Sorry, but I need step in with a response to Fred's last post. "Polemics", or a Polemical argument, is not necessarily emotionally based, but more specifically ...."an aggressive attack on or refutation of the opinions of another.... the art or practice of disputation or controversy." It is one of the oldest Polemical tricks in the book to label the other side as Polemic. Home key choices by specific composers and consistent compositional styles in within various keys, are facts. What that specifically means to anyone however, is personal. We are all professional tuners, with legitimate opinions on the subject of tuning. In a not so well publicized event back in 1812, two Journeyman at the Broadwood Factory actually fought a duel over the ..."best way to tune a piano". It wasn't recorded who won. As for the tune off, please allow me another "fact" that hasn't been mentioned this time around. It is a fact that inharrmonicity has the effect of reducing the physical size of commas. The greater the inharmonicity of an instrument, the smaller the size of the commas and consequently less tempering of intervals is required. Lower inharmonic pianos have a preferred sound, but they actually have more total beats going on in the octave. My point is that 2 beautiful pianos side by side tuned by 2 different experienced tuners in different but non-restrictive temperaments (i.e WT and ET) will both sound beautiful. This exercise would be fun and most likely revealing on a personal level, but it will not produce a definitive "winner". Not going to happen. If we were to do the same test on cheap spinets though- now that is an entirely different matter. I was offering classes on this subject 12 years ago. If you prefer the sound of all keys alike, of course this is possible on a spinet, but ultimately you are going to end up with more total beats/octave than necessary. That is because you will end up do tricks with the fifths to make it work. If the fifths are not all equal it is not ET. Typically, the black key thirds on a spinet piano in WT are beating approx as fast as would normally be expected in ET, while the white key thirds are significantly slower. This is fact. You can like that result or not. I do, and so do my customers. Ok.... back to work, Dennis Johnson -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut_ptg.org/attachments/20090130/6336ce11/attachment.html>
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