Hi Philip.

Speaking as someone with a background in mathematics and acoustics, here’s
the problem, which may account for the lack of material you seek. YouTube
has poor quality, lossy compressed audio. [I know there are ways to achieve
higher quality nowadays, but bear with me.] When tuning by ear, we are
listening to overtones and beats between overtones, as well as the
fundamental. But the amplitude of the overtones diminishes the higher we go
in the overtones series (mostly this is true) and we start dealing with
quite weak signals. YouTube audio is just not really capable of reproducing
beat phenomena to the point you you could hear them clearly, as the MPEG
compression algorithms will, and do, delete critical sonic information,
especially with these weaker signals, which the designers of MPEG think can
be eliminated as they are ‘masked’ by louder adjacent sounds. This is
partly why harpsichord music sounds Dreadful on YouTube.

Worse than this is the abysmal quality of notebook computer loudspeakers,
about which, the less said the better. Similar comments apply to most
desktop audio systems also. The sum total of this means that I can’t think
of a worse sound reproduction chain to learn tuning and listen for
overtones and beats than YouTube. It is simply not the right medium.

MPEG compression deletes audio data and throws it away - for the explicit
purpose of reducing file size and bandwidth. It was designed by the
Fraunhofer Institute specifically to cater for the limited, standardised
ensembles used in pop music. When presented with symphonic music which has
an entirely different spectrum to pop music, or classical chamber music,
the algorithm falls apart and you can hear very bad compression artefacts.
Certainly I can, and I find MP3 unlistenable t any bit rate for
harpsichord. As more people become aware of what an abysmally bad
compression algorithm MPEG came up with, psychoacoustic studies have shown
that quite a lot of people hear the MP# artefacts, contrary to the original
design assertions, and find it ugly and poor. There is a growing awareness
therefore of lossless compression audio formats such as FLAC. But YouTube
lags on all this.

As to learning to tune using your ears, it is not as hard as people seem to
think. After all, all builders, technicians, and musicians did it for
hundreds of years. I suppose the principal practice is to sit down at an
instrument with a fork and a hammer, and pick a simple tuning, such as
Valloti, and just tune it as much as you can until you hear more and more
as your listening sharpens and your brain hears more signal. It is a self
correcting process because when you get to the end of the circle of fifths
you will know how well or badly you have done. Over time it will come, and
you will wonder what the initial hesitation was. One temperament to NOT
pick to learn is equal temperament. Most tuners rate that as the hardest of
all temperaments to set well (set badly, it is common). Consider that to be
advanced practice.

Another really good temperament to learn by ear is Lehman (this comment
guaranteed to cause fisticuffs and bloody noses on the web). Brad Lehman
has indeed videos on YouTube teaching how to do it. But they are to show
that approach, not to teach you how to listen for beats.

Opening up a vast topic, which, like everything in tuning, is
controversial, I don’t believe you need to learn to count beats per second
to tune. This technique was taught to piano tuners for a long time, and it
can help with ET, but in general for temperaments where you have pure
(beatless) intervals, and a few interval types that are well understood
that you can learn to hear easily, such as 1/6 comma and so on, you don’t
need to count beats. I am critical of the technique because I have never
met a human who can estimate a second precisely, even with a watch, and
temperaments don’t always want to have an integral number of beats per
second, so you end up counting say 7 in 5 seconds. Worse that all of this,
published beat rate tables are frequency specific, so if you have a table
for A440 - as the piano tuners learn - then at A415 or A392 or A460, or any
pitch other than the table reference pitch,  the numbers are wrong. Far
better in my view to learn the ‘sound’ of intervals tempered by 1/6 comma
or 1/12 comma (also useful for ET of course!). This is where it becomes a
‘feel’ thing. And the feedback you get from the circle of fifths telling
you how well you did soon leads to fluent expertise.

Perhaps I could write something as you have suggested. I shall mediate on
that.

Andrew

On 19 July 2016 at 2:36:05 PM, Philip Kimber ([log in to unmask])
wrote:

Since this topic has come up yet again (I myself am one of the culprits), I
think it would be really helpful if there were a site on YouTube or even a
contribution on this List as to how to tune by only using our ears.

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