Steinway legless bridge

[Stéphane Collin]

Hi Ric.

Ric wrote :

> Rationalality, numbers and formulars,
> mathmatical modelings, and the rest just dont fit at least half of what
> can be loosely called the musical ear. Ok.. for some it does, and for
> others it doesnt... to some more or less degree. Whats noise for some is
> sweet music to others... usually to at least as many others.

You can hardly imagine how happy I am to read such a comment.  Just two
details : shouldn't we read "Rationality", and "at least one tenth of ..." ?
While I would be first to support efficient formalization efforts (to which
I will always raise my hat), I like in the end to trust my intuition when it
goes about aesthetical appreciation.
Once you have made a formalization (that costed you lots of research), there
is a danger (for me at least) to bend your sensitivity to automatically
guarantee it.  In my opinion, one should always be open for beauty, at
first, and then maybe try to measure it.

In the case of the legless bridge discussion, many statements were made on
basis of the (logical) prejudice that a good scale should follow as closely
as possible a geometric progression of speaking lengths (which might be a
universal invariant, but maybe not).  Still I would be interested if you
could dispose of the actual speaking lengths of the strings near the strut,
and, until then, even if I understand the logic behind geometric progression
of string lengths down the scale (at least on the long bridge), was it pure
pythagorean, or with a pounded factor, I might stay open for the possibility
that someone in the past found some very pleasure in hearing the aesthetic
result of something else (was it at the cost of some other features, like
tuning stability).  And sure I would love to share this pleasure with him.

Same thoughts about the old (ok, ingenious, but clearly improvable) desings
versus new (per se better, when made in that sense) ones.  I believe that
the idea of progress in science is a simplified one.  I think some skills
have disappeared.  Of course, some knowledge is on the raising side of the
big wheel (no doubt), but some others are on the fall (no doubt for me).  At
least, this is my formalization of a problem I encounter every day : I tend
to aesthetically prefer older pianos.  Just one example comes to my mind :
the art of letting bass dampers lift earlier than the other ones, in order
to create a modulable sound at disposal for colour shades effects : choosing
which dampers and how much could take a life of passionnate trial/error
experiments, carefully evaluated by month of playing repertoire, to approach
the amazing results I was lucky to hear in some older instrument.  No need
to say that no recent piano would help me in that direction : anyway the
dampers are too large, nowaday, to let play with the resonance of muted
strings.  Damping has improved, for sure, but where is the beautiful world
of variable tone richness, so precious when you have had a true taste of it
?

Stéphane Collin.