The C Major Chord Is LITERALLY Out Of Tune
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- Опубліковано 26 вер 2024
- I will never musically recover from this.
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Note to self: Don't ever try to make a "light overview video" of a topic that gets THIS in-depth ever again. I hate math. 😂😂😂Whatever this was fun and I find this whole thing utterly FASCINATING.
I hate it too, but who made the video?
I love better piano
Castlevania? Lilo and Stitch? Persona 3, 4 or 5?
Love your content! Keep it up bud!
Bro, just play the cello or violin. Pianos are always out of tune, cause you can’t tune notes individually every time you play them.
I love how obvious the difference is to some people, and how literally imperceptible it is for others.
as someone who has a hard time trying to perceive it (not impossible though), I surely don't love it haha
Am I stupid
The 2nd time he played the standard C major I heard some of that citrusy/twingy oscillation he was talking about in the correctly tuned C major, but with a hint of out of tune ugliness. At first I didn't hear any difference but when he pointed it out I was like oh yeah it does have that juicy perfect 5th rub. It's pretty subtle especially if you hear that oscillation in both versions.
Yeah like I can’t hear the difference in the C chord
But I want to
It’s not out of tune by a whole lot so I guess it’s ok if you don’t immediately know the difference
Pianist: *discovers just intonation*
String players: “first time?”
Trombone players: "Y'all are amateurs"
Vocalists: Sigh.....
I just play metal because if something's dissonant it isn't my problem 😂
I'm surprised that he didn't mention sonic beats once. The term "beating" is the agreed upon technical term for the "rub" that occurs when dissimilar pitches are played together.
@@thepotatotaxi2430 but if you play guitar or bass, you can already make everything in tune. Just bend by a 15th of a half step.
I will say, it's a shame that you don't have them play back to back for comparison. I had to download the audio into audacity to strip out your talking to actually hear the difference between the chords. Apparently, speech resets my musical context, well enough to not hear any difference between those tuning systems, at least. It would have been a good idea to have the chords play back to back within a short enough time frame, to give everybody the best chance of hearing the difference
here
Exactly. I was only able to tell the difference by the end of the video, and I do play piano myself lmao (even though I'm amateur). it's a lot easier to notice if you pay attention to the initial attack of the notes instead of the sustain afterwards.
when you said "I had to download the audio into audacity", I felt that
Yes. Same here. Just too lazy now to open Audacity. But like 20 seconds of alternating without gaps between those versions in this video would have been nice.
And also show the waveforms as they're played. Arbitrarily squiggling the staff doesn't really help the ear.
I am immune to your math magic debuff for my ears cannot differentiate the two versions of the C chord.
Me neither ! I thought it was a joke of some kind at first lol
I’m a music major and I can’t either 😂
I can hear the difference just fine in other videos but not this one. But interestingly I can hear the difference at 2x speed here. I knew what this video was going to be about and I was sure at first that he just edited the video wrong lol
@@toomanykatsu i'm glad to know that cause i'm learning music by myself and couldn't notice any difference too :)
@@habbokoreiapix all I heard was a little more sustain on the perfect? Maybe? 😂
What if the real C major chord was the friends we made along the way?
Now you're talking!
Ooh, so it's imaginary? Neat.
What is this, Lost?
It is and I'm tired of pretending it's not
You mean the perfect best friend that is just slightly out of tune with you?
Plays the chord
Plays the chord again
“Crazy right?”
The second C Sounds quite a bit less dissonant to my ears.
@@overtonesnteatime198literally thought this video was a shitpost because they sound identical to me
@@kb39295 I thought I was going crazy for not hearing the difference lol
@@kb39295 I honestly think he's making this out to be more of an issue than it is. I understand the tuning frequency differences (I teach math ffs) but imo it's too subtle of a difference to hear in a composition.
And for me personally, forget compositions: I couldn't even hear a difference in the video between those two C major triads.
Could have done with him going back and forth between the two fairly close together, without the interrupt of speech. I think it would make it clearer.
I think part of the reason people can't hear the difference is because it's on a piano. If it were a sine wave or another instrument we'd be a lot less accustomed to already hearing it in exact ¹²√2 tuning every day, rather than hearing the tuning commas/rubs.
To the vast majority of music listeners, the sound of equal temperament is *The Sound* of the piano.
Pianos are sine wavea
@@unknownkingdom No they're not. Piano sound can be formed out of multiple sine waves (viz. Fourier transform), but a single sine wave is different. The most common time we hear a sine wave in day-to-day life is that the most common censor bleep is a sine wave around one gigahertz.
@@rachelblaquiere9134 you have no idea what you're writing about
@@unknownkingdom A sine wave "sounds" pure to most people. Listen to this A440 sine wave: ua-cam.com/video/zODkjFvkoFI/v-deo.html
Now go and play A4 on your piano. Does the tone quality sound the same to you? I would be very surprised if it did. Maybe on an organ or perhaps on a synthesizer, yes. Piano NO. The very nature of the makeup of a string leads to inharmonicity. That is, the very fact that there are physical imperfections of a piano string means it will never produce a pure sound wave.
1:01 - C Major Triad
1:09 - True C Major Triad
The second one just sounds louder and harsher than the first one to me.
@@swiddle1play them at .75 speed. Listen to both and then switch back to normal speed after you’ve heard them at .75. You won’t be able to not hear the difference anymore and the true C Major Triad does sound a lot better.
Thanks!
