Haven't been a Linux daily driver in years, but I love that KDE continues to have such an impact.
Reminder that its built-in browser Konqueror debuted the KHTML rendering engine circa ~1999, which was then forked to become WebKit, and now (including all subsequent forks) powers something approaching 90% of web views globally. Pretty amazing!
Not OP but Windows 11 "just works" compared with Linux on a laptop.
For context, I've been using Linux since 1994, including some tiny contribution to the then kernel. I also administered tons of Linux boxes professionally and personally.
With this said, I am trying every 15 months or so to start Ubuntu on my laptop and see how I could live with it in my world of Outlook, zScaler and Zoom. So far I cannot and I would love to be proven wrong.
I think the parent's comment was unfair – you were (roughly) looking to build a self-hosted, open project for those who don't want to pay for hosted options, and that's exactly what you've done. I'm certainly a person who will be keeping this project in mind for the future.
It's fairly obvious that the largest possible audience would want a turn-key, hosted service, and there are paid options that deliver exactly that. I don't suspect that you were aiming to be "the discord of" this field, and the path to getting there is wildly different.
Great work, and kudos on both the initiative and the progress!
> In 2007, LimeWire was estimated to be installed on over one-third of all computers globally. [1]
20 years ago, even grandpa could download the LimeWire setup.exe, install it in 1 min, and start hosting and sharing files with anyone on the internet. You would think we would have made progress since then and things would be even easier to host and run. Instead we have regressed: a simple software requires devops expertise to install.
I’ve seen so many teams that fail to realize that once you use a domain in any significant way, you’re basically bound to renewing it until the heat death of the universe – or at least the heat death of your team.
Whether it’s this sort of thing, a stale-but-important URL hanging out somewhere, someone on your team signing up for a service with an old domain-email, or whatever, it’s just so hard to know when it’s truly okay let an old domain go.
But you can see your Mac (running macOS) on it. In that sense, it’s “just” a monitor, but far from Apple’s most expensive monitor.
Another comment mentions that you’re confined to the host computer’s “screen” and can’t break applications away from that rectangle. But you could imagine that being a possibility in the not-too-distant future.
After being West Point valedictorian, Wes Clark was NATO Supreme Allied Commander, Europe – can’t get too much higher than that. But yes, McCain was “only” a Captain, and Gore served for a year or so.
That's true, my mistake, and I guess he was in charge during Kosovo. But I'm not sure he would really count as being a "military leader" in the same way that Washington, Grant, or Eisenhower were.
Might have just been based on what they could show at demo time – they can handle some core productivity stuff, but might not have had the time/access/team to put together something compelling on gaming for that date.
I think they were trying very hard not to be pigeonholed as a games device.
If they had made a part of the presentation (outside the 3 second mention of Apple Arcade) about playing games I could see a lot of people spending even more time comparing it to an Oculus or PSVR2 and complaining it was insanely priced.
Instead they did a pretty decent job of getting people discussing non-game use cases.
I think the biggest problem is the controller and locomotion. Almost all VR games available right now use controllers to navigate around the virtual world. Meanwhile Apple has shown nothing that allows you to move around in the virtual world. All locomotion you do on Apple's headset happens in the real world via AR, the fully immersive experiences are basically limited to standing or sitting in place.
This has the advantage of dramatically increasing the comfort, since motion sickness is largely caused by artificial locomotion with the controller, but it also drastically limits what kinds of games you can do in VR.
I would expect them to expand on this area eventually, but I can understand why they wouldn't for the announcement, as for the time being they want the focus on VisionPro as a friendly computer/monitor/TV/cinema replacement.
I wonder if there is a way to stimulate the vestibular system externally to make it feel like actual locomotion and perhaps improve on the motion sickness.
I don't think so. While you can artificially stimulate the vestibular system, getting that to work precisely across all the users of the headset would be rather tricky.
But the even bigger issue is that even if you overcome that, you still have the fundamental problem that a correct vestibular response is extremely important to keep users from falling over. If you artificially give people the impression that they are accelerating or decelerating, they'll automatically compensate and lean into it and just fall over. This happens already often enough just from the visual stimulus alone, if you mess with the vestibular system those accidents would get a lot worse.
