Quote:
Originally Posted by Long813
Agreed. This is the inherent problem with stringed instrument and that's why builders have created multiscale's and equal-tempered necks. On the other hand there can be a lot of work done to minimize (not eliminate) the problem on a standard guitar.
Hmm, this I have a tough time agreeing on. Yes everyones ears are different, and it's a complex system of what determines the 'sound you like'. But, I don't agree that person A will hear 440 Hz while person B could here 450 Hz.
Unless of course, they are tone deaf.
When you say perfect, I assume you mean perfect as in "It's the nicest sounding interval" vs the musical perfect 5th interval?
One is subject to musical preference and one is theory/science.
I agree. But the tuner is measuring/sounding out a sine wave of 440 Hz I believe, where as the 'colour' of the tone is coming from the complex wave (it's not a simple sine wave) your guitar is projecting. The 440 Hz note on a Martin and Taylor for instance is still A, but it's the rest of the complex wave form that makes it sound unique.
My 2 cents. (is it audible?)
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Hearing is, of course, a physiological process. Our cochleas have hair cells that respond to specific frequencies and pass signals upward through a series of neural connections to the cortex where they're ultimately interpreted. The cochlear apparatus obviously doesn't know or care about any standard reference pitch. Exposure to loud noise can damage hair cells at various frequencies. Also, each person's physiology, and thus the precise frequencies at which their hair cells fire maximally, will vary. For all of those reasons (and others occurring at higher levels of neural organization) it's unlikely that people will experience an auditory stimulus exactly the same as someone else. Because of learning, they may provide the same description of the stimulus (for example, "that sounds like a middle C to me") but that doesn't mean that their perceptions are equivalent. It's pretty hard to demonstrate from how we describe it that the subjective experience of a 440 Hz signal "sounds" different to me than it does to you but you can show that cochlear evoked potentials differ between people. I realize that this is "hair-splitting" (pun intended) and the more important and more easily proven point is that an interval that I hear as optimally harmonic may not be the same interval that someone else judges to be optimally harmonic. Just think about cultures whose music is based on microtonic scales that sound really unmusical to us as a concrete example.