Progress towards a robotic piano tuner: Entropy piano tuner attempts to accommodate "variations in string thickness, stretching, corrosion, dents, the harp flexing", etc. by minimizing the entropy of the power spectrum. Using it should be better than mindlessly tuning to a digital guitar tuner.

According to the website, professional pianists still prefer a human-tuned piano, but no one else can tell the difference. And the general opinion on piano tuner message boards seems to be that it's not quite good enough to replace a professional tuner's judgment.

I think many people, particularly intellectuals, assume it's obvious that ultra-fine quality distinctions are a worthwhile pursuit. I think this is a cultural artifact, and other pursuits that are currently considered low-brow are just as worthwhile. Quality is real, as Phaedrus argues, but it is also "just what you like". That exquisite piano solo on that close-to-perfectly tuned piano (wow, "god's joke on musicians" must drive folks like that nuts:) is high art, but equally so is the juxtaposition of multiple notes and lyrics to produce an emotional effect. I personally find the art of rock and roll more impressive, since it incorporates language and ideas along with multiple interacting musical themes. The tuning of the guitar being perfect is much less the point. This makes that art harder to evaluate, since the perfect juxtaposition for one brain won't work for most others' - but that only matters if you need art to be an easily judgeable competition.

In addition, once people are replaced, the AI will be a far better piano tuner than the guy you mentioned. But I don't care one way or the other. Nor do most humans. They mostly want a safe comfortable place to live, adequate palatable food to eat, and people to talk to about things that interest them. High art is gravy, and there are so many ways to make high art that losing one particularly type shouldn't concern us much. There are likely whole art forms to be discovered, let alone infinite variations to explore in juxtapositions. Fun theory posits that fun is infinite (or near enough), and that doesn't depend on how precisely you can tune a piano.

Have you (or has anyone) ever done double-blind listening tests to determine whether in fact anyone can tell the difference in such cases?

He scoffed "there are some people who do that, but that really only gets you close, and they'd have to finish by ear anyway, especially with the sort of pianos you typically have to work with, since you really need to finesse how the overtones interact with each other, and it's not guaranteed that the overtones are going to be exactly what they're supposed to be, given variations in string thickness, stretching, corrosion, dents, the harp flexing, you know... The whole thing is a negotiation with the piano, you can't just read it its orders and expect it to sound good."

This seems to be a theme with very exact things - once you reach a certain level of required precision, the most effective approach switches from "have a target value and a way of measuring the value" to "have something to compare with". See gauge blocks in machining (nice basic explainer video if you like videos).

If it weren't for the piano soloist (the conductor probably didn't notice, he just knew to defer to the piano soloist's concerns), we would have played the concert on a very slightly out-of-tune piano, and then...

What?

Contrary to you, I think its definitely possible there's someone in the audience who would have been able to tell the piano was slightly out of tune. But I also think more would have unconsciously noticed the music was very very slightly worse than what it could have been. Slightly less detail which you could notice and recognize perfection.

Maybe not so much of a loss or a gain in this circumstance, but definitely a loss. And if you compound this across all of society, if everything is 1% worse for no reason anyone can put their finger on anymore, you just have a worse world, with colors slightly dimmer, appliances slightly less ergonomic, fashion slightly less stylish, games, books, and movies slightly less meaningful.

I think in many circumstances you'll still be able to buy the high-quality thing, but it takes a while to get to economic equilibriums, and it would be nice if those selecting bundles of goods to sell (like a concert) remembered 1% better everything adds up before transitioning to lesser quality but cheaper goods.

I also think there's room for making AI produced products significantly better than the human produced ones, so that also should be kept in mind. If you can gain 1% by transitioning to AI, you should by my same logic.

An anecdote from which I drew a similar conclusion to yours:

About ten years ago I went with my dad to a music hall where a local marching band was playing. I play a few instruments, have a solid grasp of music theory, etc..., but I'm no professional, while he has 'average Joe' music training.
I found the concert to be genuinely painful to listen to: entire sections not in tune with each other, very poor dynamics (brass way too loud, woodwinds barely audible), melodies all over the place, sudden tempo changes etc...

After the last piece, the audience asked for the encore. I figured it had to do with social pressure/convention/kindness. Before I could say anything, my dad proceeded to extol the band's musicianship and high level of the performance, assuming I too had enjoyed the experience. 

I was (and still am) baffled.

This was very satisfying for me to read!

Not only did I find this story a very convincing example for the point this articles is trying to make ("You don't know how bad most things are nor precisely how they're bad." and, related "Reality has a surprising amount of detail.").

But the writing was great as well! The fact that you were not a complete novice, but someone who tried to follow along with the piano tuner's every step, and failed to predict every next little problem that the piano tuner identified made for a great reading experience for me. It evoked a sense of: "Oh, what's the next detail going to be?" And I wanted to continue reading. :)

And, as a final sidenote: Not only do I enjoy thinking about this particular point in general (= how detailed reality is, and how difficult it is to assess the state of all the things in reality). But I also relate to this particular example about piano tuning and music, because I just started (= a year ago) learning about music, music theory, and I'm trying my hand at being creative with creating my own music. So when you mentioned the "attack of the note": A year ago I wouldn't have known what this meant. But now this consumes a lot of my mental resources (because I'm trying to wrap my head around _everything_ related to creating and being creative with music), and this whole topic was just satisfying to read. :)

Curated.

