Re: Old guitar strings

[Leigh Palmer <palmer@sfu.ca>]

> > most pianos are noticeably
> > badly tuned, which does not take very good hearing to observe as the
> > beats are quite audible.
>
> On the other hand, it is impossible to eliminate beats, even in theory.
> Any tuning of a piano leaves some intervals out of tune.  For instance,
> the standard "equal temper" tuning makes all major thirds quite sharp.
> Most people are so used to this style of tuning, that they accept it as
> the "correct" tuning, even though it is really just a compromise.

Beyond the standard apology for equal temperment (above) it is also the
case that the tuning of pianos is largely a matter of taste. In the
midrange the multiple string nature of the beast means that pitch and
timbre are not functionally orthogonal quantities (though they may be
looked upon in that way mathematically), and at both ends of the scale
the pitch intervals are stretched to the taste of the performer or the
conductor (or sometimes just to the taste of the tuner). This means that
for the highest and lowest notes on the piano the "fundamental frequency"
of the note differs from that of its nearest octave by more than a factor
of two.

Physicists are usually ignorant of such real world oddities as these.
That is the kind of ignorance which leads to interactions that annoy the
man in the street (who may be knowledgeable in some art or craft). An
example came up recently when a teacher overreached his competence in
suggesting that bullets dropped vertically and fired horizontally fall
at the same rate. People with knowledge of small arms ballistics (many
of whom never take standard physics courses) know that is untrue. The
disease even manifests itself more dramatically when physicists try to
put other fields, some of which are doing nicely already, on a "proper
scientific" foundation. An example is the introduction of "scientific
pitch" based on a middle C frequency of 256 Hz to make calculations
easier for even tone-deaf physicists!

Leigh