4 ms·
No need for electronics. Fretless string instruments, trombones, the human voice, and most any wind instrument with a good player can bend the notes sufficientl
by skywhopper 8y ago
No need for electronics. Fretless string instruments, trombones, the human voice, and most any wind instrument with a good player can bend the notes sufficiently to achieve whatever precise pitches you want and hit these perfect intervals. A typical piano doesn't have a way to bend the pitches on a whim.
All that said, perfect tuning can only happen with certain types of chords, and music that used only those perfectly tuned chords would be quite boring in general. There are so many more combinations that still sound "good". Part of what makes music interesting is building and releasing tension over time, and one way to do that is with chords that don't hit these perfect intervals.
As for the piano and other instruments like it, centuries of good composers have found all sorts of ways to take advantage of its particular idiosyncrasies, both alone and with all sorts of combinations of instruments. And it's not just old classical artists: in the 20th and 21st centuries, there are plenty of geniuses who have and continue to find new ways to bring out what makes the piano such an interesting instrument. Debussy broke all the conventional wisdom of his day to make the most beautifully resonant piano pieces. Check out Nancarrow's player piano pieces on YouTube to see the instrument taken to a ludicrous extreme; John Cage's piano pieces often go all the way in the other direction; Steve Reich's Piano Phase is a brilliant exploration of how we hear piano music; and finally, compare John Adams's China Gates (a solo piece) with Century Rolls (a concerto) for very different approaches from the same composer.
- bermanoid 8y ago> A typical piano doesn't have a way to bend the pitches on a whim. There are a few keyboard-ish instruments that allow this, and they're super fun and expressive: - Roli Seaboard (https://roli.com/products/seaboard/ https://roli.com/products/seaboard/) - Haken Continuum (https://www.hakenaudio.com/continuum-fingerboard https://www.hakenaudio.com/continuum-fingerboard) - Linnstrument (http://www.rogerlinndesign.com/linnstrument.html http://www.rogerlinndesign.com/linnstrument.html, more like a guitar layout than a keyboard)
- analog31 8y agoIndeed, when you get very far outside of keyboard instruments, there is no "temperament," but merely a scale that's good enough for most purposes, evolved over time. And a better instrument might have a better scale. Players "lip" the notes up and down. Brass instruments have little tuning slides -- it's fascinating to watch a master play the tuba. Whether or not you activate these devices depends on how fast the passage is, and whether anybody is likely to notice.