On 19/07/2016 06:34, Philip Kimber wrote:

>  I think it would be really helpful if there 
> were a site on YouTube ... as to how to tune by only using our ears.

At 12:20 19-07-16, Andrew Bernard wrote:

 >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.

etc...

Speaking as someone with extensive experience as 
a professional recording engineer and producer, I 
have no particular reason to defend MP3 
compression, except to assert that, whatever its 
many serious failings, it is in my experience not 
true that it prevents one from hearing beats clearly.

I have just done an experiment.  I placed an 
Earthworks TC30K omnidirectional microphone above 
the stringband, pointing at an angle and about 50 
cm from the strings concerned and played fifths 
and major thirds in the tenor octave, adjusting 
the tuning and listening through 
headphones.  Though the beauty of sound at that 
distance is obviously not optimal, the beats were 
quite clear and I was able to tune easily.  I 
recorded this and converted the wavefile to an 
MP3 file -- at 160 kB/s, so not even top MP3 
quality.  I can hear the beats just as clearly on the MP3 recording.

I therefore disagree with Andrew's conclusion 
that a demonstration of tuning on YouTube would 
be a waste of time.  I am sure that many of the 
members here have sufficiently good audio equipment to do this.

David

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