Can a piano be perfectly tuned?

But that doesn't work for the piano, and this is why: it has too many strings. It has a string for all of the 12 semitones for the western scale, each attached to a different key. And that means if you try to tune the whole thing using harmonics, things are going to get out of whack.

sciencealert.com - Watch: The Physics of Music, And Why It's Impossible to Tune a Piano

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There's an incredibly diverse range of musical instruments out there, from bassoons and tubas to harps and violins. But you might be surprised to learn that all of them produce their unique sounds in the same way - with either a string or air vibrating in a sine wave pattern to produce a specific note. That means musicians can use physics to perfectly tune their instruments… unless they play the piano, that is, and this episode of MinutePhysics explains why. To understand the problem with pianos, you first need to understand how sine waves work to produce different notes. Take strings, for example. In a musical instrument, the strings are attached at each end to the instrument, which means they can only vibrate in certain wave patterns, known as sine waves. Depending on how fast the string is vibrating, there can be one, two, three, four, or even more of these sine waves - or bumps - along a string at any one time. The more bumps there are, the faster the string has to vibrate, and the higher the pitch of the resulting note, as Henry from MinutePhysics explains above with some pretty cool calculations. So why is that important? Well the different pitches produced by the various patterns of sine waves are called harmonics, and musicians can use them to perfectly tune their instruments. For example, on a violin, the third harmonic on one string should be equal to the second harmonic on the next string up. If these aren't identical, the violinist can tighten or relax one of the strings to change the frequency of the vibrations and get them to match up. But that doesn't work for the piano, and this is why: it has too many strings. It has a string for all of the 12 semitones for the western scale, each attached to a different key. And that means if you try to tune the whole thing using harmonics, things are going to get out of whack. We'll let Henry explain those calculations in the video, because they're a lot easier to understand when you can see them. But the short version is that it's mathematically impossible to tune a piano across all keys using harmonics. Instead most people use what's known as equal tempered tuning to tune their pianos, as well as digital audio devices. And that works pretty well, but it's never going to be as accurate as harmonic tuning. Watch the video above to find out why and see Henry break down the complex physics that produces the music we love. And if nothing else you can take away this cool fact: if you play a sound that matches one of the harmonics of a string, it'll cause that string to start vibrating all on its own. That's one you can try at home.

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What do you call a person who loves to play piano?

pi·a·nist pē-ˈa-nist ˈpē-ə- : a person who plays the piano. especially : a skilled or professional performer on the piano.

merriam-webster.com - Pianist Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster

Recent Examples on the Web

In three images that form a part of the new chapter, Cole photographs a young pianist hunched over sheets of music, in the act of writing a new composition. — M. Z. Adnan, The New Yorker, 3 Dec. 2022 The show starts with just Adele, dressed Friday in a simple if glamorous black gown, and a pianist on a small slice of stage; eventually, several scrims slide away and they’re joined by a full band with three backing vocalists. — Los Angeles Times, 19 Nov. 2022 At age nine, her father’s studies brought her to Missouri for two years, where a love of classical piano (and her mother’s dreams that her daughter would one day become a concert pianist) led to state-level competitions. — Lisa Wong Macabasco, Vogue, 18 Nov. 2022 In the film, produced by Munk Studio, a young pianist comes back home for the summer. — Marta Balaga, Variety, 17 Nov. 2022 One important thing for me besides the overall musical interpretation is the kind of tone a pianist makes. — Eugenia Cheng, WSJ, 10 Nov. 2022 The creative bent comes from his mother, a blond-bobbed concert pianist who exists in state somewhere between daffy flightiness and undeniable frustration. — David Fear, Rolling Stone, 10 Nov. 2022 His mother was a gregarious concert pianist and painter who later owned a kosher restaurant on Pico Boulevard in West L.A. called The Milky Way. — Rebecca Keegan, The Hollywood Reporter, 2 Nov. 2022 Its protagonist, Roland Baines, is an unfulfilled but not unhappy man who once seemed destined to become a concert pianist but ends up playing standards at a London cocktail lounge. — Giles Harvey, The New York Review of Books, 19 Oct. 2022

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