Also, try 0.25 speed and then also maybe compare
1:02
1:10
@@dom.str.185 Ah yes, it's definitely noticeable at the lower speed and with the initial "attack" cut off. Would be interesting to hear from instruments that can sustain the note without decay.
@@escabasket153 The standard definitely doesn't sound "better" by any metric.
It just sounds different. If you perceive it as "better" it's probably because you're *very* accustomed to modern music, which heavily focuses on creating movement in the timbre of sounds as opposed to creating more elaborate notation.
You're also accustomed to hearing the chord out of tune on a piano normally. So the true C chord doesn't sound as realistic coming from a piano.
Your preference is going to be rooted in one or both of these factors
The first C maj is Chonggggg. The second one is Changggg.
in a way you're tying linguistics into this lol
why are they Vietnameese?
For me its more like Cheeeeech
de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tschunga-Tschanga
Boooonnnnngggg
Not a single time did you play the two back to back without a gap or talking in it
This very much irritated me as well. The more he announces how big the difference is, the harder it gets to hear it.
It’s not just a theory. My professor, Dr. Ron Borror, taught us to tune to Just Intonation as a trombone ensemble. We also memorized the pitch variations of the overtone series so we could make minute adjustments in slide position to stay in tune when playing with equal temperament instruments. Correcting pitch with the slide instead of the embouchure results in a fuller more sonorous sound
That's why trombone ensembles sound so pure and harmonious! Any and every note can be in-tune if the slide is positioned correctly.
@@InventorZahran Same deal with string quartets!
Hey Charlie, I'm a physicist and a musician and I loved your video and I'd like to add some things:
That little rub you in our ears when 2 tones are in tune you mentioned at the beginning is actually called a beat, it happens when the sounds interfere and generate periodic modulation of the amplitude (volume) of the resulting sound (it kinda goes whoa whoa whoa periodically very quickly). When the frequencies are to close the resulting sound modulates to quickly and out of sinc with both original frequencies causing certain discomfort to the ear, but when the bellies of the waves align (like with the harmonic series) it results in a modulation that's in sinc with the natural frequencies, that's why its so nice to hear.
Love your videos.
I used to program computers for fun back in the 1980s and would sometimes play with this phenomenon. One computer I owned had a four voice chip capable of producing sound of any whole-number hertz from 1 up to 32767.
Playing two voices simultaneously at a low frequency, with a frequency separation between 1 and 4 hertz, created a very obvious and quite interesting warble as the waves phased in and out of sync with each other. The reliance upon whole number frequencies is why 8 bit computer music has such a unique sound.
Actually, it is the other way around: the closer frequencies are, the slower the beat frequency.
Question... What if someone, hypothetically, can't hear the difference? Asking for a friend... Not me, I have perfect pitch... It's for my friend John, he says he can't tell the difference... But not me, I hear it.
Okay thanks.
We believe you.
Tell 'John' that he's just fine and this isn't a big deal ❤❤
It's easier to tell the difference in .75x speed. I don't know the technical term for it, but in the original, you can hear a sort of wavering of the notes, like when you play a note that is out of tune. In the pure version, it's all flat sounding. Once I heard it in .75x, then I could hear it in 1x speed.
It’s okay, I can’t hear a difference either, and I have a useless college degree that says I’m supposed to hear it. I think the audio via UA-cam doesn’t do it justice.
@@ShakeMistake Just thought I would let you know that... John... was able to hear it at .75x speed. John says thanks.
I originally learned music on the cello, where, like the human voice, we subtly tune by ear as we play, and when I learned guitar, where the notes are fixed in place, all the chords always sounded just a little out of tune to me, and it frustrated me to no end until I learned about this sort of stuff a few years ago.
I started on the sax, which was just-intonated in Bb (people play other keys on sax but we tend to choose the ones that sound the Least Bad for a Bb tuning lol), and I aaaalways wanted to play C “half flat” on guitar lol
You can bend the notes into tune a bit on guitar. However, that's really only possible for lead lines and other parts where you're playing only one note at a time. No one is perfectly pulling every string into tune as they fret a chord, unfortunately.
@@rome8180 yeah and if you try that with a chord the sustain will be messed up
The cello sounds dumb as hell.
Yup...10+ years outta music school and... Yeah, my ears still don't work.
Literally... every chord is out of tune in equal temperament. That's why (at least, the harmony director) there's a button on keyboards to make it pure. It lowers major 3rds and raises *perfect 5ths (and minor 3rds?)
Thanks, @rome8180
Oh so that's what this button does
What would that button look like/say?
@@leandru7 The button has a default setting of equal. There should be a button next to it that says "pure". If not, there might be a button that is not turned on that says "pure temperament," or "pure tone"
Is that just-intonated in C major? I’ve never run across a keyboard that had this, but they’ve all been synths and organs. Not arrangers.
There's no such thing as a "major 5th."
But yes, this video's title is a little misleading. It should say "All of Western Music is Out of Tune" or something.