That said, maybe there is some middle ground that could work where you don't create a real virtual vestibular input, but just a little jolt to notify the brain that something is going in, even if that something isn't matching the visuals. Many people report having less issue with motion sickness when they walk in place or bob their head. PlaystationVR2 has a small rumble motor build into the headsets with is supposed to help a little bit here as well.
There's the How Much Will the Vison Pro Cost game, there's the When Will the SE 3 Come Out game, there the Will they Fix the Macbook Keyboard game,
there's the How Many Ports Will It Have game, there's the Will They Give It HDMI and USB-A ports game, the Will They Switch Away From Intel game. You think I'm being facetious, but if you look at a game simply as a thing you spend time doing, and then consider the amount of digital ink spilled discussing those topics online and in-person discussions being had about them, the meta Apple is endlessly entertaining.
On the other hand, at small companies, this can be a big deal. FAANG companies pretty much know how interested you are in working there, based on the fact that you’re the type of person who thinks they want to work at a FAANG company. And since the scope of these companies is so large, there are all sorts of ways to fit your interests into work at such a company over the mid-to-long-term.
But early-stage companies are looking for folks who have an interest and understanding in the task at hand. For many hiring managers at these companies, expertise – or at least interest – in the problem space is noteworthy. On the hard-skill side, it can suggest that you may be able to help see around corners with your product team, identifying and solving issues during planning or on the fly. On the soft-skill side, it can suggest that you’re bringing positive energy and motivation to the still-nascent team.
In the end, it’s still a matter of knowing your audience and reading the room. It may be a waste of time in some places, and may be the difference-maker in others.
Folks at 200+ and especially FAANG companies are mostly interchangeable. The interviewer is mostly derisking chance of a dud and comparing a 86%er vs 87%er. A few exceptions like at the rarer million dollar comp level. For everyone else, especially non-insiders... Cookie cutter comparisons it is, and whatever edge.
Startups are very much making a more existential bet. For our openings, I'm equally looking for ownership, interest in our customers/mission/long-term, and other bits that have little to with a whiteboard. On a HN Hiring thread from yesterday, you'd be surprised how many emails I got that were 'here is my stale CV from 5-10 years ago' and little about why they're excited to do hard things with us. Likewise, if someone is on a second round with us and hasn't bothered to use our free tier, that also tells us a lot about their (dis)interest in doing for what is, for everyone else on our team, career-defining creations.
Frankly most startups aren't very interesting. The ones who want you to be super interested are often the most boring ideas "were passionate about sox compliance", and if they are interesting they won't tell you shit about the company due to secret sauce or just moving so fast nothing is documented. It's hard as a candidate to get excited about every idea. And many people purposefully don't as they don't want to get shot down later by a job they were excited about. Finally if I'm actively looking I have 10 leads I'm following and I'm practicing for interviews. Signing up for every beta tryout eats into that time. I'll take a look when ivw got an offer.
I took a career pivot from web forms /rails to AAA playstation games. I played the game after they flew me to Seattle and gave me an offer. It involved buying a PlayStation 3 and their previous game. And that's an obviously cool job. Bought it right after I landed home and played it the next morning. Accepted the offer a few hours later.
Yea, I've had a similar issue happen to me. Was interviewing at a small-mid company that I was increasingly interested in and passionate about, and had really delved into with various interviewers to learn about their business and what made them a good product and good place to work.
Ultimately, they went with someone else. I'm not upset about it, but it stung more than getting another form letter from some large company. It feels almost cruel as an interviewer/hiring manager to expect every viable candidate to get really invested in you and your company when you know you're going to reject some high percentage of them just because you can't hire more than a few people.
Yes, generally I assume each candidate is having serious conversations with 2-5 others, and non-serious with more. We do the same. There are exceptions, like folks not actively interviewing, but that's the typical case.
It is big stakes for all involved, so someone not treating it seriously is a big warning flag. That is fine for later stage companies where individuals mostly need to not screw up and add reliable incremental value, and the resume screens and interview processes people are complaining about here reflect that need. Different job, different interview..
I certainly understand the stakes for you in making the right hire, but you're fundamentally much less invested in the candidate than you seem to be asking them to be in you. At the end of the day, you can reject them and pick someone else, or wait for someone better, while it seems like you have some expectation that they should be upset and disappointed if they don't make the cut with you.
