A440A@aol.com wrote: > > << R Moody asks back.... > Ed,,,,, If Emanuel Ax, ,, PLUS a professor at Vanderbilt can't > tell the difference between ET and what you tuned, why should we > (tuners) be concerned with tuning something other than ET?? >> > > Hmm, I would phrase it another way, ie, Why should we tuners be > concerned with exactness of tuning ET, at all? But that is to miss the > exciting part, which is, 'what can the tuner do to improve the art'? Yes... You seem to be more and more advocating that any exactness relative to ET is unncessary, not hearable, a waste of time, and will not be stable for more then an hour or so anyways.... yet somehow manage to turn the same argumentations 180 degrees around as being somehow points in favour of HT's. Personally I see a problem in managing that trick. As for your argumentation about why HT's sound "better"... this is built on some pretty large assumptions about matters we will never have comfortably reliable information on. The degree to which music was ever written for any particular kind of key colour is at best a speculative question. And again... to use your own argumentations ... why should there have been ??? I mean obviously folks are not capable of "hearing" much at all, or perhaps you aslo advocate the idea that the musicians and audiences of 100 years ago had more highly developed musical ears the modern ears are. > > > To a hummingbird that sees the infra-red spectrum, the world is a very > differently colored place. > > The pianists didn't "see" the difference because they were not looking > for it! I have seen this occur in numerous situations. When I tell > pianists that there are two different tunings on side by side pianos, and ask > them to just tell me which sounds better, 99.9% of them have chosen the > Broadwood. However, if nothing is said, less than half will detect a > difference. What accounts for this? The problem with this question seems to be more a matter of not looking past the first and best explanation that fits the bill at hand. Its an interesting question to be sure. Tho it might also be said that given two such pianos both tuned in as perfect an ET as is possible, 99.9 % (to use your own out of hat statistics) would pick the one that had slightly sour unisions. I remain far from convinced that any of this has directly to do with HTs. -- Richard Brekne RPT, N.P.T.F. UiB, Bergen, Norway mailto:rbrekne@broadpark.no http://home.broadpark.no/~rbrekne/ricmain.html
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