Scale Tempered

Did I hear of some study which showed that people actually PREFER hearing music from tempered instruments vs.?

....untempered orchestras?

I had wondered about using the precision of synthesizer music to allow (for example) piano music to change key signature on a "virtual untempered keyboard" that was perfectly tuned to true mathematically perfect scales without having to tolerate the "compromises" of the slight "off pitch tuning" that is involved in tempering. I assume people have experimented with such "virtual instruments" and tested the resulting music on unaware audiences. IN SUCH EXPERIMENTS, DO TYPICAL AUDIENCES PREFER TEMPERED OR NON-TEMPERED SYNTHESIZED ORCHESTRAL MUSIC?

Well, equal temperament tuning was developed to allow for modulation to any key and still have it sound in tune. There are keyboards programmed to make adjustments for just intonation and stretch tuning (some do it with samples, others can do it with MIDI data, which is really nice), but abruptly switching from one justly tuned key to another isn't a very pleasant sound. Those "compromises' allow modulations to blend better. Truth is, it's a lot easier to go in and manually adjust pitches to better emulate an orchestra than it would be to create an "intelligent" program that would know when to make those adjustments.

For example: if you had a keyboard justly tuned to A and you tried to play a G major chord, the third would be WAY off. A justly tuned major third has a ratio of 5:4. A G, justly tuned from A=440, would be 385Hz (or any doubled/halved value of that). That means that a justly tuned B above that G (the major third) would be 481.25Hz, however, the B you get from justly tuning to A would be 495Hz... quite a noticeable difference. Also, the justly tuned 5th would be 577.5Hz, but the D you get from a justly tuned A would be 586.6Hz. Again it's a fairly noticeable difference. That G major chord would sound awful.

So what then? What if that G major was just a quick passing chord? Changing the entire temperament abruptly would throw everything off, is that what you want to do? No.

The truth is, real musicians don't play in strict equal temperament or just intonation, they play somewhere between the two to allow for the most consonant sounds possible while allowing freedom of modulation and harmonic movement. Audiences would definitely notice the difference between an equal-tempered performance and a justly intonated one that was modulating, and they would probably say that the justly intonated one sounded out of tune (or at least strange).

There is a lot of music out there that uses just intonation to great effect, but it simply doesn't work with tonal music. I know how easy it is to become obsessed with just intonation when you first learn about how equal temperament is "out of tune" but you're ignoring the fact that equal tempered tuning was developed for a reason, and a very musical one at that!

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