Ultimately, if I'm really passionate, but don't have all the skills you want, or want more money than you can provide, than you'll pass on me and move on to the next candidate. That's fine, but if we've spent the time making sure I feel like I could really create something good with you and your team, and that I'd be a good part of it, that's just setting up 3-5 of your candidates to have a really strong letdown, even beyond what's already a difficult thing to hear.
I'm not sure where I say we "have some expectation that they [candidates] should be upset and disappointed if they don't make the cut". I would assume they'd be disappointed they didn't get an offer, wasted application time, and didn't get an impactful role... for easily avoidable reasons.
Agreed that people not a match for a job shouldn't get the job offer nor should they take if the offerer have messed up. This is all match making... Which is two-sided.
I'm lucky enough to have reached a point personally & professionally where I can highly value where each hour goes & doesn't go. A lot of time goes into a job, so the idea of applying for a bunch of 2-5yr (or longer) journey candidates, and the possibility to do the best professional work of my life to date.. and not doing my homework on the options just doesn't make sense. For some people it does and for many legit reasons, and for them, a leetcode interview for a FAANG style job probably makes more sense. Just that kind of approach is a harder sell for making a good match at a startup at the more formative years.
I'm implying it somewhat, since if you're "looking for ownership, interest in our customers/mission/long-term" and getting involved in what you see as "career-defining creations", then that's a relationship with a job that requires a candidate to buy into what you're doing to the point where they'd be upset to be rejected from the opportunity. I'm not trying to say you're deluding them or anything, but that the level of commitment you're asking for out of candidates before they've even started with you is such where it's a harder rejection than just "it's on to another job."
What I'm trying to say is that expecting the candidates to do the work to sell themselves on your vision and importance and viability feels like both a large burden on them and something that's setting even those dedicated enough to do it up for likely heartbreak.
Like you say, this is two-sided. Loading up the free version of your offering is more work than most interviewers are putting into a candidate. I could see it being very fair and very interesting to have a section of an interview where I sat with one of the company's developers or product folks and played around with the product to learn and talk about it - that seems like it would be a good signal both ways.
Otherwise, it just feels like you're asking candidates to put in far more time and personal effort deciding to care about them than you're likely putting in to learn and care about them outside of the interviews. That's always the case with interviews, but this additional layer just feels like an unnecessarily interviewee-unfriendly level on top. If it's working for you, then that's good for you, but consider the sorts of candidates that could be a good fit but don't have the time after work to spend even more time becoming invested in your company and a vision.
For us, folks using our tech and then realizing what it's for is the beginning of much more interesting technical & mission conversations than programming language, monetization model, or RSU vs ISO. I rather talk about where data analysis is going for tough problem XYZ, and what we - and their area of ownership - needs to do to help get our users and the tech community there.
Both sides needs to be ready for that conversation though, and those are the candidates that stick out. And yeah, if the company is say streamlining parking, or the candidate just wants a 9-5 -- both of which are fine -- it'll be a different kind of interview.
As others have said better, you are essentially asking the candidate to put in more time applying for opportunity than you are for them as a candidate to the filtering process. Eg they've got email exchanges, resume, interviews, and researching your company and doing the free trial. You have filter the resume, do the screen, write up decision.
I think you're missing that there's a power imbalance between you as the comfortable person offering a job (who is employed), and a person who may be currently looking and has mouths to feed and no income. I think you're making some assumptions here that might rule out excellent candidates in many scenarios and filter in for ingenuine yes people.
Also I did look, you seem to be a CEO on a graph visualization 3d acceleration system. I'm not sure that wows me instantly. I did sign up for a free trial, but I don't have an example data set to upload, and you don't seem to have one (I tried no-code visualizations). The main stuff I'd upload is something from work, but I generally don't need graph visualizations there either. I'm not going to upload proprietary info to a trial account. So as a enterprise customer I'm kinda at a crossroads for trying your system out. I'd have to go to Security and Legal and get approval, or I could just use tables or d3js, graphviz, or any of the solutions I'm currently not using. It's also unclear what of my data hits your servers.
As a candidate I imagine I'm at 45 minutes in before I actually get to kick the tires. You're not really making it easy for me to love your pitch.
