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The majority of the time spent is the tuning by the hammer, which depends on the skill of the tuner. For the beginner, overtuning happens all the time as well as losing the tuning direction, therefore a software like IC Piano Tuner capable of identifying problem quickly is very useful. A beating sweeping graph does not take significantly more time than aural tuning (due to the high sensitivity, it may actually reduce the tuning time significantly especially for the pitches at the high end of the keyboard), since it merely translates the sound into a real time picture which can be captured easily even for people lack of aural training. And it actually can provide more accurate and more detail about the tuning, e.g., identifying some problems of the partials of the string(s) (which may be due to the sound echo of the room, typically happening at a specific partial), especially for those keys at the high end of the piano.
A microphone is more sensitive than an ear to detect the beating, but I have to say not all beatings are important. An experienced tuner has great value in his ability to tell what is important and what is not. Therefore IC Piano Tuner is a tool to help, not to replace the experience, although it will facilitate the process of learning.
The video is just an introduction demonstrating how tuning based on visual beating graph works. By no means will it imply to tune just two strings with the time spent on the video. You don't need to wait the sound gone before striking the string again to check your tuning. And again how fast you tune the piano depends mainly on the sensitivity of your hammer tuning skill, whether using IC Piano Tuner or aural tuning.
I can see how this product might be useful to someone just learning to hear beats, but beyond that, it doesn't seem very useful. In the video the unison tuning using this software is close to perfect but not quite there to my ear. But then I don't like even a tiny bit of twang in my unisons. Frankly, learning to use the tuning hammer/wrench to make these sorts of minute adjustments is perhaps a bigger challenge for the beginning tuner. And that is truly just the beginning of learning to tune aurally.
You caught it! A perfect tuning in this case would be like an exponentially decaying curve. The curve in the video is slightly off from that if you examine the tail closely. As an introduction video, a perfect tuning is not the focus, as a beginner has too many things to worry about. An experienced tuner can easily hit the dead sound for the unison aurally. IC Piano Tuner helps a beginner connect the visual curve and the sound, facilitating the training of the ear.
Beyond the tuning of the unison, IC Piano Tuner offers other functions such as stretch tuning from C4 to B4 key-by-key, which are useful for beginners as well as more advanced tuners. And the beating function does not stop at unisons, it also applies to, e.g., perfect 4th and 5th. With IC Piano Tuner, an experienced tuner does not need a clock to count the beat, since the beating is shown on the sweeping graph in real time with more accurate result than the counting with a clock. It is expected a microphone is more sensitive than the ear. If you can hear, it can hear too. If it can hear, you can see in the sweeping graph.
I can't imagine that this program (which I own) was designed for professional tuners. FYI, the Youtube demo says nothing about the main purpose of the program, which is to provide a rough and ready measurement of beats per sec for various intervals in the temperament. Professional tuners do this almost instinctively, as many posters have already pointed out! So the program is of no use to professional piano tuners.
As for tuning trichords, any free tuning software will do THAT much more easily and accurately than this program.
Ergo: the program is fun for NON-tuners (like me) who want a sense of what beat rates sound like as you move up the temperament. It won't "teach" you anything, however. I used it a couple of times to determine whether Verituner had produced a relatively even progression of beat rates on my own piano.
You can do the same thing with Audacity and a microphone, but it's very time-consuming.
Again the video is an introduction for unison tuning, not intended to cover everything in the program (which will be covered by separate videos). And the program provides a lot of function. Different people use it for different purposes. There is no single goal. If you want the detail of the program, you should go to the product website to download a manual, which is free.
As you said, you are not a professional tuner, it would be better to leave the opinions from professional tuners to those who are. I can see Verituner is your favorite, I hope you continue to enjoy your tuning. I noticed you have an earlier version of IC Piano Tuner. The current version is v.5.0.1. As to the unique feature of beating sweeping graph in IC Piano Tuner, I have not found any other software capable of providing such a key feature, even IC Piano Tuner has been released over five years.
As to the trichord tuning, I guess you mean tuning by pitch, which is the basic task for every piano tuning software including IC Piano Tuner (among one of its functions). And I don't think any software can do better than others with pitch tuning of unison. The task is merely a Fourier transform of the sound wave and picking the harmonics (the partials) out. The accuracy is governed by the duration of the sound wave. If you happened to get a poor resolution of the pitch, it is likely you chose a time duration (selectable in IC Piano Tuner) which is too short. Three seconds is better than one second, for example. But longer time means slower tuning process. So it is a trade-off.
