Friday, September 18, 2015
Why Pianos Can't Be Perfectly Tuned
io9.com: Technically speaking, pianos tuned to coventional 12-tone equal temperament aren’t actually in perfect tune. A new video from MinutePhysics explains the math behind this musical oddity, and why in the case of pianos, close enough is good enough.
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Though after 3 times watching this video I kind of only get some of the concept of this physics, I may narrow it down to the point of why we need to have a piano tuner and how much important they are to pianists life. A big company like Steinway & Sons have their own tiny group of piano tuner that among them, the best one’s job is to travel around the world tuning piano for those famous pianists who are “Steinway artists” and these people are really crazy. I used to watch a document about a piano tuner once and it was a pretty stressful job indeed. Not only this person carries the pressure of his own work, but also have to deal with artists’ diva-ness and pickiness. It’s not only physics and skills, because I believe on top of this physics that can be learned, it starts from the fact that a piano tuner MUST have the great ears that must be very sensitive and delicate.
This video is so cute! It combined complicated physics with simplistic drawing so I felt like I was back in grade school. I love these kind of videos, I watch another YouTube channel that does a similar style of video with complex math. It’s such an effective way to get hard to understand material across in a simple, effective way. This video in particular was fascinating because I never knew that a piano cannot be perfectly tuned. My uncle owns a piano shop and he has been tuning pianos the majority of his life so it was interesting to see into his world a little bit. I loved how at the end the guy was like you can do all this and it still won’t be in tune. I made me wonder how many people can actually hear it being out of tune. What does that sound like for them? Does it perpetually bother them that it can never be perfectly in tune but most of the instruments can be tuned perfectly?
Equal temperament bothers me. I understand that its invention paved the way for a huge amount of music, but it’s technically wrong and will never sound perfect. Today, it’s rare to find music that‘s tuned justly outside of the classical genre. It’s much easier to play in because it doesn’t require retuning when switching between keys. Especially with today’s large amount of electronically-produced music, equal temperament seems like a no-brainer. And even in classical music, any piece including a keyboard instrument is almost always tuned equally. The difference between the two tuning systems (two of many, by the way) is definitely perceptible to the trained ear. Since the just intonation system is based on the natural physical properties of sound (using integer multiples of a given fundamental frequency to establish a scale), it just sounds more natural. I love the music of the renaissance, for example, because it is tuned in this manner. Granted, piano and other keyboard instruments are great, but they will never sound as pure as a justly-tuned ensemble.
MinutePhysics is the best. But actually, they’re videos are so informative and actually make sense. This was bringing back physics class for me. I remember being told by one of my perfect-pitched friends how all pianos are slightly “out-of-tune” but I never really knew what that meant. It’s so crazy to think that basically all of our modern music is slightly “wrong” this way. I’m not sure if this relates, but this reminds me of the theory that in modern music we have incorrectly set A equal to 440 Hz, as opposed to the “more natural” 432 Hz. Are we doing things wrong? If we are, everyone is, so I guess as individuals there isn’t too we can worry about. It’s always exciting to learn something new about something so common (pianos), before this, all I knew was that pianos were tricky to record, because of sympathetic vibrations across all of the stings (which gives pianos their full sound, or so I’ve been told). There’s always more to learn!
I have never understood the complexities of tuning any instrument and was honestly very shocked to find the piano to be so much of a challenge. The thought that math is so heavily involved in the process doesn’t surprise me. After learning about the theory of everything and how everything in this world can be explained by a math equation I seriously question why that fact was not stressed to me in my early education. The thought the different method of tuning an instrument come from each other is truly fascinating but I firmly believe you need to have a fine toned ear to catch the sound of the ringing and I know that is just not a skill I have acquired or may ever acquire so I have so much more respect for the people who can pick up the differences on the sounds. And I never thought the piano came for banding on strings and the fact that there are so many keys is the reason it is difficult to tune.
This is a fascinating article. Not only does it show information about pianos and other musical instruments, but it relates music to math. It seems now that people are very concerned with STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education but things like this keep us in tune with the arts. The article suggests that each key on the piano is tuned related to an initial tuned key. What would happen if you tuned each key on the piano to an external source (i.e. pitch pipe or tuning fork)? Could you get a perfectly tuned piano then? Regardless of the mathematics of piano (or any other instrument) tuning, how relevant is this? It seems as though this is purely a thought experiment. Can humans even detect some of the changes in frequencies mentioned in the article? If the difference between the actual frequency and the ideal frequency is only two hertz can we hear it?
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