I realized the math "errors" way back (like 1986 or so) when I was programing a music player on the Commodore 64. I used f = 2^(n/12) * 440 (equal temperament tuned to 'A') to procedurally generate the frequencies to plug into the sound chip. If the "voice" is using a square wave (especially) the interference waves generated ("frequency rubbing") you point out in the beginning of the video are (more than mildly) disturbingly off. I found that a hard coded frequency "look up" or index table that I could tweak the frequency numbers and tune the program by ear worked well for nearly 4 octaves. *Interestingly the least ear grating off tuning is when the voice uses or produces a sine wave, which is what any plucked or hammered string instrument produces.* (bowed strings produce sawtooth waves - almost as disturbing as square waves)
Sine waves are the "natural" form of sound waves, any non-sine waves will gradually diffuse into sine waves (although they'll taper off faster than they'll diffuse), there's the minimal amount of difference between each instantaneous point along the wave and any other point, while maintaining the same magnitude
Etc etc... and so that's why the grating, the "rubbing" is minimal between discordant sine waves, versus square waves
A432
Yeah this really highlights something about "impure" intervals. The intervals themselves, if played as sine waves, are not where most of the dissonance comes from. The overtones that make up the timbre of most instruments (besides inharmonic sounds, like bells) are always whole-number multiples of the base frequency-in other words they're always in just intonation. No matter what tuning system you use for the notes, the overtones are in whole-number relationships to the notes, and those are going to clash with any tuning that isn't just intonation (assuming you are playing in the one key that you are tuned perfectly for).
Stringed instruments aren't pure sine waves though, they're closer to sawtooth waves but the overtones roll off much more quickly (or in other words, like a saw wave with a lowpass filter). Rolling off the high end significantly reduces the harsh rub of this timbre vs tuning system issue. Something like a recorder is a lot closer to a sine, and whistling I think is very close to a sine wave with a tiny bit of noise on top.
On the flip side, something like a guitar distortion pedal significantly amplifies overtones, greatly increasing the complexity and dissonance. The effect of putting just-intonation chords through a distortion effect is pretty interesting. But since we mostly don't use JI, this is the reason why we often don't play full chords with thirds and sevenths and so on through distortion a lot of the time, just fifths (power chords), because impure thirds make it too complex to have a clear sound. (On the other hand, in metal this is often used on purpose for a very strong dissonant sound-it tends to make the actual notes a lot less clear though)
I also started this on a Commodore 64, but I think it was about 1983. Within a year or two, I did the same on a PC clone to test the (many!) speakers I built and test my hearing. Unfortunately, there was no internet, and I had no one near me to talk about this, so it was another wedge issue keeping me apart from everyone around me.
My brained is so accustomed to 12TET that Just Intonation sounds out of tune to me
That’s me too. I was confused how he thought it sounded better. It sounds gross
Same! I just left a government saying this too!
@@Hollycb12sounds like you take this business really seriously.
Yea it sounds boneless
It sounds boring lowkey. Math belongs in my time signatures not my harmonies 😂
Everybody gangsta 'till 31edo bursts through the door
Hell yeah i love 31edo
31edo and 19edo are the "most major" divisions of an octave I've ever heard. But 31 keys per octave would make for an impossibly wide keyboard, unless... **laughs in isomorphic key layout**
@@InventorZahran what if we made the keyboard 150 degrees or something of a circle and use an organ layout? then we could have true harmoniousness.
@@InventorZahran I personally prefer 31 because it has a better major third and harmonic seventh. And isomorphic keyboard layouts are certainly the way to go, I just wish there were affordable options.
SEND IT BACK WE DONT WANT IT
I'm surprised that you didn't mention sonic beats once. The term "beating" is the agreed upon technical term for the "rub" that occurs when dissimilar pitches are played together.
My guess is he didn't want to confuse the general audience when "beat" has a very different definition in a musical context. Unnecessary jargon for a video that is already complex.
me when the c major chord is out of tune
When C major starts to sound like CdimM7
No offense to your profile picture, but it kinda looks like an off brand Xbox logo
I tune pipe organs for a living and every day is an adventure. Especially doing an instrument that’s on a high pressure, and the longer it’s turned on the hotter the chambers get, and thus the tuning goes sharper and sharper. Predicting how sharp you need to tune it so it comes back down to a-440 after it cools off can be a huge challenge. Lots of checking intervals, and touching up notes that fly off pitch. Many, many hours later you’re left with thousands of pipes that all play in perfect harmony with each other until you do it again 6 months later:)
What a niche job. How many people have pipe organs that need to be tuned daily? Or do you live near churches and major baseball stadiums? 😅
That's gotta be one of the coolest jobs in the world.
A=432Hz!
I’m sure 99% of people here already know this, but that “rub” you get on a 5th is how string instruments tune themselves by ear. Each string is a 5th apart (At least for violin/viola. I don’t know about you bass/cello weirdos). Provided the starting string is in tune, we can use that dissonance to dial in our tuning.
Cello is a 5th, Bass is a 4th.
Cello has the same notes as viola an octave down, bass is same as an electric bass, EADG
Guitars are 4th with the 2nd string B being a major 3rd above the G. Guitars and basses are backwards. EADG(BE) instead of GDAE like a violin.
@@KRBadolatoThat's because a perfect fourth is the inversion of a perfect fifth.
Bass, bass guitar, and guitar string are all a 4th apart (except a guitar's G and B strings), and we also use that "rub" but with the natural harmonics on the string. The dissonance is much clearer that way.
Not including the viola among the weirdos? Nice: I think "Defender of Violas" ought to be counted amongst your titles.
Great video! Just intonation is such an amazing concept, especially when it comes to a cappella music, and it's especially prominent in the barbershop style. Barbershop is the only style of music that I know of where concepts like just intonation is actually taught and put to practice by the was majority of singers (in some shape or form).
