Hacker News Reader

Comment by recursive | Hacker News Reader

You'd have to choose a key before it worked then. And depending on the key, some of your open strings would be out of tune then.

The good thing about just intonation is that it's always the same. No configuration.

View on HN

I think you mean the reverse; equal temperament "just works" regardless of key and doesn't require configuration, whereas JI you have to specify a key, and there are many possible scales depending on which of infinitely many notes you want to include.

It's a tradeoff between convenience and optimally consonant harmonies. ET makes a lot of sense for guitar because you have fixed frets (though JI guitars do exist), but violin can be played in any intonation so there's less reason to use ET unless you're accompanying an ET instrument like piano or guitar.

It doesn't really matter what is convenient but what is in tune as perceived by human ear.

Pianos are "out of tune" so that they sound well to humans.

It's more that they're equally out of tune in every key. What actually sounds "best" for a given key (though certainly a little strange and unusual given the pervasiveness of equal temperament) would sound quite out of tune in other keys.

With pianos there are actually two things going on. They're tuned approximately to 12-tone equal temperament, but also the octave is stretched due to the inharmonicity inherent in the strings. (In the middle-range the strings are pretty well behaved, but in the high treble they start acting more like metal cylinders than ideal strings, and the bass has wound and double wound strings to similarly mess things up. The result is that the harmonics of piano strings aren't exactly multiples of the fundamental frequency, and so the tuning is stretched so that harmonics of lower notes more closely match the fundamentals of higher notes.)

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

There are plenty of people that care about convenience. Pianos are generally tuned to equal temperament. If that's what you're saying sounds good to humans, why bother with all the fancy stuff?

Well, just intonation generally sounds better to humans. A person playing violin would tend to naturally migrate to JI voicings of intervals whether they're consciously doing it or not. So, a tool that tells you whether you're "in tune" or not should ideally not tell someone they're out-of-tune when if they play in perfect JI.

On the other hand, if the goal is to just be in the general ballpark and accuracy of +/- 15 cents or so is just rounding error, then ET is probably fine. (My own violin skills are pretty rudimentary, so ET would be good enough. But if I were better I'd probably want a JI tuner.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com