"Put a plug in it"

[Ron Nossaman]

>I hear a lot about hearing loss on this list.  It doesn't surprise me.  I
>also wonder about hearing loss for the pianists who slave away at their
>instruments for hours on end.

Me too, especially those on those old Hamiltons in an 8X10 cinder block 
practice room. Waling away on two to six strings at a time is nothing 
compared to waling away on ten or twenty.

Also, checking out the pedal problem under the grand as the customer 
decides to demonstrate by playing her most energetic piece. Hint: always 
wear ear protection when under a piano.


>  As a novice, I notice I
>sometimes have to take longer than I should when tuning a stubborn string
>(e.g. with a jumpy pin) -- probably much longer than any of you.  When that
>happens, I notice habituation to the frequency of that note.  (Perhaps I
>notice it only because it is an interesting phenomenon to me,
>physiologically.)  Anyway, when I notice that happening, I make it a point
>to move on to other notes and to come back later.

Good observation. That tends to go away eventually as your hammer technique 
improves and you learn to stop tuning past the point of diminishing returns 
and move on.

Another thing I noticed back when the earth was young and I was trying to 
learn to tune, were the "islands" in my hearing. My aural perceptions were 
lumpy. I discovered that the volume, clarity and resolution of my hearing 
was nowhere near uniform through the frequency range of the piano. In fact, 
that's why I learned to tune from a C fork, rather than an A. I could hear 
the C better. Within a year or so, I had apparently made the internal 
calibration adjustments to compensate, and was (am) no longer aware of the 
difference. I can't imagine that these inconsistencies deep within my shell 
pink audio receptors went away, but something about learning what to listen 
for and where to listen masked the inconsistencies to the point I could no 
longer detect them.

Another case of what we think we hear being what we actually hear after 
filtering through our expectations and experience.

Ron N