What barbershop quartets typically do is leave the melody pretty much in meantime tuning, and then let the surrounding harmonies adjust accordingly. Let's say you're singing a C major chord (C G C E voice) and the next chord is D7 (D A C F#), the three singers singing D A F# would then have to "overshoot" intonationwise by a great deal to make the note C appear -31 cents flat (according to the harmonic series). So that means, if we say that the note C equals 0, the two chords would look like this:
C (0) G (+2) C(0) E(-14)
D (+31) A (+33) C (0) F# (+17)
Obviously this is mostly a thought experiment, and in real life, it's usually a balance between all voices, but quartets at international champion level can pull off this was of singing for great lengths at a time.
If you're a fan of tuning chords perfectly, I highly encourage you to check out some barbershop!
I should be practicing.
I HIGHLY recommend just intonation and harmonic series ratios for sound design, especially if you like distorting stuff like crazy. You know how 5ths sound cleaner than others when distorted, especially when approaching the lower interval limit and the more you distort it? That's alleviated a bit by having more complex ratios line up exactly. Most of those people do this without realizing, a resonant filter highlighting harmonics before going into distortion, they use exact ratios FM etc., but incredibly rarely do they lean into it with composition. Doing so makes those sounds even cleaner and less noisy in a more cohesive context.
Try harmonic series over droning overtone basses that remind you of throat singing and stuff, it sounds so resonant yet colorful.
It's incredible how descending through the overtones to the fundamental or it's 1st octave has such an ultimate sense of home to it, pick a really low note so you can perceive higher harmonics as tonal and you get some crazy notes at the top to create that color and tension.
For playing over those drones, anything pure harmonic series like saws and squares lines up, I also recommend sines feeding into the same channel/mixer strip the drone gets distorted in.
13:36 Certified hood classic. Also, equal temperament is still me favorite (Typo but alright I'm a pirate now), but it's not just 12EDO! Dividing an octave into 22 instead is one of my favorites. It's of course most flexible, but I also find the even intervals add their own sense of structure to the tuning, really stands out if you like chromaticism, which gets crazy in EDO tunings we're not as familiar with.
Oh hey it's you from the Sevish comment sections. :) I'm with you, now's our chance to evangelize 22edo
@@silphv Yes! Every time a music channel brings awareness to the fact we have options when it comes to tuning I get excited
But you do need to understand what you're doing for that kind of thing. You can't just tune your instrument differently, and treat it the same. You need to know where the commas are, and which keys/intervals are smooth, and which ones are extra crunchy.
@@nwimpney I could never see myself picking it up as one of my main ways to tune for that reason. There are really cool ways to deal with it and make it more flexible by constantly adapting the tuning, but boy does that take A LOT of work on synthesizers and stuff.
I actually think this might just be one of the areas AI could help with once it gets crazy good. You have your little synth line that drifts, then you sing a version that adapts, tell the AI to tune the synth the way the acappella one is tuned, that sounds like a much better workflow.
It'd also be super cool if someone develops something that tunes notes based on notes currently played, but idk how exactly you'd program that into a DAW and how plugins would support it.
As it is, I usually just keep it relatively simple with a heavy focus on one root, I often like that in sound designy timbre based bass groove tracks anyway. You can get away with those weird notes based on upper harmonics more easily if you don't modulate all over the place and stuff too.
It's a pretty fun exercise to drone a low note on a fat synth and explore harmonics and how they play together, some synths also let you key-track filter position so you can play them that way if the filter is tight enough when the harmonics get more dense.
"You know how 5ths sound cleaner than others when distorted ..."
Interesting observation. I wonder whether that's part of the appeal of power chords?
"Math basically broke music forever"
HA! THERE YOU GO! I KNEW IT WAS ALL MATH'S FAULT!😂
More accurately, music has been trying to break math since forever, but math can't be broken because it's literally just quantifying the laws of physics in this universe.
Math is an abstract theoretical construction. It can exist without the laws of physics or with different laws of physics. You can argue that math is just advanced logic together with a few axioms which can be freely chosen (some mathematical systems include the axiom of choice, others don't). Without logic, language does not make any sense, therefore logic seems a bit at the root of knowledge, debate and science.
@@richardbloemenkamp8532 r/woosh
It’s not out of tune, it’s jazz
You're not wrong 😂
🙄
Jazz harmony evolved the way it did because equal temperament was so widespread. If an unequal temperament were the standard, we would have a totally different form of jazz!
@@InventorZahran Jazz would probably just stayed in its earlier styles. Most recordings of Jelly Roll Morton don't sound like much care was put into temperament.
Maybe jazz is the friends we made along the way
I think I'm broken; they sound identical to my ears.
Tuning systems and their rammifications are some of the most fascinating things in music I discovered:
- why we can't have perfect music
- the syntonic comma, Benedetti's puzzle
- why vocal ensembles end up in different key even if they sing perfectly
- how Jacob Collier stealthily modulates to G-half-sharp
For those who cant hear the difference:
Dont try to find the difference in the pitch; find the difference in how it feels in your ears.
The "true" c major chord feels smoother and without the wuwwuwuwu thing
I'm a lifelong amateur musician, but I've gotta believe there's a big difference in the way some people hear sounds and music. Folks like you and Charles seem to have an inclination towards picking up a lot more vibratory patterns in a chord than I do, for instance. (And for me, although I could tell a slight difference between the two C Maj chords, the 'correct' version was the one that sounded off to my ears. Go figure, lol.)
