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Comment by haberman | Hacker News Reader

Aside from temperament, I had my piano tuner claim to me that tuning pianos is actually more complicated than that. He said that the high end of the piano had to be tuned different from the low end, with some explanation like how the hammer strike bends the pitch of low vs high strings (I wish I could remember the specifics of what he said, but this was many years ago).

I couldn't decide at the time if what he was saying was legit or if he was just trying to convince me that I needed to hire him again instead of just buying an electronic tuner and a wrench.

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I am certainly no expert either, but maybe your piano tuner was referring to the practice of "stretching" an octave:

The tuning described by the above beating plan provides a good approximation of equal temperament across the range of the temperament octave. If extended further, however, the actual tuning of the instrument becomes increasingly inaccurate because of inharmonicity, which causes harmonics to run slightly sharp, as increasingly higher tones in the harmonic series are reached. This problem is mitigated by "stretching" the octaves as one tunes above (and to an extent below) the temperament region. When octaves are stretched, they are tuned, not to the lowest coincidental overtone (second partial) of the note below, but to a higher one (often the 4th partial). This widens all intervals equally, thereby maintaining intervallic and tonal consistency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_tuning#Stretch

Your piano tuner was completely correct. Piano strings have a non-linear overtone distribution, and if you tune to an electronic tuner without allowing for that they'll sound very bad.

Also, piano tuners can create just the right amount of movement in the sound by detuning the strings under each note.

You're not going to create that effect if you have no idea what you're doing.

legit, she/he was talking inharmonicity and the resulting octave stretching that makes octaves sound truest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inharmonicity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_acoustics#The_Railsback_...

Yup. There's even a strange thing where as we get older, our perception of low tones changes so that music that sounds out of tune for an 18 year old sounds great to an 80 year old.

Do you have a source for this? Sounds really fascinating, and I would love to read more about this.

Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia IIRC.

Traditionally (recent tradition), each note in the upper couple of octaves of a piano have been tuned slightly higher because it's supposed to sound better. Electronic pianos and other instruments don't seem to be tuned this way, so acoustic pianos are now being tuned this way less often.

High-end electronic tuners actually have settings for stretched tuning.

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