An instrument that is in tune with itself can sound just fine to a person with relative pitch, even if it isn’t in tune with concert pitch, so long as it isn’t playing with instruments tuned differently. My understanding would be that it would sound wrong to a person with perfect pitch.
My understanding of “perfect pitch” is that it associated very specific frequencies as being “correct,” which isn’t true of people with relative pitch but not perfect pitch. Perhaps my understanding of the concept is wrong, but that is the root of my question. If, for example, only 440 can be an A to a perfect pitch person, does any tempering change that perception?
Speaking from personal experience.. I can use a tuning fork and tune the A string of my guitar perfectly. Once I have the A in tune I can pretty well tune the other strings using only my ears, but I need that tuning fork to get started.
Do you mean that a person with perfect pitch doesn’t need a tuning fork to arrive at A?
A fortepiano of Mozart’s day also had about 3 fewer octaves to tune than a modern piano, and they were strung with a much, much, lighter action than the steel-girder-like strings of a modern piano. Tuning a fortepiano (with or without perfect pitch) wasn’t quite the task that tuning a modern piano was.
Pianos needed tuning monthly or more often (according to the cited study) due to their construction and temperature and humidity changes. Mozart calling in a piano tuner every time one string sounded a little flat seems highly unlikely, especially in the early days of the piano. There was no such profession as “harpsichord tuner” which is where any fortepiano player of the day was coming from.
As to perfect pitch it isn’t required, just a bonus. I definitely don’t have perfect pitch but I can tune up a stringed instrument using a fork or electric tuner or another instrument for reference. I was just piggybacking on the mention of Mozart having perfect pitch but it wouldn’t have been required any more so than it is for tuning a guitar or violin.
Yes they could tune a perfect 440hz A from their memory, and could tune each other string without having to compare it to the sound of the other strings, and wind up with the entire instrument in perfect tune with itself and with the actual hz values of those notes. It is a rare and, as mentioned by Knorf, somewhat irrelevant talent to the question of tuning an instrument because there is always a way to get a reference note and then tune the rest of the strings by comparison. But having perfect pitch would have made it all the easier for Mozart to tune his own piano.
You are working from relative pitch, which is the truly important skill.
That’s correct.
“Perfect” Pitch is really a misnomer. It’s really about pitch memory. Someone with perfect pitch can recall specific pitches correctly without reference. However, that doesn’t mean they can do it innately with any degree of precision, innately adapt to the real world where the pitch level can fluctuate quite a lot, or innately adapt to different tuning systems or pitch levels. All of those skills must be trained.
A=440 is not 100% universal. Historical instruments, in particular, can play at a pitch level where A4 sounds a semitone away from where it is at A440. That can mess up people with perfect pitch. As can transposing. A well-training professional musician with perfect pitch relies on the trained, and actually important, skill of relative pitch to deal with these situations.
For example, my own experience playing professionally in orchestras is that pitch of the group inevitably rises, even if the tuning note from the oboe was given at 440. If you insist on staying at A440 you will end up sounding flat. Perfect pitch gets you into the ballpark, but relative pitch is what you need to tune correctly to the group, and that is far more important.
Concerning tuning systems, another point to make is that there are many. A full discussion of tuning systems would be a whole thread unto itself, but suffice it so say conventional piano tuning, usually “equal temperament,” is not what professional instrumental ensembles or choirs mainly use. Equal temperament is basically a compromise to equalize out of tuneness, this at the expense of the potential purity of certain intervals (such as thirds and sixths) in order to ensure perfect octaves. (This is an oversimplification, but it will do for now.) Classical ensembles have a more floating sense of temperament, but typically intervals such as thirds and sixths are tuned more in accordance with just intonation than equal temperament. Suffice it to say, to the trained ear, the difference is quite noticeable. I mention all of this to illustrate the point that perfect pitch is typically tied to something like equal temperament and isn’t so useful when (as is most likely the case for professionals) your ensemble isn’t tuning that way. I hope this makes sense.
In Mozart’s day, people (even those with perfect pitch) tuned to tuning forks or similar devices when they needed to.
