As computer hardware and software becomes ever more powerful, they find ways to match and then exceed many human abilities. One point of superiority that humans have stubbornly refused to yield is tuning musical instruments. Pythagoras identified the precise, mathematical relationships between musical tones over 2,000 years ago, and modern machines can beat out any human when it comes to precise math. So why aren’t computers better than people? The professional tuner does have one incontrovertible advantage: a trained human ear.
Imprecision, it turns out, is embedded in our scales, instruments, and tuning system, so pros have to adjust each instrument by ear to make it sound its best. Electronic tuners can’t do this well because there has been no known way to calculate it. Basically, it’s an art, not a science. But now, a new algorithm published in arXiv claims to be just as good as a professional tuner. To understand how this new algorithm works, it’s worth understanding how today’s electronic tuners don’t work.
Human 1, Machine 0
One major problem with automatic tuning is baked into the Western musical system and the limits of human hearing. In the equal temperament system, which is used for most modern ...
