09/02/2026
One of my advanced piano students, Luke Rottinghaus, is interested in piano tuning...at least tuning his own piano! So I arranged a visit from my three decades-long piano tuner, Steven Fair, who explained about the process of tuning by ear, using tuning forks. Steve uses small blued steel forks for their density and accuracy, rather than the larger, softer, aluminum forks that are more popular for sound healing. Steve is one of the last piano tuners left who works solely by ear. Having a "good ear" myself, I enjoy relaxing and listening to the process as he tunes my piano, bringing the intervals of 5ths and 4ths into perfection and fudging the other intervals into equality. I've always felt that, in a way, he is tuning me, too!
On this day, Steve demonstrated how to hear (and feel) two pitches coming into alignment, such as when a piano key comes into alignment with the appropriate tuning fork. The beating sound (waa waa waa) between the two vibrations slows down as the pitches get closer together and reach unison.
Luke has a great advantage for hearing and understanding this fully (discrimination learning). He has a type of perfect pitch ability that many of my students develop over years of study - it's not connected to letter names per se, but it is a direct connection between pitches heard in different contexts, different places, or in different pieces of music. For instance, playing a certain key on the piano can bring to mind a certain tone in another piece of music, and when we go to that other source to check, the two pitches are indeed identical.
Luke's music education began at age four with my Music Play Early Childhood classes, moved right into Keyboard Games for Beginners and onward into the meat of the Music Moves for Piano curriculum created and developed by my mentor, Marilyn White Lowe, under the guidance of Dr. Edwin E. Gordon, PhD, the music education researcher who coined the term "audiation".
Learning with an audiation-based approach cultivates the ability to hear music in the mind with understanding, whether the music is present in the external environment or not. (The mind IS the audiation instrument, no matter which physical instrument you happen to play...or sing.) There are many types of audiation. For instance, notational audiation is the process of reading music notation with understanding, rather than only decoding symbols. Can you look at a score and hear the music in your mind, as it was intended? This may involve audiating the tempo, dynamic changes, and articulations as you read, in addition to the tonality, and feeling the meter in your body. It is a complex, lively, engaging, sensorial process to truly read music notation.
Steven Fair left Luke with his business card that day, and a light-hearted warning. "Be prepared to call me when you mess up your piano!" It may be inevitable, but I wanted to find a way to bridge that knowledge/experience gap. At the following week's lesson I got out several stringed instruments to practice tuning on. We started with a two-octave diatonic "Music Maker" (Nepenoyka) or lap harp, made in Belarus, north of Ukraine. It was quite easy to tune having only tones from the G Major scale. Next, I attempted to tune a chromatic bowed psaltery, but it had one broken string already and I ended up breaking two more of the old, brittle strings. We'll try starting from scratch on that one later, after I locate a new set of strings for it.
The most exciting part for Luke was getting his hands (and ears) on my old autoharp, which is in the zither family, but with chord bars. I have a complete chromatic set of blued steel tuning forks of my own, so he used those to individually tune each autoharp string. However, my forks are in a lower tuning than Concert (and piano) pitch, A=440 hertz. My set is based on A=428.8, I believe. This may be a good thing since the autoharp hadn't been tuned in many years and had dropped quite a bit in pitch. Sometimes strings don't like getting stretched after they've sat lax for a few years, but luckily none of the autoharp strings broke. Luke quickly tuned about half of the strings, touching the appropriate tuning fork stem to the wood sound board to amplify it's vibration and tone, while using the key to tighten each string, listening for the beat created by the wavelengths of the two tones hitting each other in the air, and then slowing it down. What satisfaction to hear that beating sound get slower and slower, bringing each of the autoharp strings into alignment with the corresponding tuning fork! Getting individual strings in tune also meant that some of the chord bars sounded like identifiable chords, rather than random noise. I sent Luke home with my autoharp and my set of tuning forks. The goal is to get it all tuned, let it rest, and periodically fine tune any strings that needed a little lift. Going further, it could be tuned to one of our pianos (A=440). This way it would also be in tune with other instruments such as the guitar. My next step will be finding the old piano tuning lever Steve gave me years ago (so I could experiment with MY old family piano at home). When I find it, I will lend it to Luke and see what happens!
This Fall I'll be teaching Music Play Early Childhood classes for birth through six at the Friends Quaker Meeting House on West Broadway, as well as welcoming new Music Moves for Piano (and Keyboard Games for Beginners) students to my Hummingbirdhouse Music Studio on North Stadium. If you'd like to be included in my Fall offerings or learn more about how the brain learns music please reach out to me. I also teach adults!
