Talk:Perfect fifth tuning

I saw a book on how to tune a piano this way in the Raleigh, North Carolina library. Can someone dig it up? -phma

I must admit, I'm very confused by this. I've studied tunings a little, and I don't think I've ever come across an overall scheme of tuning called "fifth tuning" or a system which resembles that which you seem to be describing here before. As far as I knew the term was only used to refer to strung instruments where the strings are tuned a fifth apart (such as violins). In such cases the term simply means that the interval between strings is a fifth of some kind, but the exact tuning is not indicated by the term (it could be a 3/2, it could be equally tempered, it could be something else).

If I understand you correctly, you're talking here about an entire tuning system which tunes a fifth exactly to 3/2 and then divides it up equally into seven semitones. What I don't understand is what happens beyond the range of that fifth - if you just tune another fifth above the first and divide that up into seven, you're going to have the same problems as you have in Pythagorean tuning (ie no number of 3/2s will fit exactly into an octave) with the additional problem that none of the notes are going to be exactly an octave above any other. In any case, I've never come across the use of such a tuning, and any system which does not tune the octave perfectly would be extremely unusual and I would think virtually unusable for music in the western canon. This is why I assumed you were talking about pythagorean tuning in the semitone article (I didn't notice the ratio was wrong for pythagorean).

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding. If you could give an example of the use of such a tuning or enlighten me in some other way, I'd be very grateful. --Camembert

I'm not sure if it's properly called "fifth tuning" or "perfect fifth tuning" or what, but it does exist. The octave is slightly sharper than twice the frequency, but according to the book it sounds better that way because the first overtone of a piano is itself sharp. I don't have a piano, so I've never tried it; besides, the second overtone is even sharper than the first (stiff strings do that). -phma


 * please see my comments on talk:musical tuning -- Tarquin

looking at the original comment, I'm thinking that this is a misunderstanding of just intonation. I'm going to redirect and take the link off of musical tuning JFQ