Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum 4ths and 5ths, I love 'em

The difficulty is how to ensure the ET and UT tunings are the same regarding octave stretch. Otherwise user preference would reflect only that. For standard UT's (which EBVT is not) an ETD tuning would do this, using the same stretch but just temperament offsets.

Still the tuning has to be controlled, making sure no unconscious bias of the tuner comes into play. You could have a tuner that is open to both, or two tuners, one preferring ET and one preferring UT, but how do you ensure they are equally skilled?

Then there is the question of subject selection. Professional musicians come to mind, but then perhaps they are already "brainwashed" to ET (if they are classical) or UT (if they are baroque specialists).

And as you mentioned there is the question of the music to select.

The easy way would be to use digitally generated piano music based on MIDI and retune it. My experience with that is that such as sound is too far from the real thing to be useful.

All in all such a study is not trivial, and would require considerable effort and expense. Which is probably why it has not been performed yet.

If anyone wants to give me $150K I'll be happy to spend a year on such a study. That's what I estimate it would cost.

Kees

Kees,

I think you're taking it too far. (although I see the appeal! ) First let's just see if people can even tell the difference between an ET and non ET. It doesn't have to be a "which is better" type of experiment. I'm just curious to see if people can hear the difference. I think Mr. Bremmer would be the obvious tuner choice: As an examiner for the guild he is perfectly qualified to tune a textbook ET, then compare it to his EBVTIII.

The best comparison would be with a dozen or more 10 second clips of piano music for easy comparison, and to provide enough sampling. That way people couldn't just get lucky and happen to pick the tuning with the sample.

Other Minds tonight had some microtonal music. It sounded out of tune to me. Of course, that is culturally related. I have trained myself to be that way.

BDB,

Microtonal music turns my stomach too. I certainly wouldn't load a CD carousel with it.

Kees,

I always stretch any Well Temperament the same way I do the EBVT III. I stretch ET the same way too. It is always a matter of balancing octaves with the corresponding 5th.

In ET, the 5ths are all tempered alike, so the octaves are similar from one to the next, although they slowly expand in size up and down the keyboard until triple octaves and double octave-5ths are both virtually beatless. If that is not exactly what Herr Stopper does, it is at least, very similar. I have done that since the early 1980's when I learned about it from Virgil Smith at a seminar held at Northern Illinois University.

When I began to tune Well Temperaments, starting with the Vallotti, it made sense to me to treat the octaves the same way. I tuned the Vallotti and other Well Temperaments and the Rameau-Rousseau-Hall 18th Century Modified Meantone Temperament for years before I have got my first ETD.

If you take the Vallotti as a good and simple example, 6 pure 5ths and 6 tempered twice as much as ET 5ths (which is also the case for the "Marpurg" Quasi ET), to make an octave agree with a pure 5th yields one size octave (not audibly stretched at all) while an octave that beats the same as a 5th that is tempered twice as much as in ET will have an audible beat in it.

This will naturally mean that from one octave to the next, chromatically, there will be different sizes from one to the next. In the case of the EBVT III, there are two pure 5ths, the others are irregularly tempered and none are quite the same as an ET 5th. From the point of view of ET, the octaves therefore all seem erratic.

When one ETD designer saw a chart of the figures I use to tune a Steinway, he came up with the phrase I love to quote, "It couldn't work, wouldn't work and shouldn't be tried." "In my analysis as a mathematician and engineer", he continued, "I look for a consistency from one pitch to the next. These figures are so all-over-the-place as to be completely erratic and chaotic as if they appeared to be random, coming out of thin air". When I saw that, I only laughed because it was the piano itself that produced them, using the Direct Interval method.

Any other non-equal temperament would produce its own set of seemingly erratic figures and irregularly sized octaves if the octaves are constructed by equalizing octaves and 5ths. One can easily produce exactly the same results aurally or by using the Direct Interval method which is what I have always done.

The problem I have using the SAT's FAC program or the equivalent kind of calculated program with any other type of device is that it does not handle the octaves properly. It will not balance octaves and 5ths. It will only slowly expand the octaves. It therefore make some octaves too wide and some too narrow with virtually any non-equal temperament. If I do use the FAC program, I use it only in the middle, I fix the problems aurally and then I create a new program for the upper octaves with the Direct Interval method and tune the Bass aurally (although I could also do the Bass by Direct Interval).

Since the EBVT III is only slightly different from ET, it would be expected with many complex forms of music to not be able to discern easily between ET and the EBVT III. However, when a piece resolves to the home key of C Major, that resolution is left with some dissatisfaction in ET, while in the EBVT III, it is there. There is also not the expected contrasts between consonance and dissonance in many modern compositions that is expected when the piano is tuned in ET. Everything sounds smoother. Some people like that, some people find it to be less than musically satisfying.

