiffness. Again, a hypothesis I'd love to see real data on. 
How quickly do the strings change from new, how much?

   Volunteers to monitor some pianos and share the numbers? I'll monitor 2 pianos.


                                                    Cheers
                                                      Dave Renaud 


Sent from my iPad

On 2012-05-15, at 8:27 AM, Ron Nossaman <rnossaman at cox.net> wrote:

> On 5/14/2012 11:38 PM, Joseph Garrett wrote:
> 
>> Ron,
>> I have a sneaking hunch what you are alluding to.<G>
> 
> 
> Sorry Joe, that wasn't intended to be so terse. I think the coffee's working now.
> 
> But yea, the different readings reported by ETD users in different seasons is pointing to something that changes in the piano regarding not only the need to adjust pitch (obvious), but the indication that the finished tunings produced aren't the same from season to season. This has been mentioned occasionally since the SAT first showed up, but to my knowledge no one has ever saved these differing tunings for comparison of the offsets note by note. I think that has the potential for teaching us something.
> 
> As usual, I'm trying up front to head off the volume of descriptions of workarounds, octave ratios, stretch manipulations, and other customizations and peripheral esoterica universally accompanying discussions of ETD tuning, by trying to explain what I'm after. Though this has nearly never worked in the past on any given subject, I don't know any other way to ask.
> 
> So in order to get anything at all useful from the data, I need duplicate processes (as is possible) producing the tunings, so we can see what the piano is actually doing season to season without contaminating the data with changing input.
> 
> So with an aurally super tuned testing piano serving as probably the most reproducible aural tuning, What are the recorded note by note differences with a 30%RH difference when the tunings were done?
> 
> I'm not sure how to do this with an ETD. Since I'm not after the ideal *result*, but rather the difference in results with the same machine setup, I don't know what to specify. But, again, I'd like the note by note offset differences of the results. I don't know, but I probably need an *ideal* version too, with tweaks as necessary since that happens in the interval checks with the aural tuning. Like anything, I won't know what I need until I find out by wading through what it turns out I don't need. That just seems to be the way things work, and at the end, I may still not know. But such is the process.
> 
> If I can get clean data from as near identical input from both methods, there should be a correlation in the recorded note by note offset results that represents how the soundboard assembly is filtering and changing the process that we can separate from the tuning method and get some idea what we're actually dealing with in trying to tune these things. I still maintain that pianos can't be tuned, much less be kept in tune, but I'd like to try to understand more about the why of it with the tools available. Unfortunately, I haven't the means to do it myself and am asking for help.
> 
> I think that's more like what I mean.
> Ron N