At a minimum it'd be great if you could just have a notebook or collab or whatever people could just spin up instantly or use via browser. All I see are images, which while pretty seem to show the same issues I have with every other graph visualization program, they're incredibly cluttered.
Again you're not Games and you're not Space... I'm not sure why people would be passionate about your product in under 45 minutes or could afford to spend more than that to do so. I'd ask you to really consider if anyone can be as passionate about your idea as you are.
No 3d/vr/etc unfortunately, we never saw commercial demand in our segments, just looking at bigger datasets and increasingly 'wide' / high-dimensional/scattered/heterogeneous data using accelerated viz & AI, and now text2code
And yes, we currently get used by data scientists and devs on problems like supply chain analysis, misinformation, cybersecurity, human trafficking. Seeing 100x+ more data than d3 and having a full env there makes analyst investigations easier. Our original GPU client <> GPU cloud tech helped lead to what is now Apache Arrow (we contributed the JS tier as part of the GPU Open Analytics Initiative) and Nvidia RAPIDS (we wrote the precursor in nodejs/opencl, and worked with Nvidia to restart for pydata), and are now focusing on the Nvidia Morpheus & graph AI sides for end-to-end GPU pipelines with our bigger customers (cyber, ...).
More recently, to make this kind of tech easier for analysts who are traditionally stuck with Splunk/Kibana/etc style UIs for investigations, we have been launching louie.ai (genAI-first notebooks) with various customers
Hopefully now it makes sense why we don't go far with candidates who can't have conversations on these things, such as how they are built, how they get used, and where they are going . It is ok-but-not-great on conv 1, but weird by conv 2. And as a CEO, far from what I look for in someone in a senior/leader role who is supposed to be looking ahead.
> if someone is on a second round with us and hasn't bothered to use our free tier, that also tells us a lot about their (dis)interest in doing for what is, for everyone else on our team, career-defining creations.
This is on a completely different planet from my experience as a candidate and as an interviewer.
It looks like you're doing interesting work, and it might be great to work for you. But that's true of a lot of other companies. You're asking for a level of interest and dedication to your company that is completely unwarranted at this stage. For all I know you're about to ghost me. I suspect a major effect of your approach is that you select people who are better BS artists and have fewer employment options.
Yes, we are looking for folks to work with us, not for us. Different mindset & process. We try not to hire ex-FAANG (but occasionally do) in part because of this kind of difference.
It's fascinating to see so much resistance to this kind of thinking for a forum that is nominally about startups. In a sense that's good - some people are well-suited for the needs of scaleups and post-scale, vs startups (0-1, 1-10), and recognizing that is healthy. What you do & learn in a big company or a already-figured-it-out late-stage & highly funded VC co is different from the wild west stage of startups.
I will work for you, not with you, as the loyalty of your company is non existent. I worked for many start ups, and enjoyed working on that type of challenges, but I am always aware loyalty is non existent. It is a red flag if company talks about "we are a family" or "work with us".
I always liked the Netflix reframing of 'professional sports team's vs 'family' because of that reason. At the same time.. I'm sorry you've had a professional career with so many folks lacking loyalty. I've been lucky enough to work with a variety of 'recognized' great people, and with them, loyalty is so common that it has been the folks who lacked loyalty (and often in politicized bigcos that seems to encourage that) who stand out as the exceptions.
Fwiw, I'm using 'work with us' in the sense of taking ownership over a problem and ability & interest to work through many unknowns, vs preferring a weekly jira with big decisions made by the time they reach you.
The analogy of 'mercenary' specialist may align with your world view. Sometimes that type of person can be worth their weight in gold. We like that for short temp consultations for example, and in big enterprise engagements, I often like when a mix of them + lifers are involved..
If you miss revenue targets, you will have to lay off staff. Maybe it is too early yet for your company, but as you go to different funding rounds this will happen. A spreadsheet will decide if you retain me or lay me off.
It really doesn't take long to try out a free tier of a product and it's a great way to get a feel for what the company is building, how far along they are, how much you like or dislike the direction they've taken.
I even like to briefly try the free tier of a product (if available) ahead of warm lead sales calls. It always pays off to have a rough understanding of what a product does and how it fits into an overall ecosystem.
I haven't been ghosted "so much." I've worked at a cool startup and two FAANGs. But there's no guarantee the interview process will go your way no matter how good you are; there's a lot of luck and interpretation involved.
