Piano Tuning - the essential idea

Piano tuning - the essential idea

Brian Capleton PhD (Lecturer in Piano Technology, Royal National College)

Updated 27th May 2007

Most people who have not studied the subject have little or no idea what musical pitch actually is. They think it is a property of the sound itself. In fact, pitch is the subjective response, created by the ear and the brain, or if you prefer, created by human consciousness, to certain sounds.

Sound is structured. Most single sounds you hear, are in fact not single things, but complicated recipes of sonic ingredients. The ingredients are sounds that you seldom hear on their own, but they mix together to produce the everyday sounds you are familiar with.

When you listen to say, a voice, you may not hear the ingredients in the voice as separate ingredients, but they are there, mixed together to make the sound of the voice. One of the things that distinguishes the sound of, say, a trumpet, from the sound of a piano, is the different recipes that these sounds consist of.

Sound recipes can be very complex. They can also change from moment to moment. They can also be very simple. A recipe may have only one ingredient! It is the recipe of a sound that largely determines the pitch it appears to have, when we hear it.

Because we have similar ears and brains, we tend to hear pitches for given sounds, similarly. But there is always room for differences in perception.

Sound recipes do not just affect our perception of pitch. They also affect our perception of tone. In music, it is not just pitch that is important. Tone is also very important.

NEXT...