ears vs. eyes..kinda long-winded

[Susan Kline]

At 09:17 PM 10/19/2002 +0200, Isaac wrote:
>I am very sure that the modern ETD are the future of the tuning world,
>but let's keep some magic in the job, it is very important too.

Exactly. Thank you.

I can readily admit that for some tasks, such as tuning three pianos
to each other, or repeating a tuning for a recording some days after
the first session, an ETD is very handy, or possibly nearly indispensable.

So, hearing the choruses of praise for the electronic much-improved
gadgets from every side, I ask myself why I don't want to use one.

I think that the answer is hidden deep enough to be difficult to define,
but if I had to describe it, I might say that I like the direct contact
with the piano, and don't want a gadget stuck in between us. Also, that I
find blinking lights (or blinking/flipping anything) tiring and distracting.
Third, that while I get damned tired tuning pianos far too much of the
time, I don't seem to suffer from the "aural fatigue" which people are
describing. On a good long grand, it doesn't seem a struggle to perceive
whether a note should be higher or lower. On a crummy false spinet, it
is a nuisance to try to penetrate the false beats and inharmonicity,
especially in the bass, to try to get the least awful result; but I don't
really see that a machine will untangle the Gordian knot and choose
the least obnoxious sound even as well as a human ear, let alone better.
It may reduce fatigue by giving a false sense of a definitive result,
but I'm not sure that that is a good trade-off.

I think that the constant struggle to achieve clarity of sound in
poor pianos does come back and pay dividends when tuning good ones.
The daily investment of energy does count for something in the end.
One is working, after all, on clear, stable unisons and on adjusting
octave stretch to give the roundest and fullest sound, even when
the roundest fullest sound is still far short of gratifying.
("Ça laissait beaucoup à desirer" as Francis Planté murmured after
his one and only recording session, in his home, when he was an
advanced age ...) (Pardon my French, I was too lazy to look up
how it really was spelled ...)

I have been wondering about something -- as an aural tuner,
the theory of coincident partials, while understood, never
really enters into any decisions I make. I don't say, "Ah,
this piano needs a 6-3 octave ..." The ETD allows one to
dissect the different partials and make octaves where
some of them line up more or less exactly -- what I don't
understand is why one would want them to. The reinforcement
of certain partials at the expense of others is a balancing
act. Doesn't each piano (or even certain registers or
notes on a single piano) have a different profile of partial
strength? Therefore, wouldn't it be better to let the ear
decide how they should be balanced? Might it not be better,
sometimes, to have octave stretches in the cracks, to
prevent reinforcing an already too-loud and objectionable
partial?

(Ducking slightly, pulling Conrad's newest fashion creation
over my head ...) What else can you expect from a tuning
dinosaur, after all? Or, as I prefer to think of it:

Shouldn't there be somewhere a "living museum" tuner, who
never used the ETD, and therefore never was changed by
its particular biases and requirements?

And I volunteer!

Susan