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Wow! You folks are deep. Is all this going on in her head as my tech tunes my piano?

I do not match partials. I tune intervals.

(I also do not use an STD. My wife would not like me to have one!)

This tread/post responding to Ryan’s question in Andy's thread,about what I heard in the what I called the “stretch” David Andersen demonstrated…

First...stretch is really to confined a term for what I heard in his tuning. Its more than that. Its a visceral quality of sound.

How David gets to the sound he creates is something he describes in various venues, quite well himself. I won’t speak for him. I relate to the sound he created, but get there in my own way…I am indebted to David because he showed me that the sound I was starting to doubt, actually existed.

I usually don’t participate in the fine aural tuning descriptions on the forum…and frankly mostly keep what I’m doing, or rather what I’m trying to teach myself to do, to myself.

The reason:

It’s non-verbal…it is outside the accepted pedagogical descriptions mostly employed to teach aural skills. It is non-verbal…purposely so…whole brain…whole ear...inextricably tied to my musician’s ear, and tied to my ear as a singer. Actually, as a singer, its an experience of whole body resonance. (I think singers will find it easier to relate to this sense than non-singers or non-wind players. The nicest tunings I hear come from singers and wind players).

What I heard in that initial encounter was a quality of sound. It appears in singing unisons first, then as octaves, multi-octaves, fifths and multi-fifths. It is much easier to hear in decent instruments with well mated unisons, and probably appears in noisier intervals, but I’m not there yet .

When the unison is there, I could break it down as Isaac has tried, to say the 1st partial appears… But frankly whenever I approach it that way, going in to the analytical brain, I miss the mark. The 1st partial appears in a large bandwidth, relatively speaking. Instead, I look for the unison to lock-in where the unison is quite still, but given a decent piano, it shimmers...still, shimmering, elicits a visceral physical reaction. In my case the sound of the locked in unison puts me at ease…That’s how I know I hit it.

Octaves…the same sensation…when the 2 octave unisons, or the lower unison and the upper 1st string(middle) lock in, the sound blooms with a visceral dimension that is missing otherwise. Very similar to the effect the unison creates

I tried many ways, in years past, when directing choirs, to figure out how to get the choir to understand this way of evaluating the consonance I’m speaking of. The only thing that really works, is for them to create the sound and experience how an entire room begins to vibrate for themselves. When it happens, it blows their minds.

I use octave, octave-fifth, multi octave and multi octave-fifths to find the relatively quiet zone, where they all are relatively quiet. I use Stopper’s still point triads. I use Stopper’s software, playing my ear, the tests mentioned and the program as a team.

In thinking about how to clumsily communicate this, instead of looking for comparisons to make, partial or otherwise, that is, instead of looking for activity, I look for absence of quantifiable activity. Instead, I look for a shimmer, fullness, which is quite active, but not active with obvious, musically perceptible beats.

Sound like Virgil??? Virgil tried to explain what he was doing with the language of science…but it didn’t work well. Using the wrong language just makes a powerful sensation seem like the rantings of a yahoo…so I avoid talking about it, since its non-verbal anyway.

There, put that in your pipe and smoke it. The sensation, aural and visceral, is why I am a musician and tech, but it, as a sensation, is not a particularly handy pedagogical technique to communicate…neither does it lend itself to competency metrics. But to me, it is real and essential. It exists.

Jim Ialeggio

On my way back to my own room, I attempted to listen for any echo in my own Similar corridor. I eventually found that I could. It's just that nobody had pointed it out to me before.
You never know until you try.

Thanks rXd,

As regards teaching, I quite like this one too, from George Bernard Shaw:

"If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance."

About verbal-non-verbal, it comes to mind a Japanese bow (Yumi) master craftsman, for the first three years he would allow the novice to watch. What do you (All) think, good or bad?

Cheers