by Taylor Mackinnon, MusicSorbOnLine.com

I am a piano technician. I am an aural tuner, meaning I don’t use an Electronic Tuning Device (ETD) and rely solely on my ears. I have done this for over forty years. Am I able to hear something most people don’t hear? Is there magic going on here; am I blessed with super hearing or some little quirk in my brain that others don’t have?

Often people will ask me, “Do you just use your ears?” and I usually reply with, “No, I use my hands as well.” (Sometimes it’s hard for me not to be a “smarty-pants” but most people will smile in response.) Then I tell them that, yes, I’m an aural tuner.

So the question remains, do I hear things that others don’t, or more appropriately, can’t hear? The answer to that is “yes,” more than likely I do. But, is what I hear something that many, even most, people could learn to hear? The answer to that is also “yes.”

When most piano technicians are tuning pianos they are dealing with the acoustic rather than the musical properties of sound. In the acoustics of a sound, piano technicians work with something called a beat. Forget about music theory and how many beats to a measure, this is something different.

Many of you may already know what I’m talking about when I speak of a beat between two vibrating bodies, say, two strings or two columns of air, but let me try to explain to what I’m referring.

Let’s stay with strings, since they are what I deal with, in a piano, all day long. When we have two string of the same length with about the same load on each string, that are producing close to the same, but not quite the same, pitch, the two strings create a beat that is discernable almost in the background, kind of a “wha-wha-wha” sound.

The phenomenon of the beat is that the closer the two strings get to being in phase or in tune with each other, the slower that beat becomes until that point when the beat stops altogether and the two strings are perfectly in tune.

If the tuner kept moving the pitch of one string past the point of being in tune, the beat would start up again, slowly at first and faster and faster as the two strings get further and further out of tune with each other.

This beat helps the aural piano technician determine when two strings are in tune and the technician uses this acoustic phenomenon over and over in the process of tuning a piano.

This is the first step in understanding what I hear. Next time we’ll talk about harmonics, overtones, and partials.