[ Quoted from 000317 MMD, "Up The Keys is Down In Pitch" ]

> I talked to this tuner later and asked him what happened and he said
> that they agreed that she would just "tell him when the note was
> right".  What wound up happening was that my tuning was fine with her
> until the treble break, at which point she started dictating to him
> what the note "should" be, and in order to please her, he ended up
> tuning each successive higher note to be *lower* in pitch than the
> one preceding.  In other words, as you played *up* the scale, the
> pitches went *down*.

I can neither tune nor play a piano, and I don't even know what the
"treble break" is.  The piano is perhaps my favorite instrument, and
I have great respect for the people who can make them sound as fine
as they do.

But I wonder if the customer's instructions in this case might reveal
something about how musical pitch is perceived.  The people who
investigate this sort of thing -- psychologists and neurologists --
have discovered that the ear encodes musical pitch for transmittal
to the brain in an extremely complex way.

The process is not fully understood by any means, but apparently a
5,000 Hz note does not produce a 5,000 Hz signal to the brain or
anything like it: it seems that some sort of Fourier transformation and
other pre-processing done in the inner ear, and the nerves transmit the
signal in a highly-compressed form that's decoded in the brain somehow.

I wonder if, in a person whose hearing is breaking down, the pitches
of the musical scale might indeed be perceived in reverse.

Mark Kinsler
Athens, Ohio
http://www.frognet.net/~kinsler