This is not of any direct relevance, but some of you may find it interesting. It was probably about eighteen years ago that a great niece of William Braid White found me to take some of his old papers. They now are part of the PTG Foundation archives. In the late 1940s WBW was designing scales for the Jesse French Company. Dr. Al Sanderson asked to see some of his worksheets of the scales. He studied the formulae while I watched for fifteen minutes or so and determined that there was nothing in White's math to figure inharmonicity. I find it fascinating how the ideas and formulae for inharmonicity have developed. I don't believe that the concept of inharmonicity is mentioned in tuning texts until sometime after the development of electronic tuning devices. Stretching octaves maybe, but not inharmonicity. Wasn't the use of early ETDs what lead to the measurement and discovery of inharmonicity? On a more practical line, we know that longer unwound portions on a bass string create more inharmonicity. I find that most German grands have the windings come real close to the bridges and agraffes. It has always struck me as something that was done to show a certain virtuosity on the string maker's part. It also creates lower inharmonicity in the bass of these pianos which is usually a very good thing. There are some however, where the transition to the plain wire strings is too abrupt and perhaps the last wound strings should have had longer unwound portions. I observed this quality of bass strings in a Hamburg Steinway O that I serviced last week. Bruce Dornfeld, RPT bdornfeld at earthlink.net North Shore Chapter -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20090525/7bc911ac/attachment.htm>
This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC