Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum What is happening when we use stretch tuning?

Because people like you are not interested in being objective.

I never labor over these things... Human science is never perfect (and sometimes not even in the realm of reality at all). Theory is simply that- "theory".
You can't beat learning to set temp by ear, and training the ear TO HEAR. It gives great advantages and benefits, especially when it comes to the quarrels around theories, stretch-possibilities, and acu-tuners programing...
Tune it to sound the best it can. If you can get there with a machine, more power to you- but, I've yet to see a machine tuning that didn't need tweaking by ear to be right in certain areas.
In the argument over what is right (in tune)- the ear should be the final judge- not a machine; since the machine will neither be playing, nor listening to the music.
Just my opinion anyway.

Too bad you didn't have something constructive to say.

That is how I have felt about your posts about tuning ever since you were unable to show a calculation that you claimed to have made.

Why don't you explain again that all ideas about partials people have believed in for over 100 years are wrong and should be supplanted with your "theory" of combinatorics?

Kees

Since I have explained it before, and since you claim not to understand it, perhaps you could be explicit about what you do not understand.

Perhaps you could also explain what I do not understand, including several things that I have asked before without receiving answers:

How do you define the frequency or pitch number of a piano note?
What generates the "partials" of a piano note?
How are audible beats produced? I should add, if not by the method that I have demonstrated graphically?

I think rigidity is the more relevant factor, not thickness. But you are right in that rigidity does not matter at the nodes since the nodes do not have to bend. The rigidity matters everywhere else, and that is what causes inharmonicity.

The only way theory can predict perfectly harmonic partials is when the restoring force during vibration is due only to the spring constant of the string in the longitudinal direction. If anything else causes an addition restoring force above and beyond what the longitudinal spring constant is providing, that will raise the frequency of vibration at that partial.

Since higher partials involve more bending that lower partials, the frequency of the higher partials will be higher than they would be without the transverse rigidity. Note that this even affects the fundamental a little because there is a little bending going on at the fundamental too. However it would be very difficult to demonstrate this experimentally because you would have to devise a string with the same mass and longitudinal spring constant, but a radically different transverse rigidity. Maybe some very carefully made wound strings?...

The discussion of ear vs. machine is complicated by the fact that we have several phenomena in play at once. On the ear side, there is a matter of psycho-acoustics that is subjective and difficult to relate to precise measurement. But there is also the matter of beats which are objective and affect both the machine and the human ear. When beats are not a factor, human perception of what is "correct" is what it is. There may be a human desire to hear stretched octaves. I don't know. That desire might even be culturally conditioned. However when beats are a factor, humans tend to pay attention to them and perceive them as "out of tune". It is beats in the presence of inharmonicity that cause us to make stretched octaves ("stretched" in terms of the fundamental). It is not an artifact of machine tuning. Tuners have been tuning stretched octaves since before there were machines for measuring tuning. But they would not be aware of it because to them they were just trying to tune beatless octaves.

BDB, you are free to feel however you want about whatever you want, but trying to manipulate others by making them feel guilty about how you say you feel can have unintended consequences.

I don't know for certain what instance you are referring to. I was probably unwilling, rather than unable, to show the calculations because I saw the question as not being made in earnest. If you remember the details, we could try again on a fresh Topic.

Holding a grudge certainly isn't being objective, is it?

The reason for my suggestion was that since you declared all responses to the OP's question "unscientific", the contributors to this thread might like to hear from you what a truly scientific explanation of stretch is.

I am personally not interested as I consider your "theory", which denies the existence of partials, to be pseudoscience of the "flat-earth" type.

Kees

I see that nobody wants to take a stab at my three questions.

At the danger of grabbing a dog by the ears here...
Science is a human understanding of something (changes with new information)- to think one knows(i.e. so-called, "knowledge" = "science").

Too many times our knowledge ('what we think we know') puffs up- and a little more humbleness on the part of the human ego could perhaps actually help lead to the Truth- (an altogether different word than science)...

I might note that,

Denying Truth is called self-deception...

Denying science presented at face value (without a complete presentation of truth to support) merely makes one cautious, and rather intelligent in my opinion.

I think the point has been thoroughly discussed here in PW in other threads and you insist to deny the evidence shown to you.

And one more poster cannot answer the questions!

I would give answers if I thought they were earnest questions, but they are not. You know perfectly well what the conventional answers are, and you know that nobody will give the answers you think are correct, or perhaps they are just trick questions like "Why do people drive on a parkway and park on a drive way." You have a hidden agenda, of course.

If there is a subject you want to bring up, simply start a new Topic and bring it up rather than playing games and piggy-backing on this one.

One more!

Childish! Matt 11:16-17

I'll answer by asking you to perform a couple of experiments which, hopefully, your hypothesis will be able to explain.

(1). Raise the damper on E3 using the sustain pedal. Play E4. What do you hear? Why?
(2). Raise the damper on E4. Play E3. What do you hear? Why?
(3). Raise the damper on E3. Play E5. What do you hear? Now play E4. What do you hear now? Explain your observations.

Play a 200Hz sine tone into a loudspeaker. Describe the motion of the cone.
Play a 400Hz sine tone into a speaker. Describe the motion.
Now play both the 200Hz and 400Hz sines at the same time. What do you hear? How is the cone moving?

Using Audacity, generate an anti-aliased square wave at 0.5 amplitude and 200Hz. Now add another track and generate a 601Hz sine wave at amplitude 0.5. Play both tracks back simultaneously. What do you hear? Why?

Pluck a guitar string at different points along its length. Explain why the timbre changes.

Why do piano manufacturers set the hammer strike point where they do. How does this affect the tone? Why?

Please explain all of your observations above using your hypothesis.

As for the pitch of a note - do you mean measured or perceived? You can experiment with this with inharmonic tones using audacity with various relative amplitudes, including setting the fundamental to zero, or with an additive synthesizer.

Paul.

You can't, since the piano sound is not a periodic waveform. You can only define the frequency of its various partials. Asking for the pitch of a note is like asking for the pitch of C-major chord.


The various modes of vibration.


By the variations in amplitude of the combination of two or more partials from different strings. Or in the case of "false beats", they are produced by the combination of two or more modes of vibration of the same string, usually horizontal vs. vertical.

Robert answered them and I asked you some follow-up questions.

Perhaps you could respond to both of us at some point?

Paul.