As long as we're still speculating, how about this. Listening isn't the only thing Virgil (says he) does differently than the norm, in spite of that being his pitch (as it were). Perhaps Virgil isn't listening to anything at all different than any of the rest of us, but the fact that he compensates for unison pitch drops as he goes may be the primary reason his tunings are so pretty. It wouldn't be the first time someone's done something right thinking he's doing something entirely different, as I've discovered many times when I discarded or modified presumably "unnecessary" steps in an often done process to see what would happen. Also, listening to and tuning the unison (whole sound???) rather than the "partial" unison (1 string???), could very well be the difference between beats between coincident partials and "natural" beats - Natural beats (in this case) being the sum of the individuals, and very obviously not the same as each individual separately. Since my superficial experiments indicate to me that I can't anticipate the degree of cumulative pitch drop when the unison is in tune, it might just be that simple and obvious a thing. It is, after all, accommodated in tuning by listening to the sum, rather than the parts. This fits pretty well, and doesn't contain any smoke, mirrors, suspension of disbelief, or the necessity of blood sacrifice or self flagellation. It's also quite thoroughly and precisely MEASURABLE with real world INSTRUMENTATION by nearly anyone at all. The apparent fact that it's not precisely predictable just means we haven't identified and produced ways of collecting measurements of all the determining factors yet, but that pitch drop does NATURALLY happen nonetheless. This observation may very well be out to lunch, but it seems considerably more credible to me than most of what I've read and heard on the subject. Or is it too obvious? Ron N
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