Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum ET - Ok, I'll come right out and say it

I know! Let's tell them!

The ties aren't pointing the same way. The ceiling is the top guy's "floor." Which one of them is upside down? I guess it matters from what perspective, right?

Still Jeff, I'll try again. You have two identical major thirds. One beats at 7bps, the other at say 11-12. Which one is more "in tune?"

Loren, the nice thing about ET is that we dont need to use the criteria "..so for that interval...". I prefer a visual anology to the ET vs UT arguement. Dissonance is like garbage strewn on a huge otherwise pristine beach. ET has a same amount of garbage as UT, but spread out over the whole beach equally spaced far enough apart that you only see a small fragment from any one spot you stand. UT has the same amount of garbage but clumped in less piles, that are larger and more visable from anywhgere you stand.

The following photo shows a beach that has small piles of garbage all over it. Because of the perspective, the majority of it is unoticed except for the peice in the foreground. UT that has an appropriate piece of music selected for it that favours the better intervals is like this picture with the upper portion cropped out for viewing. An UT that has music played in a less favourable key will require the viewer to look at the cropped out lower portion of the photo. Except for the sand, the rest of the beach is lost in the garbage.

ET would be the equivalant of photographing this beach from a position where no highly visable garbage is close enough or large enough to be really noticed. UT followers will always have to either crop the photo (select music in appropriate keys) or find some mystical way to remove the lower portion from their sight.

No, they weren't "wrong". Neither are you or I. Some people just prefer a piano that sounds out-of-tune.

Your argument is based on the idea of relative correctness, in other words: "double-speak".

As to your example, assuming we are talking about C4-E4, both the 7bps and the 11bps M3s are out-of-tune compared to a just M3. However, the 11bps M3 will be in-tune with all the other M3s in ET but the 7bps M3 cannot be regardless of how the rest of the M3s are tuned. Again if it is UT it is out-of-tune.

Now here is a question for you. Why does it bother you that I say UT is out-of-tune? You can't have your cake and eat it too. Consider the Beatles song "Day Tripper." Of course the guitar is out-of-tune. It is supposed to be. That is why the song sounds like it does. So what?

Emmery:

I respectfully disagree.

I do not think ET on a piano needs to be like distributing the trash evenly so that it is not noticed. I believe that the RBIs are not nearly as important as us tuners think they are. They mostly beat too fast to mean much. But the SBIs are another story. And let's include unisons and octaves in with the SBIs. And then let's include the effects of iH on SBIs. The result with a reasonable stretch are pure sounding 5ths, octaves, 12ths, double octaves, etc. And, oddly, the fourths sound extremely similar to each other, too. That's what makes a piano sound in-tune. And, I believe, is only possible with ET.

All:

I remember reading a commentary by J. Vernon McGee. He recalled having dinner with someone that insisted that there was always more than one way of looking at things. And that how you looked at them determined thier value. The insistence fell apart when it was pointed out that such a demand meant that there was only one way to look at looking at things, uh, that being that there was always more than one way to look at things???? The argument is not self-supporting.

While UT, I venture, is a rather more crude compromise.

By definition, theory and practice, at least if you want to use all twelve keys, three M3s have to make up an octave and twelve 5ths have to make up 7 octaves - irrespective of which temperament you use. If you make one M3 purer, at least one of its partners in the octave has to give. If you make some 5ths purer, others in the circle have to give.

At least ET tries to distribute this irreconcilability as homogeneously as possible. To me, there is a sense of coherence (if not perfection) in that, which an UT can never achieve.

So it boggles my mind how some UT proponents can write that "in ET, everything is out of tune", and at the same time, they praise an UT for the "spice and color" of its remote keys - while these are more "out of tune" than ET!

If these proponents use 13.7 cents as a yardstick for an "out of tune" M3, then by their own standards, half the keys of well temperaments are not spicy, they are badly out of tune.

I agree with Jeff, lots of double speak here...

I've always preferred ET. Everything is nice ,even, organized, precise. There's no guess work. When done well, it's able to accommodate any music imaginable on the piano by any player who plays it.

It really comes down to tuning stability and accuracy and the music produced by the pianist.

Greetings,
I find it amazing that people can only hear a third as "in-tune" if it is a particular distance from Just, and only that distance!
I find it amazing that people can tolerate an unrelenting buzz of tempering that accompanies the sound of ET. (It has its own sound, distinguishable from other temperaments, to those that have listened long enough to recognize it).


>>At least ET tries to distribute this irreconcilability as homogeneously as possible. To me, there is a sense of coherence (if not perfection) in that, which an UT can never achieve.<<

This is at the crux of it all. To some homogeneous is the goal, to others, it is a barren, sterile, harmonic wasteland. It is a simplified sound, not nearly as complex as a WT.
To my ear, pianos in ET sound like artificial pianos. I think this is because the parameter upon which ET is formed has nothing to do with the natural human attraction for consonance, rather, it is simply the mathematical solution to the problem of us only having 10 fingers and an octave that wants to be divided into 19 notes. I am amazed that people can accept that the sensual quality of musical intervals is being determined by mathematical solutions, instead of emotional ones.
Dissonance is not bad or good. Those are value judgements that have to be made inre how it is used to created emotional responses. The response I see from the ET proponents is that lack of equality is bad, whereas, in music, equality impresses me as bland and lifeless. Once understood, it becomes rather clear that the great composers of the Classical age were very aware of the normal harmonic resources available in the circulating temperament of the period.
Regards,

Ed:

I quite agree that those that prefer UTs, prefer pianos that sound like they are tuned differently in different keys. In other words: out-of-tune.

