Assessing the sound quality of a grand piano for different tuning standards

Abstract

Grand pianos are tuned to a standard frequency of 440 Hz for a4. Eighty years ago, the tuning standard was lower, around 432 Hz. In Germany, a group of music lovers insists that the sound quality of a grand piano when tuned to 432 Hz is much superior to that of the same instrument when tuned to 440 Hz. Therefore, well-controlled psychoacoustic experiments were performed to check the validity of that argument. Using a Welte–Steinway reproduction grand piano of the Deutsches Museum Muenchen, with the exception of the tuning, all other features of the pieces of music used as stimuli could be kept the same. The advantage of using the Welte–Steinway lies in the fact that reproductions of the music of famous (deceased) artists are available, who at their time performed at a lower tuning standard. Recordings of the music played at 432 vs 440 Hz were made on DAT and presented to the subjects via headphones for sound quality evaluation. Psychophysical procedures like semantic differential or preference scaling by ‘‘random access’’ that have proven successful for the assessment of sound quality in the context of car interior sounds were used in the experiments.