> if someone is on a second round with us and hasn't bothered to use our free tier, that also tells us
Now that you've said it on HN... soon, most of the applicants you get using your free tier by second round will be doing so because that'll be added as a standard part of the generic tech jobs interviewing ritual for people who just go through the motions (along with memorizing Leetcode, and practicing good-sounding lies to behavioral questions).
A friend told me that Bumble require you sign up to apply for a job. And now my pet theory about why guys get so few swipes back is that they're all swiping away on leagues of job applicants.
I can't fathom having a serious discussion about a 2-5 year career bet, and hopefully even more impacting, and not having a serious look at the actual work or at least the highly related technologies. Some of our best hires have been from our userbase and the OSS communities we helped start, and some of our misses have been from those who couldn't get on board with those.
(We don't do leetcode etc, though for junior roles we do ask for a Jupyter notebook, and for senior, might do a contracting period if mutually agreeable.)
Having a contracting period for senior engineers sounds like you must not get many of them. Most people I know at that level are swimming in offers when they go looking for work, so a contract period is just incredibly unattractive.
Yes it varies. Some prefer it before jumping in, eg, super senior who mostly do advisory and light consulting. We are a small team so by definition each person gets more ownership than at your average bigco or megaround VC co.
> On a HN Hiring thread from yesterday, you'd be surprised how many emails I got that were 'here is my stale CV from 5-10 years ago' and little about why they're excited to do hard things with us.
I was about to write a moderately snarky comment and went to your profile to check which Java banking middleware or Rails-based Uber-for-dogs your startup is building for applicants to be excited about... but looking at the description your company seems quite interesting! Sorry to hear that you've got flooded with generic low-effort application from disinterested people. I guess in current job market some people just desperately knocking on all doors hoping to get any job at all.
A lot of people here would argue it’s just a numbers game. I’ve been lucky over the past 25 years to hit 2 or 3 targeted possibilities with a single email to someone I knew. But I realize that’s probably not typical.
I think that's more true than people, especially pure engineers, would like to think
Ultimately companies are made out of individuals going through their own lives and making decisions as they go. Raising capital, selling software, and getting a job offer are all very much sales processes. That means very real human + numbers components.
Agreed on the numbers side too on the long-view.. join a company, vest + 1yr, and either stay if it's growing or on to the next one. At least a couple times, stay longer - ideally at the growers - so you can go up in learned seniority too vs just in title. An equally important numbers game.
I just feel bad that folks are pretty much disqualifying themselves needlessly. It's a tough job market, and if folks are flubbing it with us that needlessly, I can only imagine what they are going through with their other applications. A bit of effort here can go a long way, hence my advocacy...
> Likewise, if someone is on a second round with us and hasn't bothered to use
> our free tier, that also tells us a lot about their (dis)interest in doing for
> what is, for everyone else on our team, career-defining creations.
This makes sense. After a first round, if I'm still interested in a company, I want to dig in and find out everything I can to see if they're a likely fit and signing up for a free tier (if there is one) is absolutely a no brainer. And it's usually is a great way to form some meaningful questions to ask in the next round of interviews if I AM interested.
Not to be a buzzkill – this is a cool story! But it’s worth noting that perfect/absolute pitch can be a negative for musicians in some contexts, especially vocal music.
Since even the vast majority of musicians employ relative pitch, entire choruses can move together off of the original key, for good reasons and bad, but those with perfect pitch will (sometimes stubbornly) maintain the original key, even when doing so is counterproductive to the performance.
Lead singer in the ensemble is a little under the weather and can’t hit the high notes? Normally, you’d consider starting the piece down a step or two, and get on with the show without much trouble. But if you have members with perfect pitch, that may not be an option without some significant rehearsal to familiarize them.
This also translates to musical appreciation – I know people who can’t stand when a singer covers a song in a modified key, saying it sounds “wrong” and “terrible” compared to the original. For the vast majority of the audience, the key doesn’t matter terribly much, but for those with perfect pitch, the key is a significant attribute of the original piece, and it’s just as major as changing the words might be.
In other contexts, perfect pitch can be very handy, but it’s not always quite as “perfect” as it’s sometimes portrayed.