There is a common misconception running through practically every post in this thread that needs to be cleared up. Neither perfect pitch nor relative pitch has anything to do with tuning a piano.
Piano tuning is all about matching and comparing beat rates, not pitches.
“Beats” are the pulses of sound that are produced by two sound sources with slightly different frequencies. The interference of those frequencies produce a wah-wah-wah sound (not a pitch per se, just a pulse). All fifths should have the same beat rate (1/2 beat per second on the narrow side), as should all fourths (1 beat per second on the wide side). The beat rates of thirds and sixths should increase linearly as you move up the keyboard. I’ll stop there to avoid being overly technical–you would need to know about harmonics, coincident partials, inharmonicity, tuning temperaments, etc. to progress beyond this.
As an example, consider using a tuning fork to set A4 (the A above middle C) to 440Hz. Nobody rings the tuning fork then sets A4 to musically match that “pitch”. Instead, we ring the fork and play F3 simultaneously, mentally noting the beat rate. Then we play F3 and A4 simultaneously and tweak the A4 tuning pin until the same beat rate is achieved. There is absolutely no musical pitch judgement involved.
I have been told in Piano Technicians Guild meetings that even the most pitch-perfect human cannot distinguish between two frequencies that vary by less than around 2 cents (there are 100 cents in each half-step or semitone). 2 cents is about ten times less accuracy than you need in order to perform a concert tuning. The required .2 cent accuracy can only be achieved by listening for beats.
If someone tells you he knows a good tuner and offers “she has perfect pitch” as supporting evidence, call him on it. Fighting ignorance and all that.
I believe it was Leibniz who said “Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.” In that philosophical respect, I suppose you are semantically correct to say that beat rates and relative pitches are the same thing, but my point is that piano tuners deliberately “tune out” (sorry) the pitch part and only engage in counting.
In general usage, when people refer to pitch (relative or otherwise), they are referring to a musical sound in their head. That is emphatically not what we listen to when we tune pianos. Instead we count. We are listening to the speed of the wah-wah-wah beats produced by intervals, not pitch differences between the two notes. I fear I may be failing here in conveying the significance of the distinction.
As for the tuner in your link, I suspect the paragraph you quoted above is his way of not pushing readers away by using abstruse terminology before they click his further links. If you go to his first linked page (Temperament), he correctly describes intervals in terms of beat rates. That is after hitting the reader with this:
I understand exactly what you mean but that is how I tune a stringed instrument too with no piano tuning training. Tuning a guitar, after striking one string fretted to the fifth fret and striking the next higher in pitch string, you then adjust the tuning peg until those drum-beat like harmonic differences between the two notes goes away. At that point the second string is in relative tune with first.
I think having absolute pitch would still help in tuning an instrument if for no other reason there would be much less time spent comparing relative tones (or wah=wah-wah beats). If someone with ‘perfect pitch’ sits down and tunes every string of the piano to the exact hz they are supposed to be, individually, without comparing them to other strings, and a professional piano tuner tunes each string relative to the others, perfectly, by the method you describe, at the end of the day don’t both of them have identically tuned pianos?
Sure, I know about beat counting. I consider it a subset of several skills that fall under the general heading of “relative pitch.” I could see why you might want to break it off into its own category, though.
Who’s claiming it’s rocket science? It’s a skill like any other. I’ve played piano for, what, almost 30 years now, and I couldn’t tune a piano without much, much practice. I’ve tried tuning a harpsichord before and, forget about it. I would definitely need someone to show me the ropes. I mean, hell, I could tell the difference between good piano tuners and not-as-good piano tuners, and these are guys who do it for a living. Obviously, this is not a trivial skill.
I used to jam with a singer with perfect pitch. We started each session by tuning my guitar with her voice. I would check it against my electronic tuner afterwards. It was always right on.
The answer to the question in your quote is “no”. A “theoretically perfect” tuning will sound different on different pianos, but will sound bad on all of them (unless one of them is a simple sine tone generating synthesizer, ie no overtones). On some pianos, a theoretically perfect tuning will sound truly obnoxious. This is due to inharmonicity and is also why computer aided tuning devices sucked ass until about 15 years ago.
