Tuneoff

[Richard Brekne]

Richard Moody wrote:

> But how can this be determined?  What qualifies a good tuning?   How
> can any tuning be judged, and then its quality be shown?   If a better
> tuning is to mean anything in the music world it must be recognized
> and demonstrated in a way it can be heard by players and then
> hopefully by their listeners.  Since hearing and listening is the
> primary experience of music, the desired standards of tuning can only
> be determined by aural evaluation.
>
> A set of aural tests and evaluations should be agreed on.  This could
> be complied through suggestions and then agreed on in the comming
> weeks.

Virtually any aural test involving beat rates can be confirmed by a machine.
Machines are  not really set up to operate this way, but they can be easily
used in this fashion. If you want to be one hundred percent sure that you are
hearing say 6 beats per second for a given set of coincidents.. then just read
in Hz the two notes at that partial... and subtract the lesser value from the
greater. That will tell you exactly how many beats per second there are.

Its not a big problem to read in all relavant partials for all notes and use
the data to  spit out a beat rates chart showing exactly how the piano is
tuned.

One at the same time confirms an appropriate curve which is also easy to
confirm in this fashion.

The result of such an analysys is a completely impartial and exact evaluation
of how the piano is tuned relative to any given set of beat rate related
criteria.


--
Richard Brekne
RPT, N.P.T.F.
Bergen, Norway
mailto:rbrekne@broadpark.no