A lovely bit of programming, and a very good fine, David! One thing I noticed is that there is little or no data on absolute pitch accuracy. (He mentions that accuracy is about .3 cents, and shows how his A=440 pitch fork when cold gives 440Hz +.2 cents, but avoids the actual question of whether this program's A440 actually _is_ A 440, and to what accuracy.)
http://www.tunelab-world.com/ has a tuning program which is meant for tuning pianos and other keyboard instruments. Tunelab97 has the following benefits: -freeware -can be calibrated (and has descriptions for using NIST tones, either by phone or radio, and a file that makes calibration this way easier) -can be fed temperament files, many of which are included in the distribution -has a phase-zeroing meter display, which shows the exact match of note to the target to a very small degree of cents (I believe, although I'm not rereading the spec right now, so I could be wrong, that a block moving the width of the screen in one second represents one cent of deviation) -allows measurement and calculation of stretch with adjustment to those results (which is very useful for non-harmonic overtones like pianos, but might be very useless for lutes) -handles any reference pitch (this is there because pianos currently in people's homes were built as much as 130 years ago, and might have been built to any of three or more pitch standards, but it has a much larger range -This calculation function also displays the strength of fundamental and overtones via bar graphs and shows the cents-deviation from harmonic for each overtone, which might be useful to someone studying the effects of harmonics on the tone and tuning of lute strings of different makes and manufacture -allows saving tuning files which include the reference pitch, temperament and stretch (if stretch is applied), so once you find out the tuning that works best with each instrument, you can save a file dedicated to that tuning for future use. I've used this program mostly for tuning keyboards, guitars and viols. I haven't tried it for lute yet, but it should be as serviceable as any PC-based program. There is no mac version, but there is a pocket-PC version (windows mobile) and a pro version, both of which have the same features, but are more aimed at the professional piano tuner. If you really want to throw money at a computer-based tuner program, the Reyburn Cybertuner may be for you. At about $1000, it has both PC and Mac versions, also for Pocket PC. If you don't have a pocket PC and want to go that way, they also have packages going for about $1000 plus the list-price for various models of Pocket PCs. Clearly intended for professional piano tuners! The major shortcoming of these packages for lute or viol tuning is that they are intended for chromatic instruments. This means, in general, that they will have an automatic next-note-search or next-note-sequence which will switch to a note within a chromatic semitone of the previous note (sometimes up to as much as a minor third away!), and can be set for bi-directional, up-only or down-only changes. Since lutes are diatonic in the basses and thirds and fourths elsewhere (likewise viols and guitars are a third and fourths) this automatic switching is not automatic switching at all. The up side is that they tend to correctly recognize the octave of the note they're trying to tune, so you can avoid, in the wild, tuning an instrument an octave low ( and then wondering why the strings are all flabby!) Anyway, if you find WinTemper to be what you really wanted, it's a bit of labor and no cost to calibrate it against a real pitch standard. Most countries have some method, radio or phone-based, of disseminating their accepted pitch standard (which should be A=440 to some ridiculous number of decimals), so playing this pitch into the computer will produce a reading that is the opposite sign of the deviation of the program's standard from the "actual" standard. In my short look at WinTemper, I didn't see a place to adjust the reference, but Tune-lab can be, so you can zero Tune-Lab and forget about absolute accuracy, or keep in mind that all the readings from WinTemper will need to be adjusted. The real test of these tuning programs come, however, when you have to adjust a large number of instruments to a non-standard pitch, in which case just changing the reference pitch (A= ) of WinTemper will probably do fine. This works as long as you aren't playing with someone who is neurotic about numbers, who will say, for instance, "We're tuning to A=415, not A=414.5!", even though their A=415 tuning fork is an actual A=414.5Hz. This is the point where acoustics becomes psycho-acoustics, though, which is probably beyond the scope of electronic/computer-based tuners... ray On 8/24/07, LGS-Europe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > If you don't own a multi-temperament or even programmable tuner, and want to > experiment with the various temperaments, here's a good one for free: > http://www.wintemper.com/ > > David > > > > **************************** > David van Ooijen > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > www.davidvanooijen.nl > **************************** > > > > > To get on or off this list see list information at > http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html >