What do I mean by “theoretically perfect”? Well, A4 (A above middle C) in modern piano usage is supposed to be 440Hz. According to the science of acoustics which goes way back to the Greeks, when we double the octave, we double the frequency. So A5 should theoretically be 880Hz. But due to the stiffness of piano wire (which is drawn steel at extremely high tension), the partials/harmonics/overtones which are components of the sound you hear when a piano note is struck don’t line up exactly (ie, within that 880Hz A5 you are supposed to have a 440Hz partial contributing to the tone, but you don’t-the hidden 440Hz is off by a little bit). When piano tuners compare A4 and A5 by using beats as their guide they are comparing certain partials of A5 with certain other partials of A4 but they are not comparing the fundamental frequencies of 440 and 880 because that is not what the human ear hears.
I am a piano technician and not a scientist or a science pedagogist, so I’m afraid this is as far as I can go without consulting textbooks. Let me give you a couple anecdotes instead.
Every piano technician has a story where he did a painstakingly hardcore tuning and was called back later with the client complaining “The piano sounds good now, but I used my electronic guitar tuner to test your pitches and they were all off except A above middle C. What is up with that?”
Or, “My daughter has perfect pitch and can hit high notes straight from low notes and she sounds pitch-perfect, but when accompanied by your piano tuning she sounds flat on those high notes. What is up with that?”
Both anecdotes are examples of inharmonicity. We can tune the piano to sound perfectly in tune with itself, but it is not “theoretically perfect”–it is tweaked to accommodate the harmonics that are produced by the piano’s design.
Final word: adapt your instrument’s or voice’s pitch to the piano, do not rely on theoretical frequencies (or “perfect pitch”).
The OP has not been answered. There was a link to a speculative, non-scholarly article early in the thread where the author decided provisionally that he believed Mozart tuned his own pianoforte. We don’t know conclusively how Mozart kept his pianoforte in tune, or if he bothered at all.
My own guess, which is not intended to be an answer to the OP but merely more speculation, is that Mozart’s pianoforte probably sounded like ass. I suspect he tweaked it himself when absolutely necessary. I cannot imagine Mozart (given the biographical data we all know about him) bothering to learn how to tune a piano beyond making C sound like his head told him C was, etc. (which is all he probably needed to do his thing).
Mozart had perfect pitch and all his music was essentially composed in his head. The tuning in his head was perfect, always (I presume). The only function of his piano was to check things in his head against reality, and probably to demonstrate his projects to his financiers. A piano that is wildly out of tune can still serve that function.
btw, I would like a cite that anyone claimed piano tuning is rocket science, or even hard.
I think I’m sticking with my original response, which is that I think Mozart probably paid a tuner. Maybe he tweaked it himself from time to time, but I still doubt he had the training to do it properly.
For any who saying tuning pianos “isn’t rocket science,” which is true but only because that’s a straw man, have you have really tried tuning a piano yourselves? Did you read pulykamell’s article?
For sure, perfect pitch has nothing to do with the ability to tune a piano.
There is equal temperament tuning and well temperament tuning, as well as the exact tuning for some particular key. (Wikipedia has articles for both of the italicised terms.) Were the keys of music chosen carefully for one particular session? How often were pianos retuned not because of drift, but because chosen music was better suited for a different temperament? Equal temperament is the norm for pianos today, right? But before a special concert or recording, is the piano temperament not optimised for that piece?
There are plenty of people in this thread saying that a person needs to study piano tuning and achieve professional qualifications to tune a piano.
I’ll agree that to do a professional job, one does need to be a pro. My contention is that a non-professional who knew pianos could do a “good enough” job. Not a perfect job, but enough to get by.
Given that Mozart was a musical genius with perfect pitch, and also given that he was notoriously poor, I think it’s a reasonable assumption that he tuned his own piano. I don’t have a cite for it other than Occam’s Razor. Do you have a cite that he didn’t? If not, then we’ll just have to go with what we’ve got: either he did it himself or he got a pro in and paid for it.