Further a disadvantage of tuning based on pitch is that one doesn't know how close two strings' pitches should be (here we are not talking about experience, rather, just in principle) until checking the beating between them. Although it is less a problem in lower keys, it is getting harder for keys at the high end.
Thanks for posting the video! You have obviously done a lot of hard work on this application. I would be more interested if there was a digital read out of bps of the chosen interval (or simply the chosen nearly coincident partial). As an aural tuner, beat progression is what is important, not cents from theoretical nor even bps from theoretical. What a great training tool it could be! Imagine playing F-A and then F#-A# and quickly tell if the difference in beat rates is about 0.5bps (as it should normally be) or only 0.2bps or too much at 0.8bps. Trying to guess it on a graph just isn't accurate enough.
Jeff Deutschle Part-Time Tuner Who taught the first chicken how to peck?
Thank you for your suggestions. The digital readout of bps for the pair F3-A3 is actually displayed on the video screenshot above, in red numbers, next to the fifth partial graph. "6.9" in the small window is the measured bps. "5:4(6.9)" above it is the beating frequency ratio and the bps of the equal temperament (in this case the measured bps happens to be same as the equal temperament). The names of F3-A3 pair are shown on the top ("KEY ID" and "Beat Reference"). Red number for wide and blue for narrow.
Nevertheless, your comments are very helpful. I will consider to add some function to make it more efficient when one change a pair to the next pair (e.g., F3-A3 to F#3-A#3 and so on).
Please continue to post your comments and suggestions. Thank you!
Bill, I expect I will be buying your app soon, after I take a look at the literature. And you can expect some comments.
I am not an ETD guy, so I may be mistaken on this. The thing that gets me is that regardless of the tuning procedure, evaluating the quality of the temperament is done by listening to the beatrate progression. Yet your app is the ONLY one I know of that can display beatrates while tuning. Not sure if any others calculate and display them in any fashion after the fact.
Jeff Deutschle Part-Time Tuner Who taught the first chicken how to peck?
Bill, I will go through your manual later, but after looking through the videos I have a feeling you are an aural tuner at heart. May I ask what your preferred aural temperament sequence is?
Jeff Deutschle Part-Time Tuner Who taught the first chicken how to peck?
Jeff, I don't have preferred aural temperament sequence to suggest (as I am afraid to give you wrong advice). I am sure you have more experience in terms of tuning. My strong background is in physics, math, engineering and programming, but just an amateur piano player and tuner. That is why your opinions worth a lot for me to improve ICPT. My goal is to help a tuner to do the tuning in an efficient way. And yes I am an aural tuner at heart. It's the beauty of piano.
Back in old time, my tuner just used a fork to tune, which drove my curiosity. But many ETDs offer very little information beyond pitch values (at least inconvenient if one tries to measure a beat), so I started to write the codes. I try to put out a lot of functions in ICPT without using the menu structure for convenience, so the interface is not that fancy as some other ETDs.
For the beat progression running, the current ICPT (5.1.0) can do but you may need to change two keynotes for the next pair. I will add some codes to either automatically catch the pair names (so you don't need to touch computer for the next pair) and/or reduce to one touch. I expect to upgrade it soon (a minor one) if I don't get caught too much in other duties.
Thanks, Bill. I was asking about your preferred sequence to try to get an insight in how you constructed your app. I was surprised to see that you used the circle of 5ths when getting input for calculating stretch instead of sampling the notes chromatically. That would be simpler for many tuners, especially ones that rely on the RBIs (3rds and 6ths) rather than the SBIs (4ths and 5ths).
My preferred sequence is one that corrects itself through iterations. For instance, consider just the notes within a 5th, F to C. If all the minor thirds (m3s) are progressive but have nearly the same beat speed, the M3s will also be progressive, but be too progressive with F-A too slow and G#-C too fast. And visa versa. This is one of many things I's like to verify with your app.
But this sequence within a 5th might only be used by me. The most popular ones involve contiguous major thirds, so your app might work well for that if there was a way to easily get the beatrates of F3-A3, A3-C#4, C#4-F4 and F4-A4 while tuning from one note to the next and back and forth.
Is this the kind of input you were looking for?
Jeff Deutschle Part-Time Tuner Who taught the first chicken how to peck?
For instance, consider just the notes within a 5th, F to C. If all the minor thirds (m3s) are progressive but have nearly the same beat speed, the M3s will also be progressive, but be too progressive with F-A too slow and G#-C too fast. And visa versa.
