Customer Complaint on Tuning

[Ed Sutton]

 Will-

This is a person who paid you a good price to make her piano better. She obviously loves music and wants to play and enjoy her instrument.
It doesn't really matter what it sounds like to you if you can make it sound good for her, given her hearing difficulties.

For example you could make a "moderator," a thin practice mute that only goes over the high treble section. Start with a thin piece of muslin. Mozart's piano had something like this.

You can leave a strip mute in between every other space, effectively converting the instrument to bichord treble unisons, or even mute fully to leave one string per note. You can lay felt on the bridge end of the strings to muffle the sound.

I recently had a customer in her nineties conclude (after visit to an audiologist) that her hearing was too far gone to play any more. It was not a happy moment. Losing capacities isn't fun. We tend to deny as long as possible.

Ed Sutton
    I have a customer in her early 80's whose Knabe grand action I rebuilt about 3 years ago.  When I go to tune the piano (which I do every six months), she is always asking me to voice down the treble.  She says the middle and the bass are just fine, but (and she'll go over the piano, bang some notes "Hear that, it's way too bright, it's awful").  Well, I've voiced the dickens out of top 3 octaves of that piano, it's like milquetoast to my ears.  The rest of the piano is much brighter, and I've voiced this piano enough to feel like I've taken too much away;  BUT it's still too bright to her.  She's a really sweet lady, and her hearing is not perfect but certainly not at the 120 db TV level yet.

     

    We've been doing this for a while.  She still likes me and I like her.  But I am thinking to myself, what's going on here?  So I approached Laura, who is an audiologist and a good friend (we have been teaching skiing at the same mountain in New Hampshire for a number of years) and asked her what might be going on with my customer's hearing.  She explained to me that there is a condition that some older people can develop where they develop a hypersensitivity to higher frequencies that actually can cause them discomfort when hearing those higher frequencies.   She told me the name of the condition but I have forgotten it since it was last winter when I asked her (sorry).

     

    The person isn't really aware that they have this condition - they are aware of the symptoms, which cause them discomfort.  Which, of course, makes it hard for them to understand why you are having such a blasé reaction to all this, when (to their mind) it's so obvious that any fool can hear it.  

     

    Basically, it's a situation you cannot win.  She doesn't want to hear "It's you, Lady!"  

     

    So, yeh Terry, you got it right.  Smile, wiggle a few tuning pins, and say: "Oh, yeah, that should sound better now...?"

     

    Will

     

     
    www.farrellpiano.com
    terry at farrellpiano.com
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