@@DJHolte i totally did not hear the difference the first few times myself. I had to turn up the volume and realize that I had to focus on the feeling in my ears instead of trying to listen to each of the three notes' pitch
But you are right, people's ears are built different
On the contrary, the "true" C chord sounds flat and dischordent. LOL
Thanks, now I hear the difference.
30 years playing music, and I'm only "fairly" sure I'm hearing chords correctly. I got to be honest, the difference between the "perfect" C maj and the actual was VERY slight in my ear and it's really frustrating me.
You have been hearing the compromise of 12 equal temperament tuning. It is just some cents.
@@HenritheHorse all music is is trying to make a machine that can do what the voice does naturally. Someone in a cave thought they might be able to do it better and now we have Prog rock.
@@JosephTavano I love prog! Thanks for reminding, I was supposed to listen to Yes today!
@@JosephTavanoThe cello mimics the human voice most accurately out of any instrument I believe.
Try to focus your attention on the third. That's the note that's really "off." I think it would have helped if he'd played both chords in more rapid succession.
At the end of the day, we're only talking about a note being 14 cents off. That's like 1/7th of a half step.
hey why do i hear the "true" c major chord out of tune but the "fake" one in tune even after hering the "true" c major cord?
Because they aren't true or false, tunning perception is way more culturally dependant than natural dependent, of course no one will find very close frequencies pleasing, but a cents (a 1:2 ratio has 1200 cents) off is completely fine
Big up for the Balinese gamelan excerpt. I actually trained in Balinese tuning practices in Bali, and just finished retuning one my university’s gamelan angklung ensemble a few weeks ago here in Montreal. I have dedicated the last 20 years of my professional musician life to that music and culture, so instant like from me there when I heard that 😂 if you ever want to do a video on that topic reach out!
allow me to assist you with time stamp 12:02
and thank you for appreciating indonesian culture that much
(apologize for a little overproud me =D wkwkwk )
I definitely heard the difference immediately but the "better" C major chord sounded worse to me
Same. It's crazy how our brains just got so accustomed to 12TET that Just Intonation sounds out tune
Yes, especially with the amount of pitch correction and things in production pipelines nowadays, it’s easy to believe people are just VERY used to 12TET. Maybe for a capella we shut it off, but I’m not sure.
rick beato said something along the lines of "notes have to be just a LITTLE out of tune to open up the SOUND" (he was talking about guitar tuning) and thats precisely why i think the true C major bothers people. its too "closed" and "perfect" . sometimes that few cents can really make a chord open up and sound a lot better
@@KaentukiTheFuki I think it depends. If you're going for grungy, punk vibe, the guitar can be actually quite of tune, and it just adds vibe. Rick noticed that when he analyzed "One Armed Scissor" by At The Drive In. In dirty rock genres often the particular tuning doesn't really matter that much. However if you're going for a style in which technicality plays a bigger role, maybe avant-garde jazz, or art rock, then sticking to 12TET should be enough. And then there are xenharmonic experiments like the one By Adam Neely when he showed just Intonation chords allocated to 12TET melody. qnd jt skhnded amazing
Brilliant...I've been a musician for 50+ years and neven knew this! I only knew things never sound quite right to my ear, although I don't think everyone can hear these subtle differences, I've played with many seasoned musician, guitarists especially, where they can't hear something is out of tune and so many videos on UA-cam (of guitarists mainy) where I'm thinking, 'wow,you could have tuned up before making the video'. But, in my eperience so many people can't hear the difference.
Maybe it's a gift...or a curse actually that some people have.
Brilliant video, I'll share it around my musician freinds and see how many can hear the difference between the two C chords.
Thanks for posting...it's made my day!
People definitely differ in their abilities to perceive intervals, as well as pitches. Just as an example, I can hear the difference between ET and just triads very easily. I also have absolute pitch. I'm not sure if there's a connection there, but there might be, at least indirectly.
I would love for you to do a video on non western tuning systems
I teach band with the Yamaha Harmony Director. You can put your keyboard into pure temperament as well as equal. And any chord you play, it automatically changes to the correct intonation for that chord. It even can tell if you play 9 and 11 chords. It’s a game changer.
“It’s oUt Of TuNe.?.!”
“Always has been.!.!”
lItErAlLy UnLiStEnAbLe.!.!
Learning this in college was eye opening. It was also something I understood that other people didn't. Even more revelatory was the tuning Bach used for the Well Tempered Clavier.
Thanks for this video. You wouldn't believe how often I tried to explain this to customers when I tune their pianos (acoustic, Rhodes or Wurlis) the way I do. And that is not even mentioning stretched tunings for orchestras etc. You did a great job condensing this into 15 minutes, because talking about tunings could easily make a video of 2 hours length. Just as an info for people who are interested in checking tunings on the fly: The DX7II by Yamaha and the Ensoniq TS10/12 can work with tunings other than equal temperament. I bet there are software solutions now, but I am an old fart loving his hardware. ;-)
I am a tour tech working for various bands aroound the world, but my original profession is being a piano builder.
It’s been so long since I’ve taken music theory in college, and I’ve listened to so much microtonal music that I couldn’t tell the difference between the C chords. Still a really fun dive into tuning systems
I can't tell the difference because I guess my ears are broken or I'm not trained enough to know the difference. It's all ice cream to me.
I literally just discovered this when my dad was trying to tell me about the "therapeutic behavioral benefits" of "special magical frequencies". Thanks for doing a video that isn't afraid to have a mathematical component.
I literally could not tell the difference between the regular and "true" C major chord.