...
Uh, I am not so sure. I may have posted without thinking it completely through...
Jeff Deutschle Part-Time Tuner Who taught the first chicken how to peck?
For instance, consider just the notes within a 5th, F to C. If all the minor thirds (m3s) are progressive but have nearly the same beat speed, the M3s will also be progressive, but be too progressive with F-A too slow and G#-C too fast. And visa versa.
...
Uh, I am not so sure. I may have posted without thinking it completely through...
OK, I looked things over and I was correct. If within a 5th the m3s are barely progressive, the M3s will be overly progressive and visa versa. Probably the same for intervals larger than a 5th, but regardless of the size of the interval you try this within, you can't go far without screwed up the SBIs.
Some may be scratching their head and saying, "Uh, so what?" It has to do with the sequence I use just within a 5th (very successfully) and the fatal error aural sequences have in general: How do you get the correct beatrate for both the 4ths and the 5ths within an octave? I mean without going back and forth like searching for garden worms with a flashlight at night. But starting with a given 5th, and making the three 4ths beat the same speed (any error for them not actually being progressive is insignificant) the resulting beatrate progressions of the RBIs will indicate if the 4ths need to be adjusted and in which direction. I don't think this would work if errors making the m3s less progressive caused the same thing to happen to the M3s.
Of course there is much more to it, like how to get the proper 5th. (Hint: P12 & 4:2 octave)
Jeff Deutschle Part-Time Tuner Who taught the first chicken how to peck?
Bill, I looked through the operating manual and have a question. When the app displays a beatrate of a played interval, is it the result of directly measuring the change in amplitude of the combined nearly coincident partials (as the human ear hears it), or is it the result of a calculation regarding the difference in the frequency of the two nearly coincident partials (same as if the notes were played separately and then calculated) ?
Jeff Deutschle Part-Time Tuner Who taught the first chicken how to peck?
Thanks, Bill. I was asking about your preferred sequence to try to get an insight in how you constructed your app. I was surprised to see that you used the circle of 5ths when getting input for calculating stretch instead of sampling the notes chromatically. That would be simpler for many tuners, especially ones that rely on the RBIs (3rds and 6ths) rather than the SBIs (4ths and 5ths).
My preferred sequence is one that corrects itself through iterations. For instance, consider just the notes within a 5th, F to C. If all the minor thirds (m3s) are progressive but have nearly the same beat speed, the M3s will also be progressive, but be too progressive with F-A too slow and G#-C too fast. And visa versa. This is one of many things I's like to verify with your app.
But this sequence within a 5th might only be used by me. The most popular ones involve contiguous major thirds, so your app might work well for that if there was a way to easily get the beatrates of F3-A3, A3-C#4, C#4-F4 and F4-A4 while tuning from one note to the next and back and forth.
Is this the kind of input you were looking for?
Jeff, yes those are very helpful. I will go through your words again when I add the codes. So far I think about adding the following pairs for the beat progression run. If I miss any, please let me know.
Octave 2:1 Octave Exact Major sixth 5:3 Two octaves and major third Wide Minor sixth 8:5 Three octaves Narrow Perfect fifth 3:2 Octave and fifth Slightly narrow Perfect fourth 4:3 Two octaves Slightly wide Major third 5:4 Two octaves and major third Wide Minor third 6:5 Two octaves and fifth Narrow Unison 1:1 Unison Exact
BTW, if you have a moment to write out your typical tuning steps (and mark where you wish to use ETD), I may be able to add more functions to assist your tuning.
What would it take in terms of time and money to get this ported to an Android version?
After I finish the beat progression update for Windows 10, I plan to design a simpler version for Android. Money is not an issue. But there is no time table yet.
Bill, I looked through the operating manual and have a question. When the app displays a beatrate of a played interval, is it the result of directly measuring the change in amplitude of the combined nearly coincident partials (as the human ear hears it), or is it the result of a calculation regarding the difference in the frequency of the two nearly coincident partials (same as if the notes were played separately and then calculated) ?
Jeff, it is the latter. When the beating pair are not too close in frequency (pitch), the separately calculated one should be the same as what is heard. Note when the two partials are too close as in the case of unison, the two strings may couple together in vibration, meaning the actual sound frequency may be different from any of the partials played separately. Although we are not concerned too much as unison can be tuned easier with ear and/or the sound wave, and non-union pair are unlikely too close in frequency when tuned.
