I want to share with you an exchange I had recently with someone on messenger.
This tech posted some videos online and the unisons obviously needed some work. I tactfully offered to use a bandpass filter to help them see if their unisons needed any improvement, offering the possibility that they were fine. (They definitely didn’t sound fine to me but I wanted to have an open mind.)
Being someone who has dedicated their life to helping people become better piano tuners, it’s distressing when someone doesn’t want your help but I understand.
However, the problem is not people saying, “Thanks but no thanks. I’m happy at my level.” What I see are people putting their head in the sand and coming up with all kinds of reasons to back up their decision not to learn more and not to explore the possibility that they could get better, including saying they are perfect and don’t need to improve; classic close minded reaction.
The following exchange provided me a nice opportunity to analyze a closed mind.
Here is the exchange:
ME:
Hi [Name Withheld] I can do a bandpass filter analysis on the unisons in your recording. My feeling, and please pardon me if I am offending you, is that many of the unisons are out of tune. The analysis may open your ears to hear what’s really there. Again, I don’t want to offend you so if you are confident with your unison tuning then I will humbly retract my offer.
Again, I feel I am completely overstepping my welcome here as a complete stranger, but I do believe that more than a few concert halls would not be happy with these unisons. I think I can help. But again, you would have every right to tell me to mind my own business.
TECH:
Hi Mark, no you are not offending me at all, but I disagree on you that the unisons could be improved by tuning it better. Be sure I know how to tune a clear unison. I tune for several concert halls, never had a complaint about my unisons not being clear.
ASIDE: I tried to find the recording he posted of his “fine tuning” but he took it down so obviously he was not confident enough in those unisons to leave it up, even though he said he knows what a clean unison sounds like.
ME:
Have you ever used a bandpass filter to filter the higher partials? It’s fascinating to hear all the partials filtered and then try to hear that same sound within the unfiltered unison or interval. If you’re interested, let me know. I can send you some videos. I will also filter the unisons in you FB video. It’s a great way to be sure you’re hearing what’s really there. I’ve found that sometimes my ear plays tricks on me. There’s a term for it. “Auditory Illusion”. It’s a real thing. You can look it up on Google.
TECH:
Hi Mark, yes I am familiar with it, false perceptions of a real sound. That’s why I use TubeLab for the highest octaves since these frequencies tend to be the first one to become difficult to determine precisely when you are older. But I don’t want higher partials being analysed, I just want to perform a good and stable tuning, that sometimes needs to be done in an hour and a half before the concert takes place. Thanks for your assistance but I don’t wish to use it.
ASIDE: He wants to perform good and stable tunings yet doesn’t want to learn another way to confirm they are good and stable. I know. I should have left it alone. But I didn’t.
ME:
Why not? You don’t use the filter to tune the piano. It’s just a tool and an exercise to help you hear better.
The following is a very important question for me because what I am offering has helped dozens of other piano technicians before you. The procedure has been written up in professional piano technician trade magazine. You’re not the only person who doesn’t want to know about it or doesn’t want any help using it or seeing how it can improve your tunings. So your answer to this question will help me better to help others.
Why, if we know bandpass filters help tuners improve, would you not want to know more about it?
ASIDE: What I really wanted to hear him say is, “I know I can improve and I acknowledge filters are an amazing tool but it’s just not something I want to do right now.”
TECH:
Hi Mark, because the auditory illusion differs from person to person. In other words: it is impossible to develop some kind of golden format that will please every listener.
ASIDE: This shows a serious misunderstanding of what Auditory Illusion is. It’s not a subjective opinion on how good a unison sounds, it’s hearing things that are not there.
In addition, I often don’t have time for it when I’m working on a grand piano in a theater. I therefore do not believe that the quality of the tuning will improve, that is to say: not in a general sense. For individual listeners it surely can be an improvement, but since the auditory illusion is not the same for everyone, I find the added value of a bandpass filter limited. But then again, it’s only one man speaking. I like your passion about it Mark, but I can do my work without it as well.
ASIDE: Again, a complete misunderstanding of what I am suggesting. There is no subjectivity concerning a bad unison. If a partial is moving, it is moving, and that is not a clean unison.
ME:
The biggest problem is not individual perception, but assumptions. I decided long ago I would take anyone’s word for anything with testing it out and using technology to measure the assumption. You should too. Often what were told just isn’t true.
So the impetus for the texts was really the recording you posted. Those unisons, in my opinion, would not be acceptable in any serious concert hall.
