Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!apple!xanadu!michael
From: michael@xanadu.com (Michael McClary)
Newsgroups: comp.music,ba.music,sun.music
Subject: Re: Tuning (e.g. pianos)
Message-ID: <1989Dec22.100211.22037@xanadu.com>
Date: 22 Dec 89 10:02:11 GMT
References: <129476@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Reply-To: michael@xanadu.UUCP (Michael McClary)
Organization: Xanadu Operating Company, Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 16

In article <129476@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> briang@bari.Sun.COM (Brian Gordon) writes:
>A couple of weeks ago, there was a comment about the difference in "feel"
>between something played in, say, the key of C (on a piano) and the same
>thing transposed, say, to C#.  I responded with a comment that this was the
>wonderful world of the equal tempered scale, or "deliberate mistuning".
>[]
>If version #1 is correct, the question then is, how do the differences get
>there?  Is it designed into the tempered scale, or is it a distortion, like
>stretched octaves, introduced by technicians.  If the latter, how and where?
>
>Any piano tuners and/or theoreticians want to hazzard a guess?

My brother the music major pointed out that he had a HELL of a time
tuning pianos, because he kept drifting from equal-interval toward
perfect-fifth (which sounds better when you're only playing two notes).
Perhaps the paino you were playing on wasn't really well-tempered?