Echo-cho-ho-ho-ho-o-o-o-o~~~~~~~~~~

[Joe And Penny Goss]

SHUDDER
Joe Goss
imatunr@srvinet.com
www.mothergoosetools.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ron Nossaman" <RNossaman@cox.net>
To: <pianotech@ptg.org>
Sent: Saturday, July 27, 2002 5:37 PM
Subject: Echo-cho-ho-ho-ho-o-o-o-o~~~~~~~~~~


> Had an interesting tuning appointment yesterday morning. A small church
> congregation had built a VERY much bigger facility, and were chasing the
> more pressing finishing touches getting ready for their grand opening
> tomorrow. Their Yamaha C-6 had been moved into the sanctuary about a week
> ago, and my mission was to tune it and the new P-22 in the even newer
choir
> room. No Problem. It's what I do.
>
> The sanctuary turned out to be about a half-acre, octagonal,
> concrete-walled echo chamber. It wouldn't have mattered where the piano
was
> put with eight reflective wall surfaces at 45° from one to the next.
> Anywhere in the room was nearly equally as bad as anywhere else. The echo
> effect was unusual and bizarre too, not at all like the usual annoying
> "rifle shot" and diminishing ricochets I'm used to fighting everywhere. Oh
> no, not this one. For the first couple of seconds, there was a general
> continual (no pulse or ricochet) sound at the same pitch as the note
> struck, which gradually lost volume, clarity, and organization over the
> next five seconds or so, and finally died in a sudden total
disorganization
> that sounded like a grubby buzz. Brown noise, very unpleasant. It reminded
> me of multiple generation Xerox copies that lose clarity, resolution, and
> detail with each generation, still being mostly recognizable until
finally,
> one copy looks like a Jackson Pollock Rorschach that someone cleaned fish
> on. That was the buzz that finally killed the sound abruptly in phase
> cancellations. At least that's what I thought it sounded like. An
extremely
> strange sound. The interesting thing was that it acted like a sort of
> extended super duplex! A very lively one. I got beats from the echo when I
> changed the pitch of a string, but the sustain was fantastic! I was
getting
> three+ seconds from C-8 putting my finger on the string immediately after
> striking it. The mid-tenor was good for over seven seconds with all the
> dampers down immediately after striking a note. You can't get that sort of
> response most places, tuned duplex or not. Fortunately, about ten minutes
> into the tuning, someone started vacuuming in the hall, and I had a
> familiar enough acoustical point of reference to finish up without severe
> psychological damage.
>
> The lady who set the appointment said the choir was becoming dangerously
> depressed trying to practice in there where they couldn't tell who was
> singing what when, and from which direction. I suggested she advertise for
> a basso profundo and break out the Gregorian chant sheet music. Heck, I'd
> even attend the service for that. She said she was seriously considering
it.
>
> I'm told a high-dollar acoustical engineer's disaster recovery team are
> coming in a couple of weeks to try and conjure up a fix that doesn't
> involve going back in time and shooting the architect before the thing was
> built. I hope they get it under control before the Fall tuning, but I
> expect it's going to be expensive. I can hardly wait to see what they do.
>
> Another day in tuning land.
> Ron N
>