Auditory illusion in this case could be:
1. I want to be considered an expert who has great ears, so I hear beating and meowing when it’s not there.
Or 2. You have no reason to tune unisons better so you don’t listen deep enough and you therefore don’t hear the meowing that would lose you a serious concert hall contract.
There’s only one way to know. We filter some unisons; unisons that you think are good and I think are not good enough. FWIW it is not unheard of for me to make claims in class only to be proved wrong by the filter and then confirmed by my ear listening again.
But being happy with one’s tuning whether or not one feels there is room for improvement can’t be ignored. This is valuable.
And here’s where things get crazy. I will post his answer and then my comments inside his post.
TECH:
Hi Mark, so you keep going on and on about my unisons, that they are not acceptable et cetera. And you suggest that all of this can be solved with your technology.
Well no. I said I THOUGHT they could be improved. I also said I thought I could be wrong.
So basically you are saying that I should have tuned those unisons differently (better!) as I did now. That’s pretty off topic:
Umm, no. It’s clearly THE topic – unisons
For someone who hates ETD so much
Speaking off off-topic! I hate ETDs? That’s interesting. Why would I hate a machine? I only do studies and test their results. What I hate is when people say without knowing for sure, that their ETD is perfect. Many do.
and preaches that everyone should tune aurally (which I did by the way),
Whoa? I do say aural tuning can be high level but only an idiot would say everyone should tune aurally. I am always careful to mention there are many appropriate places for ETDs .
I’m surprised you suggest me to use a bandfilter in order to improve my unisons. Apparently the human hearing alone is not reliable enough to tune a decent, concert hall worthy unison.
Many. many people don’t understand what I am saying. No. I am not saying use a bandpass filter to tune unisons. I am saying use the bandpass filter to test unisons, at home, in a practice session. If there’s room for improvement, use the filter to try and hear better. Use the filter to train your ear so that you can tune concert level unisons by ear.
My guts feeling says you almost never [hear?] the level of tuning others perform. And that the thing I brought up is just one of these examples. It’s all fine by me, I know how to tune and I don’t need you to either confirm or deny that.
No. It would not be me. That is arrogant. It would be the filter confirming or denying and then the user choosing to agree or disagree. Clearly close minded. Not much I can say to this.
But I do want to point out a bias in your approach.
The following is a common misunderstanding of the physics of sound.
Since I work as sound engineer for classical and acoustic music as well for many years, I can tell you that using media that was recorded by a smartphone and then uploaded to social media, is way different than the source of the sound. There are a lot of things that go into that, but the main one is the limited dynamic range of the microphones in that gear. So distortion occurs quickly, though not always clearly noticable. This also means that if you rely on a bandpass filter, you can only do so if the source that is used for it, is cleanly and without interference. The only way to achieve that is to professionally record the piano, preferably in 32 bit floating point since that has an infinite dynamic range. To give you an idea: the videos I posted on the facebook group were recorded with a smartphone. If you listen to the sound on a desktop with external sound, it already sounds a lot better than on a smartphone. So there are two bottlenecks: the microphone itself and the way the signal is presented. This also means that it is wise to be a bit more careful about making big claims about – among other things – the quality of unisons. Let’s call that an auditory illusion too.
For someone who claims to be a sound engineer, he clearly doesn’t understand the physics of sound.
Sound quality and everything that goes into producing a high quality recording is dedicated to accurately reproducing partial volumes which are responsible for the tone of the original sound being authentically copied. If the partial volumes are not exactly copied in the recording, then the tone will not be the same, it will be degraded, usually.
We use a bandpass filter to see the variations in partial volume, not the replication of it. Meaning we do not need a high quality microphone to hear if a unison partial is beating. In other words, an out-of-tune unison is not more or less out-of-tune in the original sound or a poor quality recording of the sound. In fact, once the sound is filtered it sounds the same no matter the quality of the recording.
END OF COMMENTS
At this point I just posted, “Let’s agree to disagree.”
The point of this is to encourage anyone who wants to improve to do just it. Look for ways to improve. Never think you do not need to improve because if you are always looking for ways to improve, you will improve, while guys like this are stagnating. As you improve, you will be passing them by the side of the road where they are ignorantly blissful with all the positive comments they are getting from their customers who are not picky, and quietly wondering and then dismissing the questions, “Why didn’t that person call me back?”, “Why did I lose that concert hall/high level musician?”, “I know there are better techs than me. How can I be like them?”.
Work to not ever have to dismiss those questions.
