physics4me

Typical tuning curve of a piano. The plot shows how
much the fundamental frequency of each note deviates from the equal-tempered scale

Haye Hinrichsen
The human sense of hearing perceives a combination of sounds ‘in tune’ if the corresponding harmonic spectra are correlated, meaning that the neuronal excitation pattern in the inner ear exhibits some kind of order. Based on this observation it is suggested that musical instruments such as pianos can be tuned by minimizing the Shannon entropy of suitably preprocessed Fourier spectra. This method reproduces not only the correct stretch curve but also similar pitch fluctuations as in the case of high-quality aural tuning….
Read more: http://arxiv.org/pdf