Electronic piano tuner software#
Electronic piano tuner plus#
Electronic piano tuner professional#

However, mechanical strobe units are expensive and delicate, and their moving parts require periodic servicing, so they are used mainly in applications that require higher precision, such as by professional instrument makers and repair experts. These can tune instruments and audio devices more accurately than most non-strobe tuners. The interaction of the light and regularly-spaced marks on the wheel creates a stroboscopic effect that makes the marks for a particular pitch appear to stand still when the pitch is in tune. The light shines on a wheel that spins at a precise speed. They are stroboscopes that flicker a light at the same frequency as the note.

Electronic piano tuner plus#

Some electronic tuners offer additional features, such as pitch calibration, temperament options, the sounding of a desired pitch through an amplifier plus speaker, and adjustable 'read-time' settings that affect how long the tuner takes to measure the pitch of the note.Īmong the most accurate tuning devices, strobe tuners work differently than regular electronic tuners.

More complex tuners offer chromatic tuning for all 12 pitches of the equally tempered octave. The simplest tuners detect and display tuning only for a single pitch-often 'A' or 'E'-or for a small number of pitches, such as the six used in the standard tuning of a guitar (E,A,D,G,B,E). Instrument technicians and piano tuners typically use more expensive, accurate tuners. Tuners vary in size from units that fit in a pocket to 19' rack-mount units. More complex and expensive tuners indicate pitch more precisely.

Electronic piano tuner software#

Since the early 2010s, software applications can turn a smartphone, tablet, or personal computer into a tuner. Simple tuners indicate-typically with an analog needle or dial, LEDs, or an LCD screen-whether a pitch is lower, higher, or equal to the desired pitch. 'Pitch' is the perceived fundamental frequency of a musical note, which is typically measured in Hertz. In music, an electronic tuner is a device that detects and displays the pitch of musical notes played on a musical instrument. The EPT realizes the three steps – recording of the keys, minimization of entropy, and tuning according to the computed pitches – in a single application.Guitar tuner showing that the 'E' string is too sharp and needs to be tuned down In this way it is possible to reduce the entropy successively, producing a certain tuning curve. If this leads to a decreasing entropy, the change in the pitch is accepted, otherwise it is discarded. In the EPT we use a simple Monte-Carlo algorithm: A key is selected at random and the pitch of the key is altered by a small random amount. By shifting the spectra of individual keys, which correspond to the process of tuning, it is possible to minimize the entropy. This is like pressing all keys of the piano simultaneously and computing the disorder of the resulting sound. These power spectra are filtered, added up and used to compute the entropy How the EPT works: The entropy piano tuner (EPT) records all keys of the piano and determines the spectra of their higher partials (overtones). This creates the typical texture of the sound which may have played an important role for the world-wide dissemination of the piano. In fact, the art of piano construction and tuning is to compensate these effects by putting the instrument slightly out of the mathematical tune. The problem: A piano cannot be tuned with a conventional tuning device because of the so-called inharmonicity, a physical effect caused by the stiffness of the steel strings. With this software we do not aim to compete with high-end tuning devices and professional aural tuners, rather we would like to demonstrate that a single extremely simple formula can generate an acceptable tuning.

Now we present a software which allows everyone to evaluate this new tuning method. However, at that time it was not even clear whether the method would work at all, and not a single piano had been tuned. in Daily Mail and the Wall Street Journal), claiming that the new method puts aural tuners out of job. This article triggered a huge but misleading echo in the media (e.g. In spring 2012 we published these findings in a Brazilian physics journal (see right). The idea behind entropy-based tuning is very simple: Since entropy is a measure of disorder, we expect the entropy of a well-tuned piano to be lower than the entropy of an instrument out of tune.Ī first test with real data led to the surprising result that a simple entropy-based iteration algorithm produces a resonably-looking tuning curve.