Why should musical imstrument tuning be done by ear brain

At your risk. Our precious ears must be protected from high sound presure levels.


It may be stating the obvious but music is meant to be listened to by humans or other living beings.


An electronic tuner measures frequency. Frequency is measured in Hertz ie vibrations per second.


Human perception of height of tone is called pitch. It is measured in Mels (from the word melody) [Stevens]. Pitch is related to frequency but it is not the same. Pitch also depends on intensity of a tone. Most of the time pitch decreases with increase in intensity. This can be easily be confirmed by how the pitch of A4 changes according to how soft or loud it is played.


Also 440Hz x 2 or even worse 440Hz x 4 do not sound satisfactory octaves or double octaves. It is again the way our brain perceives pitch. More Hz from what is predicted by an engineering octave are needed the higher the note or it will sound flat.


So what to do or not to do?


Tuning, intonating etc by ear brain. This is just what the best orchestra players and best conductors in the world do. And they sound perfectly in tune.


Musical instruments can be tuned by comparison of one to another by choosing which one gives the reference tone.


If extremely high accurate in Hz tuning is needed comparison of 2 overtones can be made by listening to then simultaneously. The addition of waves creates a beat which has frequency the difference of the 2 frequencies, f=f2-f1. By making the beat very slow, approaching to 0 the difference of the 2 frequencies approach to 0 ie they tend to be equal. There is no limit to how close we can get to zero and this method can yield accuracy that an electronic tuner can only dream of it could dream. This is a method used by piano tuners. Or when tuning a guitar using the overtones of other strings. But good piano tuners use ear brain for octaves. If the overtones of each string do not agree with what the human brain wants (human brain wants slightly higher than x2, x3, x4,... In frequency) they compromise between between beatless octaves, beatless double octaves and correct sounding octaves, double octaves etc to human brain. On good and usually very very expensive pianos the 2 concepts coicide. No compromise needed.


It is extremely important when playing with different synthesizers etc that the one playing high notes be tuned above 440Hz and the one playing low notes be tuned below 440Hz or they will sound like cheap toys instead of having the quality of sound of such great players such as Vangelis, Mike Oldfield, Jarre etc.


See also:


Sound and Hearing - Stevens, Warsofsky - Time Life silence series


Piano servicing tuning and rebuilding - Reblitz