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Comment by Cshelton | Hacker News Reader

So this is interesting, I know a piano tuner who has tuned for countless famous artist. He was working on a project to record songs, like Beethoven, as someone would have heard it in his time.

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I actually found it a little odd that Beethoven was mentioned, since it he was a big fan of equal temperment. His 5th symphony was largely written to explore the idea. In well tempered tunings, you have to play around a central "root note" in order to get a harmonic melody. But in equal temperment, the dissonance is equally spread out across the notes. His 5th symphony was able to take advantage of that in two ways: by being an unusually dissonant symphony to begin with and by jumping all over the place, going from very high to very low, playing the same note repeatedly and yet having it sound the same no matter what key he went to. We're so used to it, however, I doubt most people could really hear the difference.

I had no idea that Beethoven used equal temperament. Do you have a source for that?

Nah, just from learning about music years ago. Not everything he wrote was equal temperment, though.

Slightly off-topic, but because I love this topic so much: there is a wonderful documentary called Pianomania about a piano tuner ("piano technician", if you will) to the stars. The story centers around a good-natured piano tuner and his seemingly impossible task of translating the pianists' vaguely expressed desires into a well-tuned piano. As the movie illustrates, piano tuning is just as much about timbre as it is about pitch -- perhaps even more so!

As I discovered just now, the whole thing is available on YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxEcifeMf08, only 1.5 hours, not 3 hours as the video incorrectly suggests].

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