I had to write a 16 page research paper on some sort of tech/math/science topic and so I chose how math and music can be intertwined. It was pretty interesting how these vastly different domains can be so related. I mean like math is algorithmic and purely "logical" it has a sequence of literal equations and on the other hand you have music, an artistic, and expressive way to communicate. It's amazing all the discrepancies and similarities between them, mathematically and audibly.
My ears are much more used to the equal-tempered C major chord, so to me it sounds better in tune than the mathematically pure C major chord
That’s why ear is key as you can adjust things on the fly with certain instruments, for keyboards you can set up special key by key tunings for each particular piece you want to play, that’s the best solution I can think of.
Weirdly, it's the opposite for me, the 'true' one sounds kind of nasty. It just sounds out of the tune and the out of tune one sounds nicer.
the common one has personality
I spent years telling my dad our keyboard was out of tune. and he agreed with me. But there's no way to tune a keyboard. Now i know why i feel that way.
i literally hear the other way around
like the other examples I agree but the real C major is actually slightly out of tune for my ears lol
Fun fact: when dealing with 31 equal divisions of the octave (as apposed to the standard western 12) chords, and especially the major chord, are more in tune.
Idk if the playback on my phone is too limited but I'm not hearing a difference between the c major chords
Just intonation is not only a problem when we go outside of the key. Even wihtin the same key, if we go up a fifth and then go back down using a just major a third and a just minor third, you will not get the same pitch frequency as what you started. That's why when singing acapella, even among truly great singers, there can be a slight pitch shift during a song or piece. EarlyMusicSources has a truly great video about this.
Also, because no temperament is perfect, it's all about making compromises. Meantone temperament and other related temperaments are great if you stay in one key. If you wanna play in all keys and sound good enough, you need a "well-tempered" temperament (yes, the well-tempered klavier book by Bach is in reference to this). A well-tempered temperament makes sacrifices to certain just intervals in order to be able to sound good enough in every key. 12 tone equal temperament is a well-tempered temperament, and it is the one that we mostly use today, but it is not the only option to make a well-tempered temperamen. 12-TET just divides the tuning "inaccuracies" equally among all the intervals, so every key sounds the same. But in the 17th and 18th centuries there were other options that while spreading the "inaccuracies" unequally, still managed to sound good on all keys, but the keys actually had a different character to them because of those unequal intervals, so probably when Bach or Mozart wrote in D minor, they had a particular sound in mind thar is lost to us when we play in 12-TET. Unfortunately, while we have examples of well-tempered temperaments from the time (for example, Kimberger 3 is well-tempered), we don't know exactly which of the many temperaments each composer had in mind when composing... Still, I find this topic so fascinating
To me the "true" C chord sounds out of tune. I guess I'm so used to regular C that it just sounds more right.
I feel the same way. Our ears and brains have been thoroughly conditioned over time to accept equal temperament as the norm, so anything different sounds "wrong" to us.
@@InventorZahranyou can tell any difference?
“Even wind instruments can do this as well,”
*shows trombones*
0:05 it sounded quite dissonant to me to be honest. Makes me wonder how much of that perception is caused by you implicitly announcing it. 🤔 I got music lessons from quite a young age though and my hearing is fairly good for my age, so that might "help" (or makes things sound terrible) there as well ;) I'm usually estimated > 10 years younger in those (not too serious) online hearing tests but I actually realized that when I heard this very unpleasant loud and high pitched noise around a bus station, turned out it was a device to annoy youngsters who'd otherwise trash the place. I was a good amount in my thirties though 🤐Terrible idea though when you think of it, to basically outlaw people (and certain animals) solely based on arbitrary biological conditions such as hearing ability, or otherwise (mildly) torture them.
I honestly prefer the equal temperament C chord. It’s probably just because it’s what I’m used to.
I love that this video was directly to the point. I’m still gonna watch the remaining fourteen minutes and forty-four seconds, but great stuff!!!
💀
Now release a short with the two chords playing back and forth so everyone else can hear it too
funny how I was just studying this exact subject only 1 week ago... I love this stuff it's fascinating. Tunings are the least talked about in the broad thing that is Music and it seems that more and more and questioning this lately which I hope leads to some more variation in our songs and creations as a culture. There's more to music than 432hz and thirds. Sound can go way beyond what we have now.
SEE?! My singing isn’t off-pitch, I’m just really in tune with an alternative tuning.
11:28 cries in perfect pitch
right so how does perfect pitch relate to equal temperament? do you learn it as a kid and then feel weird when hearing the just one? or can you sing in each temperament equally well?
You should check out binks sake from one piece. Still in my opinion one of the saddest piano parts especially the walking down part when he said “it isn’t right leaving just the accompaniment” really made me cry. Even though Charles might not see this comment, would mean a lot if he would at least walk through it like he does with we are and coconut mall. Love ur vids man!
Jokes on you I love songs that use microtones
I've long had the thought of an electric piano that could tune the notes and chords on the fly based on what key you wanted it to tune to.
I find this incredibly fascinating. I am not formerly educated in music, but I have been aware of the different tuning systems for many years. I clicked on this video, thinking that this was what this was going to be about, and I was right - but you said something that clicked for me like it never has before. I have sang in audition community choirs for much of my adult life, and I particularly love a Capella music - both performing and listening to it. I always felt like in some songs the piano kind of gets in the way of that pure vocal sound that I was NEVER able to really quantify or understand before this.