You posted:

"I find it amazing that people can only hear a third as "in-tune" if it is a particular distance from Just, and only that distance!"

Where did you get that idea in this Topic, or is this a straw man you are creating to knock down? You have admitted to "hanging paper" before, you know!

It seems there is a propensity for that sort of thing among UTers. It makes me suspect their motives.

I posted:

"I find it amazing that people can only hear a third as "in-tune" if it is a particular distance from Just, and only that distance!"

>>>Where did you get that idea in this Topic, or is this a straw man you are creating to knock down? It seems there is a propensity for that sort of thing among UTers. It makes me suspect their motives.<<

Hmm, I got the idea from you. You posted (OP) that if a piano wasn't in ET, it didn't sound in tune. (Actually, if one preferred anything but ET, they preferred "out of tune". And since there is only one size third in ET, (measured in distance from Just), logic tells me that you only hear one size of third as "in tune"?

Let's not give straw men a bad name; go back and read your original post!

You keep repeating the mantra that implies only ET is "in- tune". In other words total non-sense.

By the same token you could infer that I only hear one size of aug 4ths or diminished 27ths as "in tune." No, straw men should not be given a bad name, only those that use them!

Are you saying that both ET and UTs can be in-tune?

I must take exception to this, Ed. It didn't take me long at all. In fact it took me all but 10 minuites after I had the recordings in hand to compare as well as other sources. Indeed, I now can easilly distinguish ET by the incessant "buzz". I have always noticed this "buzz". But like a diamond, the defects are ignored until closer inspection clearly reveals its inherent faults.

The notion that there is no other proper tuning of a piano than ET is preposterous. And to demand that no one even utter another temperament is bordering on insanity. No! It borders on dangerous.

It amazes me that for an alleged obscure temperance, that only an alleged few PT know about (what was it? 0.1%?), and even fewer pianists, that it can cause such consternation. I find the protestations against anything other than ET to be the behaviour akin to enraged followers of a strange religious sect.

Perhaps this phenomenon reflects modern society in general where a certain type of individual decides to take it upon themself to quash thoughts outside the mainstream psyche. As if any thought not congruent with theirs is considered a threat. Indeed it is. It is a threat to their conceit! We have witnessed this type of behavior before in history with disastrous results - Fate is knocking.

Neither can be "in-tune" if your standard is just intonation (just ask any string player).

This arguement is getting quite ridiculous - and quite child like - You either like your particular tuner's way of doing things or not. In forty odd years I've never been asked to tune to anything other than ET .... except for the odd harpsichord recital. Why all the bad feelings here? Early keyboard tuning is considerably different to that normally used on a modern concert grand .... and I have tuned 000s ...all of which were tuned in ET and have never given cause for complaint. If anyone requires something different to ET, then by all means find someone prepared to oblige, but please don't let us get caught up in this stupid "mine's better than yours" mentality.

Let's all prosper the art ...... and just move on

Tribbs:

From your last post (I don't see a need to always use the quote facility) I think you may be able to understand how ETers feel when the UTers, especially the WTers, make judgments about WT vs ET. How it "ruins" music, ect.

I am not making a judgment. I am pointing out what in-tune really means: one element (unison, interval, chord, key, progression, ect.) sounding like it is tuned the same as another element. By definition of what UTs are, one or more of these elements do not sound like that are tuned the same. So then they are out-of-tune with each other. And it is OK that they are out-of-tune. That is the whole idea!

But it does get down to discernment, too. What may sound like ET, to one person, may not to another. If all of these elements sound the same as the others, to that person, it therefore sounds in-tune. And of course if they sound different, then they are out-of-tune.

First, I don't think we should be using the term "unequal temperament" when we are talking about "well temperament"; yes, WT is a UT, but so is Pythagorean and meantone tuning, so for clarity's sake....

Some WTs are perhaps better conceived than others, but what is considered better is open to interpretation. Typically, the way WT works is that C major is the most consonant, followed by F and G, and so on in a predictable fashion. There is nothing haphazard about it (at least the "good" ones).



This philosophy of yours indicates a deep misunderstanding of the importance of temperament throughout the course of music history. You have to understand the aesthetics of the era because all temperaments were designed based on the goals of the people who developed them, and these goals were markedly different as music evolved. Has it occurred to you that, perhaps, homogeneity was unimportant, or even considered undesirable? Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, and others used key color of WT to their advantage when composing (and this is why many of them had preferences for individual keys).

It's perfectly acceptable to tune pianos in ET; mine is tuned in ET, but don't make the mistake of diminishing WT, because that is a very.... misguided opinion.




Again. You're missing the point. Jeff claimed that "if you like a piano tuned in something other than ET, you prefer a piano that is out of tune." Ron countered that "In ET, everything is out of tune." The intent was to point out the flaw in Jeff's original argument, not some claim that WT is any more "in tune" than ET.