Easiest way to start to understand tuning is to begin with the idea of a unison. Two things playing exactly the same thing at the exact same time at the exact same frequency sound like one thing twice as loud. Let’s tune two oscillators to the same pitch and bring up the volume.
It’s just twice as loud. It’s called constructive interference, but watch what happens when we change the pitch of one of them. That’s called destructive interference.
If one oscillator was pushing and pulling 220 times a second, the other one were pushing and pulling 221 times a second. One time every second, one would be pulling and one would be pushing. And you wouldn’t hear anything.
This can sound pretty badass on a synthesizer, where we use all the available voices and detune them a little to fatten up the sound. But on a piano, the objective is to get these two strings in lock step. This is an important concept, and if you already know it, Share it with somebody who belongs in a Beat Kitchen class.
