Sythe Users: What Do They Know? Do They Know Things?? Lets Find Out! #4

Right so a Shiteian trying to tune a middle C by ear would be an educated guess. Because they are well versed in music.

Still a guess and still not the answer. You can throw all the tantrums you like about it, won't make the guess anything other than what it is.

 

the pianos are untuned

 

Perhaps they're also not advanced enough to wait for you to get back from american cancer shopping day before solving their problem

 

If they don't know how many vibrations per second corresponds to middle C how will this help?

 

Jim will be able to know when he hears a tone around middle C, for sure, being well educated in music.

This doesn't give you middle C however it gives you an educated guess for middle C, as already discussed.

 

That could work, what type of strings does it require and can Jim prove it's a middle C?

 

Jim fails once again.

Most instruments can be tuned from a single known reference note. That is because the spacing between the notes is usually built somehow into the instrument (in order for it to be able to play music). This part wasn't the problem. As pointed out numerously you can tune a guitar or violin from a single reference note (although for the piano the tuning is tricky as noted earlier.)

The key thing to identify here is while the spacing between the notes is based on an objective standard (the physics of harmonics) the placement of the scale itself on the pitch spectrum (I.e. the range of audible sounds from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz) is almost completely arbitrary.

The way the modern scale is placed in the pitch spectrum is down to essentially what sounds good. A number of international conferences in the 1800's gathered together many musicians and composers to try and standardize the pitch of one note (A4) so that the scale could be placed at a location in the pitch spectrum consistently all over the world.

440.00 Hz was chosen as the pitch standard for A4. This has become an ISO standard. Read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A440_(pitch_standard)

So the standard for where the chromatic scale should be placed is actually arbitrary and the Shiteians, if they wanted to could validly come up with a whole new standard for middle C based on a conference. (I would have accepted this as a partial answer if accompanied by the full explanation of why it's arbitrary.)

The task however was to find the previously existing middle C they had learned when learning music. That would be ~261.63 Hz.

The essential key here is that while each Shiteian can only make a single educated guess as to what middle C actually is, collectively their educated guesses will form a normal distribution. This is because the variance in their guesses is down to natural variation in their hearing, musical intuition and learning biases. I.e. they are a random sample of musicians which is sufficiently large and therefore their opinions will naturally fall into a Gaussian.

In other words: The information while not held by any one Shiteian can be extracted from the whole population using statistics with a quantitative system of testing.

Coming up with a quantitative measurement of each Shiteian's guess for middle C is its own subproblem. There are a number of approaches, but they all must be repeatable, objective and quantitative.

My approach to this was: Use a ridged flask or cylinder with the bottom filled with water where the water level is perfectly markable. If they are not accelerating this will not be possible, so in that case design a slide whistle where the amount of slide extension can be measured quantitatively. Next have each individual Shiteian sing the Solfège notes (do re mi so fa la ti do). Have them return to the first do and hold (continue signing) the note -- this is supposed to be middle C, and this will be their best guess of middle C. Adjust the whistle or cylinder and blow to make a similar note. If the notes are slightly apart there will be a beat effect. Adjust the water or slide whistle until the beat effect disappears. A third person in the room can determine when this occurs. Document the amount of the slide or the water level.

This then allows the quantitative measurement of each Shiteian's guess of middle C in an objective and reproducible manner.

The trick is then to write all these down all the guesses of all the Shiteians and take the mean. That will be very close to exactly the middle C taught to them in music school.

Then fill the cylinder or extend the slide to the amount specified by the mean of that curve and that's your reference note for tuning all the instruments.

Also Dear Leader was so angry that Jim couldn't figure this out that he pulled the control rods from the communist tin-can reactor (formerly used as their power supply) and irradiated the entire ship killing everyone on board. To this day a beat up commie space shuttle full of magic cement, untuned pianos and irradiated skeletons orbits the moon.

Fin