Stretch tuning is a term you may not be familiar with, but you’ve certainly encountered it if you play piano – or almost any instrument for that matter! Today we are going to talk about what stretch tuning is and why it’s important to you.
Before we get into the concept of stretch tuning we need to discuss what pitch is. Pitch is the ability of your brain to count sound waves. When you hear an A – as when an orchestra tunes to A440, you are hearing 440 vibrations per second which is perceived as the pitch A above middle C. If you double the frequencies to 880 vibrations per second, you will get A an octave higher. We could go into extreme depth about the proportional relationship of tones. This article and video touches on the subject:
When it comes to tuning, specifically the tuning on a piano, you’ve probably heard the term “A-440 tuning”. This refers to tuning the piano to A440 – or 440 vibrations per second. There are tuners who can precisely tune a piano to these frequencies but there is much more to tuning a piano than just the reference pitch. Even if a piano is tuned to 440, the higher octaves would sound flat to the human ear if they were mathematically perfectly in tune. You may wonder how this can be.
This is where stretch tuning comes into the equation. The human ears are imperfect in how they perceive pitch. They tend to hear flat in the higher register. To counter this, the octaves must be stretched beyond their normal pitches in order for the human ear to hear them correctly. A good piano tuner will know how much to stretch the higher octaves to make it sound correct to the human ear. This can be as much art as science since tuners take different approaches to this as well as other challenges in tuning a piano.
You can depend on technology to an extent, but the ultimate test is your ears when it comes to deciding if an instrument is in tune throughout all registers.
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