Some barbershop quartet stuff has been coming up in my feed lately, and I absolutely love those tight chords - and I understand now that they are most likely mathematically correct, and that's why those overtones shimmer. I tried to play some for my daughter, who has been raised in music, school choir, etc, and we see eye to eye on what is pleasing to the ear. We can both listen and love Eric Whitacre songs, for instance, and love the dissonance while a lot of others in my family do not. But she absolutely hates barbershop, and those chords do nothing for her. I have been scratching my head for a while about this how we could hear things so differently - and then you mentioned something about what is pleasing to our ears is based on experience. I wonder if dissonance is something that just needs to be there for her to enjoy those chords.
In my middle school years, we moved to a small town in a very small mountain valley. No radio, and very little TV, and only when the weather was right. The only music I had to listen to then were my mothers old albums (classic country mostly - Hank Snow, Hank Williams, etc.) In her collection were some Statler Brothers, and I loved singing with them - and they are the ones where I learned my love of vocal harmony. They weren't a Capella usually, but unknown to me their tight harmonies had a lot of barbershop qualities - the style of music was different, but the vocal stuff was there.
I guess what I am saying is that this video helped me to understand that those stifling years in that small town actually allowed my appreciation for mathematically correct tuning to grow. And now I can love music that is both mathematically correct a Capella, but also music that is slightly off, like most of pop and rock and classical are. And what is amazing to me is this just happened. It's not like I went to college and studied mathematically correct scales or anything - my brain just ran with what it took in. I am not sure if that indicates the magicalness of music, or the magicalness of the human consciousness, but I can see there is something magical there.
Out of tune? No problem, I'm used to listening to Couldplay's The Scientist
In the US it's "Coldplay"
I was in choir in highschool and we almost exclusively sang a capella, so when we actually sang with piano accompaniment we had a lot of trouble "tuning" the same way as the piano.
Still waiting for a breakdown of Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049
As i learned when i first learned The Well-Tempered Clavier, keyboard instruments are tempered, not tuned. We vernacularly call it tuning, but it is properly tempering.
To what I know it's only tempering when you are compromising to pure or just intonation tunning, otherwise (as most contemporaneous music) is tunning anyways, since it is intended to be at 12 Tone Equal Temperament (or more properly 12 Equal Division of the Octave)
I remember when I first learned about tuning systems and microtones. The first time I heard our scale being out of tune wasn't even with a chord. It was literally just the major scale. I was reading an article comparing equal temperament systems with more than 12 notes. And which ones had more "pure" fifths, fourths, etc... After hearing all of those, and going back to 12-equal temperament... Ugh lol. It was much more jarring than hearing the C major chord in just intonation compared to equal temperament.
opening youtube: "uploaded 53 seconds ago"
2:34
I always ask for a hug, but no one gives it to me... probably cause I look like Charles when he says "crazy"
you have 15 minutes to convince me
Did he convince you?
@@GurrBrew2 I couldn’t tell the difference.
@@DoMorrMusic dang, i could.
I an quite literally tone deaf and both of those chords sounded the same to me
Well you *are* tone deaf, so is it a surprise?
The C major chord is not out of tune, the instrument that you are playing is out of tune.
All chords in equal temperament are out of tune but they are out of tune equally so the ear gets accustomed to it.
@@postiepaul i’ve been a professional musician for 50 years, I am aware of that thanks.
That's a very fascinating video. I remember when I was practicing a piece on vibraphone, my friend who's used to violins and strings in general, told me that my instrument was out of tune. I literally couldn't hear it because I'm so used to vibraphone that it seemed to sound normal to me. I gotta read about how vibraphones are tuned because now I'm intrigued
I recently watched a TV documentary about the Arod sting quartet: “10 years with the Arod string quartet “. (I can’t find it on UA-cam). They really put a lot of effort on their intonation and focus on harmonic tuning, and in the documentary it is explained (as an example) why the E in the C- major scale has to be slightly adjusted depending on the chord progression .
Anyhow listen to the Arod string quartet on Spotify or UA-cam. They are indeed excellent!
I do this on my guitar, thought every guitar just didn't tune right going from the G string to the B string, or the D string to the G string on electric, thought it was the strings, thought it was the cheap guitars. Played on 1000 dollar guitars and it still happened. Then come to find out there is slight tonal discrepancies to the frets and you can do it perfectly because of this.
And to get it perfect on the guitar the frets are all over the place.
I could here the tonal vibrations as well, but after dealing with this on a guitar for so long, when i moved to piano i didn't even notice this.
Thanks, now im gonna be annoyed with this on my piano i got.
I subscribed because of your "Imagination" video.
I can only play the easy chord version on my little fp-10 but i am enjoying rediscovering a new instrument, since one of my arms is shot and can't lift it above my shoulder.
God bless.
The idea I have had for a while now, is to have a quality keyboard with a 2nd set of keys to span an octave (similar to multiple manuals on an organ) but have it be a just intonation keyboard. That on the fly, a keyboardist could change it to the best sound based on the key they are playing in.
As a French piano technician / tuner , I have to say this is a very good explanation !! Loved it . ❤
Yep. After playing guitar for as long as I have, I noticed that there's just some issues with tuning that just never sounded right and I couldn't shake it for years until I discovered the guitar with extra frets all over the place. It drove me so crazy how tiny of a difference a few hertz can matter. I could never ever tune properly because when I used a tuner, I could never replicate the exact sound I needed, since I tune by fretting the 5th fret and also doing the harmonics on 5 and 7th fret (obviously except for the g-string where it's 4th fret). I would tune it and then do powerchords all the way down and they always, no matter what I tuned to, would just sound a tiny bit off. That is just simply the frets being equal temperament as well. Because they are all exactly the same sized frets, they will never have the ability to tune properly all the way up and down a guitar. That's why the guitars with all those added frets exist.
