Don <drose@dlcwest.com> wrote: > Hi Ron, > > No mention of mechanical impedance in the OED 23 volume version. > Specialized usage perchance? *giggle* *And* lets leave sheep and goats out > of this discussion. > Search on "acoustic impedance" -- 2000+ hits on AltaVista. The petroleum industry cares a lot about it. > My point is that the data for a *perfect* tuning device would have to be > collected each and every time. Come to think of it...that's just what ears > do? LOLROF! > Right on -- ears and brain make a judgement about which partial-pairs (beat generators) are so strong that they can't be ignored, and then we concentrate on optimizing those pairs. We can update the victim list as we work, but to do a self-consistent job on a changed data set -- even with ears -- we have to make at least two passes, cuz we don't know about newly updated string interactions that we haven't heard yet. We can usually get away with just one pass and some final corrections when tuning by ear, and I'd expect the same to be true by machine -- re-estimating the relative importance of beat-generator pairs can be done on the fly in subsequent tunings. The value added is that we can *simultaneously* optimize more beat-generator pairs using a computer than we can with brains alone (or a conventional ETD). We won't achieve perfection. It can be defined (all beat rates set precisely to their theoretical targets, whatever the theory), but it can't be realized because of the physical limitations of strings and support structures, imperfect tuning technique, etc. However, we *can* do the practical engineering stunt of minimizing the overall errors for a chosen level of effort. -- Marc Damashek Hampstead, MD ____________________________________________________________________ Get your own FREE, personal Netscape WebMail account today at http://webmail.netscape.com.
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