I was in a band 20 years ago and "out of tune" always meant what Rick says: one of the notes the instrument is generating is off relative to the other notes the instrument is generating. It had nothing to do with how close the notes are to the original piece. That was known as being "off key."[0]
[0]: I'm a drummer, so my understanding of "off key" might not be entirely accurate, but that's how I remember the phrase being used.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch :
> For example, a 1740 tuning fork associated with Handel is pitched at A = 422.5 Hz, while a specimen from 1780 is pitched at A = 409 Hz, about a quarter-tone lower. A tuning fork that belonged to Ludwig van Beethoven around 1800, now in the British Library, is pitched at A = 455.4 Hz, well over a half-tone higher.
Besides the chosen pitch, only in an equal-temperament tuning can a piece of music be transposed to a different key and sound identical. Under different tunings, the ratio between subsequent notes is not always constant so transposing a piece of music to a different key will produce slightly different harmonic intervals.
Why John Frusciante is Out Of Tune (Scar Tissue): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Daw93bRHe4Y
Beato seems to think that people should just "feel" or know that, but I think he might be blind to how little people play instruments or how little the average person has "trained" to pick up when something is out of tune. People that play instruments can usually pick it out pretty quickly, especially in a band setting. People that pick up a guitar can't just immediately tune it. Over time, however, you get a very intuitive sense for what "in tune" means (which is really just like a set amount of harmonic 'steps' between the strings) and can tune by ear very quickly - whether that in tune guitar has actually been tuned to E standard, however, is more about a common reference point for that note. Beato seems to be thinking that common reference point is a kind of general knowledge, but it's definitely not.
That’s way more surprising to me than folks not being good at noticing it in the first place (they seemed to do that just fine!)
No, but they can recognize when a guitar sounds "good" vs when it sounds "bad." He mentions that in the video.
Humans have a certain amount of innate musical recognition that doesn't require education to understand.
This video demonstrates this with the pentatonic scale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjvR9UMQCrg