Sat Tuning comparisons

[Jim]

To the list:

			The Arizona Tuneoff

At the Arizona State Seminar in January of '97, three Yamaha U1's
were tuned before a tuning class was given. Near the end of the class
the pianos were each played in varying order while the attendees
scored which piano they preferred. this particular tuneoff was not
between two tuners, but between styles of tuning - the same technician
did all of the tuning.

The room arrangement was somewhat like the illustration below:

_______________________________________________________________
|
|
|           /      _________________   _________________
|          /
|         /            Center piano        Right piano
|        /
|       / Left piano
|      /
|     /
|    /
|
|
|
|     \_/     \_/     \_/     \_/    \_/    \_/    \_/
|
|
|
|     \_/     \_/     \_/     \_/     \_/    \_/   \_/
|
|
|
|     \_/     \_/     \_/     \_/     \_/    \_/    \_/
|

I have taken the space to show the room layout because later, you
will see that it affected the results of the test.

In the first test, the piano on the left had been tuned with extra
stretch in all of the octave work, so that in the treble, the octave-
5ths and the double octave-5ths were balanced out, making the single
octaves a little wider and even the double octaves were wide thus
providing for almost pure triple octaves.  This is more stretch than
is usually done except on concert stage.  The Sanderson Accutuner was
used for the tuning.

The center piano was tuned with just the standard FAC stretch using
the Accutuner.

The right piano was tuned with an Accutuner, using the Coleman VII
Well temperament. with the additional stretch similar to the left
piano.

Each attendant was given a sheet of paper with 4 columns as follows:

Left piano      Center piano      Right piano      Can't tell


There were 17 rows below for voting their preferences of the 17
musical selections which were played by the same person on each
piano, who mixed up the order in which each piano was played.

The selections ranged from playing 4 octaves in several keys, playing
chords in several keys, playing Schumann, playing Chopin, playing
Gerschwin, and playing arpeggios.

At the end of the class, by a show of hands, we counted the voting
preferences and wrote them down on the board.  Later the individual
ballots were counted with the results being generally the same but
with more votes.  Here are the results:

Left piano      Center piano      Right piano      Can't tell
Wide Stretch    FAC stretch       Well Temp.       who knows

91              59                83               38


There seemed to be a slight preference for the wider stretch of the
left piano.  However, since there was such a high number of those who
couldn't tell the difference, this should not be taken too seriously.
The more amazing thing was that the Well Tempered tuning rated as
high as it did when no one knew in advance what the differences were
in the styles of tuning.  At least one thing is proved by this test
and that is that temperament is not all that important to the listening
musician.  Many in the audience were musicians as well as technicians.

Next time, we'll show the results of the voting of the second class.

Jim Coleman, Sr.

PS  I'll post the next and final article in a day or two.