SAT & RCT

[Kent Swafford]

james turner wrote:

>Friends,
>
>I have been thinking about getting the SAT lll, RCT or the TuneLab.
>When one tunes aurally, we listen to every note on the piano, intervals
>and so on.  What puzzels me is how a machine can measure only 3 or 6
>notes and compute an optimum tuning for a piano.  It seems to me that
>for any machine or computer to create a really good tuning, it would
>have to sample many more notes than 3 or 6?  Wouldn't a machine that
>sampled every note on the piano be a better tuning? Isn't this what
>aural tuning does to a degree?
>Thanks,
>Jim Turner

While it might very well be true that more data derived by sampling more 
notes would produce a better tuning, you get into a "diminishing return" 
situation, where more data might not be worth the trouble.

The strength of calculating tunings based on measurements of a few notes 
taken from various portions of the scale is that the resulting tuning can 
match the general level of inharmonicity of the piano as well as the 
general overall change in inharmonicity from one part of the scale to 
another. In other words, one can let the VTD provide the overall shape of 
the tuning, the macro-tuning if you will. The human tuner can then 
provide the micro-tuning by tweaking individual notes, like those notes 
on either side of the breaks or "maverick" notes that for whatever reason 
do not have the "expected" inharmonicity. For me, it is the combination 
of aural and visual techniques that is attractive, better than 
visual-only, better than aural-only.

Kent Swafford