I used to be a harpsichord tuner, and I can tell you that perfect pitch would have driven me nuts dealing with A being 415, 430, or 440 (+/- 2) Hz on any given day, as well as dealing with unequal temperaments. I have very good relative pitch in comparison to the average musician, and that is a lot more useful (and an entirely learnable skill as an adult). I know a lot of musicians with perfect pitch, but only one piano tuner.
My sister has perfect pitch, and she definitely had a leg up learning music, but she can't stand baroque music played in authentic pitch/tuning. Some modern music also uses effects to raise and lower the pitch of the song, and those annoy her too: think about the Janet Jackson song that breaks hard drives - it is in E, but the tuning is almost A=450 thanks to the use of varispeed. That one is pretty far, but many other songs have A=435-445 thanks to post-production.
Her orchestra plays at A=441, and I think she has basically learned that tuning or doesn't care - it's only about 5 cents sharp (1/20th of a half step).
I have to ask out of curiosity, does this mean you worked full-time tuning harpsichords or rather that you did a lot of e.g. piano tuning and also occasionally tuned harpsichords? I'm hoping the former but expecting the latter.
I was a student at the time, and harpsichord tuning was a side job (~10 hours/week). My big "competitive advantage" over piano tuners was that I was very much into playing baroque music and knew a lot about unequal temperaments and harpsichord technology. I could also do pianos (tuning only, no maintenance), and did a few when needed, but harpsichords need tuning once a week plus an extra tune before every concert. For comparison, most pianos tend to get tuned on a several-monthly cadence, so you need a lot more clients to fill up a schedule.
Essentially, instead of a fee for service (like piano tuning) product, harpsichord tuning is a subscription product. However, I think there were <10 other people who tuned harpsichords in the same major metro area, so the market is pretty tiny.
This is all fascinating! Thank you for sharing! If I can keep bothering you with questions (or if you happen to be able to point me to a place to learn more about harpsichord tuning), I have more questions. But I also understand if you don't want to keep answering them! Despite being someone who doesn't know much about nor listen to much music, I've always had a soft spot for harpsichords.
Why do harpsichords need to be tuned so much more frequently? How long did they take to tune (and how does that compare to tuning a piano)? How was the pricing structured with such a regular need? Were most of the harpsichords you were tuning in academic institutions, arts institutions, private use, et cetera? And not a question but another thought, I'm surprised there were even a handful of people tuning them in your metro area!
A sibling comment mentioned that harpsichords tend to have wood frames, and so they are incredibly reactive to temperature and humidity. The pin blocks in harpsichords also are often a single piece of hardwood, while in a piano they are a laminate of specially selected quartersawn hardwoods, so they hold the tuning pins a lot more strongly. If you hire a piano tuner for your harpsichord, they also tend to torque the pins too hard, which weakens the pin block even more.
Depending on the instrument and temperament, a tuning could be ~45 min or up to 90 min. Small instruments in the family (spinets and virginals) could have <4 octaves and one stop, meaning <50 strings to tune, and the biggest instrument had 5 stops and a 5-octave keyboard, meaning more strings than a piano (300 vs about 230). The "standard" instrument is ~4.5 octaves with 3 stops, meaning ~150 strings.
The customer picks the temperament generally, and that has some effect on how long it takes. Quarter-comma tunings (4 fifths flat by a quarter of a comma, the rest remaining pure) like Werckmeister are the quickest, and took under an hour on the standard instrument, but tunings like Kellner (1/5th comma, but harder from an A reference) and Valloti (1/6th comma) took me at least 2 passes to touch up, so over an hour. I also did equal temperament tunings with a tuner, which are quick. For reference, it takes me about 90 minutes to 2 hours to do a piano, so I am a little slow by professional piano tuner standards, but harpsichords are definitely quicker.
I also frequently adjusted the tuning based on what repertoire was being played, rotating it so that the near-pure thirds would be in the keys of the repertoire and possibly raising leading tones a bit. It was also not uncommon to have a modern woodwind in an ensemble, which often meant only doing a slightly spicy version of equal temperament rather than using a full-on baroque tuning.
The harpsichords were pretty much all at schools - I started by tuning my school's instruments and expanded from there.
I generally charged my hourly rate for 4 services/instrument/month + some padding, with extras (concerts) going at an hourly rate. This was a "work study" arrangement at my school (although I had 15 hours/week of work study for <3 hours of work, and still gave them a discount at the standard student rate) and contract work outside.
