Quantifying What You Hear...

[Stéphane Collin]

Hello Matt.

You are after the holy graal of the piano technician/designer.
Just a thought : if you must quantify a quality, maybe the best way to 
approach is doing statistics among a large group of attendees.
Now, go and quantify "personnality" ... while for the individual who thinks 
"this piano has personnality", he can be very sure of that, for himself.
So, in my opinion, scientific analyse could be the wrong tool for the 
purpose.  I personnaly would lend towards analogic thinking and personnal 
experience to build up a certain "truth" which would enlight only me, as in 
this whole matter, it is about a certain analogy between the outer world 
(the piano) and the inner world (my soul), which raises, or doesn't raise, a 
certain kind of resonance (the aesthetical jubilation).
Most probably, the rest is about measuring proportions, amplitudes and decay 
times of combined sinusoidal acoustic waves.
Anyway, the research is great.

Happy new year to you and all.

Stéphane Collin.