Confirmed!

Hitting the right note on the fiddle is

impossible.
Friday, March 26, 2010 @1:43:09 AM
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Cant sleep. Before turning out my light, I read a passage written by a violinist over 90 years
ago that explains how it is impossible for your finger fall on the right note. Since Im awake
now, Ill paraphrase what I read and hope it doesnt keep you awake.
What is the distance between the 1st and 2nd fingers on the A string notes B and C? Lets
say its about between these two notes. The difference in the pitches of these notes is
about 30 vibrations of the string. (That is to say, when we play a B note on the A string, it
vibrates just over 493 times a second (or 493 Hertz). The next semitone up, note C, sounds
when the string vibrates at 523 Hz. In other words, the difference in pitch is: 523 minus 493,
or 30 vibrations of the string.
In order to land our index finger at exactly the right spot to play note B (i.e., make the string to
vibrate exactly 493 times a second), wed have to be accurate within about 1/64th of an inch.
Thats the width of about five strands of hair placed tightly side by side. (Some rulers have
lines showing 1/32th of an inch, but 1/64 is so small that the lines blur together.)
To help you keep track of the numbers, heres a summary:
The distance between notes B and C on the A string is .
The difference between notes B and C on the A string is 30 vibrations per second.
These 30 vibrations represent a pitch difference of one semitone.
On the violin fingerboard, moving our finger 1/64th of an inch will cause the pitch to go up
or down by 1 vibration.
By the way, one semitone = 100 cents, so each of these vibrations is about 3 cents.
Fortunately, pitch perception is not so exacting. Our ears are a little more forgiving when we
perceive a note. The regular person on the street needs to hear a change of at least 6
vibrations (Hz) or 18 cents in order to perceive a change in pitch for these notes. (Musicians
can often hear differences as little as 1.5 Hz and some people have hearing so accurate that
they can hear differences of less than 1 Hz, but for this example, Ill be lenient and go with
the normal range of 6 Hz.)
(To check your perception try this test: http://tonometric.com/adaptivepitch/. I could
distinguish tones 1.125 vibrations apart, with headphones and a lot of concentration.)
Still with me? So, Im thinking that a normal person will hear a note as sharp if the string
vibrates 499 times a second or more (+ 6 Hz) and will hear it as flat if the string vibrates at
487 Hz or less (-6 Hz). If I can make the string vibrate anywhere from 488 to 498, I have a
shot at sounding in tune.
This means my landing area on the finger board to play the note B has to be within 1/16th of
an inch of the exact spot or else it will sound sharp or flat. The note will sound even better if I
am much closer to the perfect spot.
Okay. So each note has a tiny landing strip on the fingerboard. There are a couple more
problems with trying to play the right note.
1) We press the string down with large squishy fingertips, which makes pinpoint accuracy is
even more of a challenge.
2)
The perfect spot to sound the note actually changes, depending on the scale or the
temperament. Ill keep this short, and just say that if our note B is the 3rd tone (say, in a G
chord), the perfect spot will be closer to the scroll than if our note B is the 7th or leading tone
(say in a C chord).

In short, we have a tiny spot to land, our fingertips are oversized, and the perfect spot
for each note moves around.
In conclusion (Ill quote from Carl Flesch here) to play in tune in terms of physics is an
impossibility.
Heres the amazing part. He goes on to explain that the key to sounding good on the violin is
not to become a master at finger placement, but to develop your ears so you instantly and
automatically adjust your finger placement as soon as you hear the note. He says we play in
tune by making tiny adjustments of our fingers on the fingerboard within the first second of
playing each note. (Heres another reason for developing a light touch.) Ill end this entry with
more of his own words they strike me as profound.
There are however a number of violinists who create the impression that they play in tune. How can
one explain this contradiction? Simply by the fact that those violinists, even though they do not strike
these notes totally accurately, correct them within a fraction of a second, either by changing the finger
location or by shading the vibrato in the direction of the correct intonation. All this happens, given the
necessary dexterity, so rapidly that the listener has the impression that the note was in tune from the
very beginning even though it happened only after an infinitesimally short time. Playing in tune is
therefore nothing but an extremely rapid and cleverly executed correction of the initially imprecise
pitch.
The Art of Violin Playing, Book One. Page 8. Carl Flesch, Translated and edited by Eric Rosenblith.

Back to bed.