EBVT Offsets (compilation)

[A440A@aol.com]

Kent writes: 
>At the risk of walking into a minefield here, there are ETD-based 
>temperaments out there for which no guidelines for the absolute / 
>relative beating, "beatless, equal beating, nearly equal beating" 
>intervals are available. So the tuner _cannot_ listen and adjust as 
>necessary. Not a good thing, IMO.

Greetings, 
   There is a point of diminishing returns involved in these decisions.  If a 
particular harmonic quality depends on distinctions of less than one cent, 
there are going to be few pianos or venues where they will make any 
difference.  Pianos move around.   Octaves that vary by 1 cent will usually 
not be noticed by musicians, and the effect of an equal beating triad is 
rarely altered by the amount of divergence a machine-only tuning allows.  
This is more true of well-scaled pianos.  Any short scale spinet can be 
better tuned by ear, since the machines don't make compromises very well,(the 
VT may do better than the others, depending on operator skill).    
   Also, the difference between a fifth that is Just and one that has 1 cent 
of tempering in not a difference that can be heard in the music, unless there 
is a particular use, in isolation, that sustains long enough.  Or, to put in 
another way, in fast passage work,(Scarlatti?) the tuning is almost 
irrelevant.  
    It is also seen that due to the coupled nature of piano strings, they can 
"draw" one another away from the pitch that would be produced in isolation. 
(hold down an ET C3-E3 and strike a staccato on the E5.  You will not hear 
the beating for a couple of seconds, then the "drawing" created by the single 
frequency of E5 will be overcome by the resonant periods of the lower strings 
and you will hear the beating begin).  
    As we tuners go through measuring intervals, we are hearing phenomena on 
a degree of scale that musicians don't.  I have seen this in changing the 
stretch for studio engineers and musicians.  Even the most astute ears didn't 
hear the difference between two tunings where the final C's ended up 10 cents 
apart.  I have tuned the top octaves of a piano with so much stretch that it 
almost sounded like two different notes, but the group of techs in front of 
me didn't notice anything until I pointed it out.  Only when the single 
octaves were played in slow movements did it become apparent.  
     
    It has become evident in the last 9 years that the arrival of the 
programmable machine has had a lot to do with the increased use of the 
temperaments. Though the knowledge required has been out for decades, working 
tuners never took up the cause, and I think it had to do with the amount of 
work involved.   However, there have now been far too many pianists 
successfully playing many venues and pieces, on machine-based non-ET tunings 
to think that the ETD can't produce.  They can.  I have seen world class 
artists blown away by a straight FAC, so I wonder if my 1 cent "tweaks" are 
really worth the effort.  
    (I am reminded of the first Sight-O-Tuner, which produced a tuning that 
Arthur Fiedler thought highly of!).  I also believe that Jim Coleman has 
demonstrated a machine only tuning that compared nicely with the best of the 
best ET tuners we have.  
   The machines aren't perfect, but they don't need to be in order to produce 
results that far exceed musicians ability to discriminate.  Many of us that 
learned to tune strictly aurally will always believe that the ear will always 
outperform the machine, but you will have a hard time finding musicians that 
can tell any difference between highly skilled techs using either.  ( I will 
be giving an aural demo at the chapter meeting this week and will try to 
record what differences are noted between the machines interpretation and my 
own). 
Regards, 
Ed Foote