Topic: Bug? Significant inharmonicity even with 10m piano
Hi all,
Tonight I took some measurements of the Pianoteq 7.2.0 PRO "Grand Ant Petrof" sound with the string length set to 10m. The manual says:
"Inharmonicity decreases very rapidly with string length. Experiment by changing the String length. The difference will be most evident in the bass range. You can choose up to a 10 meter long piano! At such a size, there is almost no inharmonicity. People say that piano manufacturers dreamed of producing pianos without inharmonicity..."
However, even at 10 meters there is significant inharmonicity, at least for the notes I tested. In particular, the harmonics track very well to the standard Harvey Fletcher equation for stretched partials due to string stiffness.
For instance, for "B" above A4 (so about 494 Hz), I measured the inharmonicity coefficient "B" equal to 0.000854634239097124, to which the harmonics have an extremely good fit. Given this, we can then measure the cents deviation of each harmonic from its "just" version with no inharmonicity. Those deviations are:
1 0.85100734626789
2 3.39902100548722
3 7.62911367488012
4 13.5167286476116
5 21.0281493252212
6 30.1211301330984
7 40.7456645903049
8 52.8448621854427
9 66.3559033372764
10 81.2110410865593
11 97.3386191477907
12 114.664078308312
13 133.110926583857
14 152.601652675856
15 173.058566779242
16 194.404557344766
17 216.563756744031
18 239.462112719482
19 263.027865893305
20 287.191936388401
So you can see there is still some very significant deviation from true inharmonicity. Even the 7th harmonic, for instance, is almost a quarter tone sharp, the 11th harmonic is a semitone sharp, etc.
This coefficient barely seemed to change *at all* with the string length. The only strings whose coefficients changed were the very low ones. I did check the "Note Edit" view as well and all of them supposedly changed to 10m.
How can I decrease the inharmonicity to 0? I would certainly like to request this be possible somehow. Is this a bug?