This is also why key changes just didn't happen in early classical music. Without using equal temperament, if the symphony was in A, the instruments had to be adjusted to play in A. It was only after the development of equal temperament that a key change in the middle of a piece of music was even possible.
Great video on explaining the challenges on instruments with set ratios for their tuning such as piano and fretted guitar where just intonation is impossible to achieve for every key. That said, I would have appreciated the just intonated C Maj and the set intonated one back to back with nothing in between. It's difficult to distinguish for some if speaking or other sounds get in the way as the original tone kind of gets lost.
This is why our choir director never uses a piano except for warm-ups and to give us starting notes. Yes, we're a professional civic choir and we all use just intonation without even thinking about it, as we're often working with an orchestra. It also helps us as we focus on tuning chords depending on the acoustic space we find ourselves in, which varies from concert to concert. There are a few "perfect pitch" people in the group, but they've learned to keep quiet and just go along with that's happening. :)
I tried a few different tuning system for... Reasons. And I found a cool gateway equal temperament system.
Have CDEGbAbBb be 6 equal temperament together, repeat with GABCbDbEb, and have both be connected by a perfect fifth.
Allow me to get into the weeds on this one.
As a brass player, my instrument relies heavily on the natural harmonic overtone series, and you find that each harmonic has certain tendencies when compared to even temperament.
Now, anyone who gets very familiar with the harmonic series will tell you that once you tune the naturally occurring Octaves, you will find that the Natural 5th runs slightly sharp, and the Natural 3rd runs very flat. (Also applies to chord tuning in ensemble playing)
From a pitch frequency standpoint, most pitches are tuned around an A above middle C being 440Hz. The A below is half that at 220Hz and the A above is 880Hz.
Now if we work between A-220 and A-440, the 5th in between them (in this case E), is officially considered 329.63Hz, but the Natural harmonic series runs slightly sharp, so in theory tuning E up to 330Hz evenly splits between A-220 and A-440.
To take it further, the Major 3rd (in this case C#) typically lands 277.18Hz, but the Natural Harmonic runs very flat. If you land at 275Hz that evenly splits between the A-220 and the adjusted E-330.
And yes, advanced playing of an instrument that can freely adjust pitch (read, not a piano/keyboard) typically comes with an understanding that every key has slightly minute adjustments for the notes to be properly tuned, so the C in the key of C Major is slightly different from the C in Ab Major.
Just so everyone knows: the “beats” are WAY easier to hear in person; recording the sound removes the wavy quality the beats have. It’s not as much something you hear as it is something you “feel” in your skull. If you can’t hear it here I’d bet it’s only because you’re not familiar with it in the real world :)
Fun fact to illustrate the whole Pythagorean tuning thing: if you do the fifths down and end up at Gb, it is not the same not as going upwards and ending up at an F#. So technically, Gb and F# are not the same note, as they are portrayed in equal temperament.
These tuning problems are why competitive-level barbershop singers start with a pitch-pipe and the singers adjust the notes they sing note by note so you get each chord in tune. As long as the singers know how to adjust pitch on the fly the chords stay in tune. My favorite good barbershop chorus is the "Vocal Majority" from Dallas TX.
I LOVE tuning the third in my acoustic guitar just to hear how pleasant an E major chord can be.
This was one of the hardest things to figure out while learning to tune pianos. Like, your tuner says everything is perfect but it sounds AWFUL
I tune my guitar by ear most of the time but when I take the actual tuner out I often find that my high E string is ever so slightly sharp. I suspect it has to do with what you’re talking about but after I tune the high E back down to where it’s supposed to be, a G chord doesn’t seem to ring out quite as bright.
30+ years of having a *VERY* good ear, and I can barely, barely, baaarely make a distinction between the first two chords Charles played. They both sound great to me.
having spent a lot of time tuning guitar by ear, one becomes very familiar with those dissonance beats, and especially the fact that they are MEANT to be there in equal tuning
It's interesting that you brought up the sine wave addition, because that's the easiest and comprehensible way I've found to convey this to people. Dissonance, as we perceive it (because it is a perception created by the brain, which is why dissonance perception is not universal and varies widely based on the music one is exposed to in youth, rather than a physical or tangible thing), is primarily created by tones which create irregularity or abnormally-timed variance in the resultant waveform when combined. It'd be cool to show an oscilloscope readout of what we consider more or less dissonant, just to show how our brain perceives different types of waveforms and the patterns within this process.
This is fascinating, and explains why in digital music production, I have had to slightly sharpen instruments that exclusively played higher notes. They sounded jarringly flat, likely due to the frequency difference widening in the upper registers.
Interesting observation. Because of our ears and brain, we like to hear notes slightly higher in pitch than the math model. So it’s necessary to intentionally tune to the auditory perception of pitch rather than listen for coincidence of harmonics.
Every Jazz pianist are giggling to this video
I'm one of those who can't really tell any difference between those two differently-tuned C chords, although I could barely notice a bit of difference in some of the other examples. So, I'm a mathematician, and I love looking at those ratios! I was at a math conference once where the presenter talked about the different tunings and played some longer clips (like 15 seconds) of orchestral music in different tunings, and you could REALLY hear the difference. I thought it was fascinating.