This was a fun post to read! I liked learning about God's prank on musicians, a little bit about how pianos work and how tuning works. I particularly appreciated how Solenoid_Entity shared what it was like trying to hear the problems and what the fixes sounded like. I feel like I got a lot of detail about what the actual subtle problems in the audio waves were, whether or not they were perceptible to plebs like me.

I'm not sure if I agree about the importance of preserving high-quality tunings like this. I lean towards yes, but mainly because I expect a bunch of people would actually enjoy music slightly more in a world with better tunings. Not least, because it might make a difference to the production processes of music makers.

The comments were good on this one. I particularly liked the thread under Garrett's comment, which made me think about the tradeoffs between the abundance of mass production and the often higher quality cap of artisanal work (though I think the absolute quality cap is normally higher for industrial production).

For more on potential incommensurability of skills, see: What Money Cannot Buy [? · GW].

I liked the post and really liked learning about what it means to tune a piano. I had no idea that is was that envolved (makes me wonder if perhaps somethnig like a 12 sting guitar has some similar tuning aspects). So thanks for writing this.

But I also wonder, how to I extrapolate or generalize this. I come away with the question "Are there any actual tuned pianos and how would we know?" That kind of generalized into "We live in an imperfect world, and I already know that."

But the post also tells me that some people can make things better than I would have been able or even known that it could be done or even was achieved. I am sure I would have been one of the people (possibly that very last to ever notice) the piano was not quite right. 

That leads me to thinking about when do the tails matter? Sure, for perhaps a small number of people in the world the better tuned piano makes the world a better place for them. For most the improvement is beyond their comprehension so the world has really not improved.

I wonder a bit about where else this might be playing out, where people see something could be improved and want to get others involved or resources reallocated but struggle to do so and feel very frustrated by the appathy they feel they are confronted with.

A title like "some people can notice more imperfections than you (and they get irked)" would be more accurate and less clickbaity, though when written like that it it sounds kind of obvious.

In my opinion, this is connected with Sturgeon's Law. I'd guess that to expert pianists and piano tuners, 90% of pianos sound out of tune. I know among hardcore software engineers, a common lament is that almost all software sucks. Windows is almost unbearable to me, but I'm sure most desktop users are happy with it. Most desktop users are not programmers.

90% of all things may be crap to the discerning eye, but the world remains ok with that because each person has only a handful of places where they care to discern.

I'm surprised, I think I was predisposed to agree with the conclusion but this post has the opposite effect. This post seems to implicitly take as a given that
1. Pianos sounding the way the piano tuner and pianist wanted them to sound is a Good Thing, and
2. It is not replicable by machines
 

\#2 is a very unusual take for this site, perhaps I misunderstood?

\#1 Why should Piano Tuner's preferences for how a piano sounds affect my preferences? Maybe I like the variety of hearing an out-of-tune piano:

You can be a [connoisseur of anything](https://xkcd.com/915/). I think I do value connoisseurs existing, but I'm not sure I value specifically piano connoisseurs in their current form existing.

And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have.

I fundamentally disagree. Worse according to Piano Tuner, sure. But will the experiences we have of enjoying music get worse if piano tuners slowly died out as a profession? I doubt it.

very cool explanation! I played the piano for more than a decade and this finally explains why I often think electric pianos sound slightly funny. It's all in the tuning lol.

Historically, everyone who had shoes had a pair of leather shoes, custom sized to their feet by a shoemaker.  These shoes could be repaired and the 'lasts' of their feet could be used to make another pair of perfectly fitting shoes.

Now shoes come in standard sizes, are usually made of plastic, and are rarely repairable.  Finding a pair of custom fitted shoes is a luxury good out of reach of most consumers.

Progress!

so that after 11 stacked 'equal-tempered' 5ths, each of them 1/50th of a semitone sharp, we arrive back at a perfect octave multiple of the original frequency.

Don't the 5ths need to be slightly flat (700 cents instead of 702 cents) to have the octaves in tune?

As for God's Joke-- there is definitely another way to interpret this detail than the author provides. 

The article refers to the adoption of the "even tempered scale" where each note is tuned slightly imperfectly in order to create conditions to play mostly in tune during music that involves multiple key changes; however, it is possible to tune instruments in a more precise manner, including the piano so that they are perfectly in tune for a certain piece of music written in a certain key or with few or no key changes. This kind of piano tuning is called "just intonation." 

So, the piano or any other instrument could be more precisely tuned so that music in a certain key sounds even better than it would on instruments tuned to a tempered scale. There is the potential for a story of greater perfection inside a story of seeking greater precision. Instead of taking this tack, the author refers to it as a kind of joke, invoking God's sense of humor, whereas this is actually an artifact of human ingenuity. Beginning in the 18th century, western musicians decided, "yeah, this kind of tuning is good enough" given the trade off of listening to a concert and music that includes the effect of key changes or tuning instruments for every key that the group plays in. 

(Look up "truck stop key change" for even more fun and insights.)

The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2025. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

I think discernment is not essential to entertainment. If people really want to learn what a slightly off piano sounds like and also pay for expert piano tuning, then that’s fine, but I don’t think people should be looked down upon for not having that level of discernment.