There's a harpsichord in my family. The traditional harpsichord had a wooden frame, thus the materials just weren't stable.
An American maker, John Challis, developed a harpsichord using modern materials, that stays in tune for much longer.
They didn't take as long to tune, as mentioned above, because the historic temperaments were easier if you knew what you were doing, and there were no unisons (multiple strings per note) to get into agreement. Before the age of the modern piano, keyboard players had to tune their own instruments, so it was just part of learning to play.
The Challis harpsichords are fascinating, but I think also a bit of an acquired taste. The aluminum parts sound odd to me, but I assume they basically never lose their tuning.
I can finally ask someone this! I was thinking of getting my piano tuned to a spicier temperament, happy for certain keys to be noticeably out as long as other keys sound a bit sweeter.
Anything you'd recommend, or is it a shit idea on piano?
I would suggest Kellner or Valloti if you tend to play romantic period music, although those are a hair harder to tune than the easy ones like Werckmeister. Pianos can definitely take temperaments as long as you keep the A at 440 (to equalize tension on the harp).
Personally, I think Beethoven and Chopin sound great in Kellner, and I had my piano in Kellner for a very long time.
When I was a teenager, I took piano lessons from a teacher with perfect pitch. When I told her that our piano at home—an old American-made upright—couldn’t be tuned any higher than about A=435, she visibly shivered. She said she couldn’t stand playing pianos that were not tuned to A=440.
Ever since, I have never wished that I had perfect pitch.
Some hardware and software instruments can easily switch from modern A440 to A400 or any desired A frequency, and from equal temperament to various other temperaments - even dynamic tuning. They are really fun to play, particularly the dynamic tunings where you can get highly in-tune chords and scales in any key. Vocal ensembles can also dynamically adjust their tuning, producing amazing overtones. I imagine string and brass ensembles can as well.
Some (non equal-tempered) keyboard instruments have split sharp/flat keys so you can play more in tune in certain keys/scales.
Being able to distinguish these all of these tunings accurately and switch between them as needed seems like it would be a nice skill to have.
That sounds great. I would like to try playing a keyboard with dynamic tuning sometime.
I should have mentioned that I was a teenager in the early 1970s, and the only pianos I had access to then had strings and could not be retuned on the fly. In retrospect, I came to feel sorry for my teacher, as being conditioned to the arbitrary standard of A=440 prevented her from enjoying playing music on many of the pianos she would have happened to come across.
Wow this is so interesting! So you are saying that the person with absolute pitch often has lost the ability to intuitively follow relative pitch, such that they are having to transpose in their heads?
I had always assumed they could still intuitively match pitch and just had an extra information overlay.
Do these people you know who dislike transposed covers also dislike genres of music with dissonant elements, such as certain types of jazz or microtonal music?
It's not losing relative pitch at all[0], it's actually kind of the opposite. Relative pitch and absolute pitch are at odds with each other in some contexts. There are many reasons as to why, and if you search tuning theory [1] you can find some amount of technical information. In this post I'll only cover a tiny portion of the reason, there are many other reasons, but this is one fundamental reason why.
To give a basic gist, two of the most fundamental intervals in music are octave (2:1 frequency ratio) which is 1200 cents, and perfect fifth (3:2 frequency ratio) which is about 702 cents. You'll find that if you stack 12 of these perfect fifths you come back to the same note (seven octaves up) but 23.46 cents off. 23.46 cents off is very much audible by every human being who is not speech impaired, so it'll sound extremely jarring (dissonant). This makes musical composition within the tradition of Western art/church music challenging. So, to fix this, we use 700 cents as the interval of approximate perfect fifth and each semitones apart by 100 cents (so that perfect fifth is 7th note and octave the 12th). We call this system "12 tone equal temperement" which is standard in all genres of Western music (from classical to jazz to pop to rock... but other cultures have many other systems). Now your piano will be tuned to these notes (0, 100, 200, 300... cents) such that it's impossible to play other notes. When people learn absolute pitch, they learn these notes are C, C#, D, D# etc. But when an instrument with continuous pitch plays (such as violin, cello, human voice etc) you do not need to be bound by this tempering. So you can actually play a perfect fifth as 702 cents. As long as the piece is not so chromatic/atonal such that you need 12 perfect fifths to add up to seven octaves, it'll work out. But when someone with perfect pitch listens to this effect, it can feel jarring, particularly because music is "out of tune". This can make piano music feel "out of tune" for people who are used to just intonation (e.g. violinists) and violin music feel "out of tune" for people who are used to 12TET (e.g. pianists with perfect pitch).
