Laura Conrad wrote:
>
> >>>>> "John" == John Henckel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> John> Is "well-tempered" and "equal-tempered" the same thing?
>
> No.
>
> John> I don't think so. I was under the impression that
> John> equal-spaced half steps produced bad-sounding music.
>
> No, most "modern" music assumes an equal-tempered scale. If you try
> to play music more than a couple of centuries old that way, you get
> something that doesn't sound the way the composer would have heard
> it. Which most people who are used to equal temperament don't think
> sounds bad, but if you have gotten your ears used to the kind of
> difference between keys and purity of intervals that other tuning
> systems provide, it sounds bland or even out-of-tune.
>
> John> One time I watched a professional piano tuner and was
> John> surprised to see that he didn't use any electronic pitch
> John> measuring device. He only used ONE tuning fork for middle
> John> C, and he tuned all the other notes from there! I said,
> John> "why don't you just tune each note separately to its correct
> John> frequency" and he said that would sound awful. He said it
> John> is impossible to tune any piano perfectly, but it is always
> John> a compromise of many different factors. In other words, it
> John> is an art.
>
> Yes, but he still tuned the piano to an equal tempered scale. Piano
> tuning is an art because piano strings are stiff, so the harmonics of
> the string are not the same as the mathematical overtones. Also, the
> tone sounds better if the 2 or three strings that are struck for one
> note aren't exactly in tune.
>
> So you don't tune anything exactly to the "correct" frequency. For
> instance, you don't tune the octaves exact, because if you did, you
> would get horrible difference tones between the fundamental of the
> higher note and the first overtone of the lower note.
>
> And of course the great composers for the piano play games with these
> peculiarities. I remember a chord in a Messiaen piece that is just
> left to ring for about 10 seconds. Depending on the piano and the
> room acoustics, the different harmonics damp out at different rates,
> so the sound changes from second to second in really marvelous ways.
>
> Harpsichords (and fortepianos) have less stiff strings, so you can
> tune them to the "correct" frequencies for the tuning you've decided
> on. It's deciding on the right tuning for a given concert that may
> have pieces in several keys and from a range of composers and periods
> which constitutes the art in that case.
>
> --
> Laura (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
> http://www.laymusic.org : Putting live music back in the living room.
>
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About a week and a half ago I asked a piano tuner friend how he did it.
He has a tuning fork to start (A=440) and has a table of beat frequency
differences to tune to by comparing one string to another (tightening or
loosening a sting will tell if the adjusted string frequency is higher
or lower than that of the reference string). So it's tuned to 12TET, and
not to just intonation.
Bruce Olson
--
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