Using a player device is a double edged sword. It plays everything the same, which is neutral on one hand but on the other, it does not express music according to what the piano has to offer the pianist. Patrick Wingren who is a professor of piano performance, has expressed in writing some of the experiences he has had. ET affected his playing in one way, the EBVT III did in another.

Ryan,

I have not been terribly interested in any such "contest" but I certainly would not decline the invitation because I have no doubt which piano would "win" it as it did as far back as 1998. I know that not every last person would like my tuning and I know that locally, some people do not have me tune their piano because they, in fact, prefer ET.

Everybody has their own favorite tuner. I am fully employed, I often have more work than I can handle. If people often did not like the way I tuned their piano, I would attempt to find out what really did please them. If I really thought that it would be ET with pure sounding octaves, that is what I would do. Clearly, that does not have the appeal, in my experience, that the way I have developed and chosen to tune now for some 20 years.

Microtonal music does not turn my stomach. It is just something I am not used to. I am not certain what the point is.

I can handle microtonal a lot better than 12-tone! Ugh, just can't handle the atonal stuff.

On the other hand, once when I was in the video store, they had a creepy horror film playing on one of the TV's. The music featured a piano which was tuned in mind bending intervals. It suited its purpose well. I've heard other soundtracks that featured pianos with music I would not normally choose to listen to but was very effective for the film such as Planet of the Apes and Chinatown.

I like to bring up this You Tube vid from time to time of Gamelan music from Bali. If you want to hear extreme inharmonicity and intervals unlike anything that Western music has to offer, this is for you. I like their version of a "piano" (or what might be considered a keyboard instrument).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldPMifPbngc

This has already been done. Go into the thread My tuning in EBVT III. There are MANY recordings of tunings in both ET and EBVT III that were posted intentionally for comparison. Tuners were dared to say which ones they thought were which yet, very few dared to make mention of which tunings they thought were which probably for fear of being wrong. I did post what I thought publicly on a couple and then, privately to GPM as to not taint anyone in one direction or the other. I waited for a couple of weeks before I was finally told if I was correct or not. I guessed correctly on each one.

There is a difference but one must listen closely sometimes to decipher between the two.

I stopped posting to that topic after a bunch of people got their panties in a knot when I said one of their pet tunings sounder awful. The whole question of temperaments is not important to me, because most of the people who are interested in them cannot tune worth a darn.

quick reply to BDB
The whole question of atonal temperaments is not important to me, because most of the people who profess to tune ET cannot tune worth a darn.

(right back atcha!)

Ron Koval

True, and I myself can't tell those factors apart

Atonality is not so much of an issue as polytonality. When people cite atonality, it is just another way people harp on the wrong things.

I love polytonality. Can't beat a nice chord.

Right BDB, you've made it abundantly clear that you are the only one who can tune worth a darn.

That has been attempted in the EBVT thread, but the respondents were a small group and biased as people whow can't tell might be embarrassed to confess. Another objection was that we can't scientifically exclude Bill deliberately tuned an ugly sounding ET to promote his own tuning.

I personally would be much more interested in a variety of UT's, being not convinced that EBVT3 is better sounding than, say, Neihardt.

For myself I could not tell the tuning is these experiments, but one recording always sounded subtly better. In all cases except one this was EBVT3 for me. Interesting the one counterexample was Bach in B-minor, a rather remote key. I think it is inevitable that pieces in remote keys in UT will sound worse than in ET.

Kees

Let's see BDB, for the thread you are referring to, https://www.pianoworld.com/forum/ubb...Piano%20in%20EBVT%20III.html#Post1387799 which has 241,230 views, with 1141 replies, according to you, we have "a bunch of people got their panties in a knot when I said one of their pet tunings sounder awful. The whole question of temperaments is not important to me, because most of the people who are interested in them cannot tune worth a darn." [b][/b]

Strange logic BDB.

Doel, fyi, Bill never tuned my piano in ET. I tuned it in ET, using the RCT and Tunelab programs.

That eliminates the possibility of Bill's hypothetical cheating, but now it's even less clear if we were hearing the difference between EBVT and ET or the difference between Bill's tuning and yours.

I don't intend to put down the value of the experiments, just point out that they have flaws that a scientific study, if ever undertaken, should eliminate.

Kees

It is easy to refer to an entire topic, instead of citing the ONE post of mine in it where I said that ONE recording sounded awful, no reason given, because I could not determine one, and the ensuing flack that I got for saying that afterwards.

Logic has nothing to do with it. Logic left the room a long time ago. When someone does not know the difference between "most" and "all," there is no point in talking about logic.