[0] Note that relative pitch is required to understand spoken human language, so as long as you don't have a speech impediment, you can likely understand relative pitch just fine. Of course, ear training can help you label the intervals you hear and associate them with names, not something all laymen can do.
Most professional violinists play in perfect equal temperament. I never got that deep into string playing, but I assume that a lot of study of "intonation" is actually about unlearning the natural frequency ratios (3/2 for 5ths, 5/4 for 3rds, etc) and learning to use the equal tempered counterparts (2^(7/12) and 2^(1/3) respectively).
However, there are a lot of times when you can make music more interesting and exciting by adding some pure thirds (equal temperament is off by the most on thirds, and thirds are very harmonically important) at strategic places. You just can't do this on a keyboard instrument.
I think this very much depends on the context, and being a good virtuoso violinist (or cellist, or singer etc) picking the right temperament for the right effect. If you're playing in an orchestra with many other instruments, you likely have to stick with 12TET. If you're playing a violin concerto cadenza, if you're playing a piece for solo violin, you likely want to play in just intonation as much as possible. If you're playing a piece for accompanied solo violin (violin + accompanying piano or orchestra i.e. sonata or concerto) then it very much depends on the moment and what sounds good for the music. Especially for an instrument like violin, which is extremely sensitive to every tiny expression performer can add, it's hard to make blanket generalizations. Ultimately, it's all about the artistic style of the performer, and composer's vision.
Excepting split sharp/flat keys (as seen in some non-equal-tempered harpsichords and organs), or some electronic instruments/plugins which can dynamically vary the pitch of each note.
The voice is the only instrument where you can "play" (sing) what note you think. So, the advantage of absolute pitch for improvisation is minimised.
However, AP would be advantage in vocal sight reading. With AP, you will never sing a wrong note, whereas a non-AP could make some mistakes, depending on how strong there musical ability/relative pitch is.
I am not sure shifting keys in singing would be hard for people with AP. Of course they would be aware of the exact new notes they would be singing whereas nonAP would simply thing "everything is X steps up/down" but relatively the same.
I don't think AP has an effect on tolerance to listening to a song in a different key, it is more your personal taste. I don't have AP, but I can tell when a song is in a different key from the original. I find it acceptable, so long as it is in tune. But I vastly prefer the original key simply due to familiarity. Also, some songs really do sound better in certain keys than others.
How so? I can definitely sing random pitches that don't conform to, say, 12-tone equal temperament. If I sing into a guitar tuner, I can make the meter move continuously from its flattest to sharpest position.
Their point is that there are dozens of instruments that also fit that criterion; i.e. the human voice is not the only instrument with that capacity.
Fretless sting instruments allow for continuous pitch modulation - that includes the violin family as well as others like pedal steel guitars, the Japanese shamisen, etc.
Certain wind instruments like slide trombones and slide whistles do the same.
There are also electronic instruments like the theremin or any synthesizer with a pitch bend wheel.
Audiation is a basic skill for any instrument. Accomplished musicians are trivially able to improvise complex melodies that they can play and sing simultaneously.
I'm a jazz guitarist who has developed the very bad habit of singing what I play while I improvise. Working hard to break it. But what I sing, and what I play is the same.
Being able to "think it, play it" is absolutely central to what I do when I improvise.
Relative and absolute pitch are orthogonal. A person with absolute pitch needs to practice relative pitch. So, this is not necessarily the case. However, people with absolute pitch have far easier time reading notation, which may result in less familiarity with relative pitch.
Unfortunately, they (or at least mine) communicate by IR, which is not as stable as wires – two of my rooms have very intermittent response to my IR pucks.
Reminder that its built-in browser Konqueror debuted the KHTML rendering engine circa ~1999, which was then forked to become WebKit, and now (including all subsequent forks) powers something approaching 90% of web views globally. Pretty amazing!