Dan: 0:00

Peter Stumpf has been a piano tuner for 36 years. He does work for Heinz Hall, the home of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, tuning pianos for the world-class artists who come to town. During his audition for the job many years ago, he had something unexpected happen.

Peter: 0:18

Yefim Bronfman was the expected artist. I'd never worked with these people before, and he's coming out on stage for this day to meet. And literally 15 minutes before he comes out, a string breaks.

Dan: 0:31

Oh...

Peter: 0:32

Yeah! And for ten seconds or so inside my head, I swore every bit of vulgarity I'd ever heard in my life. I just screamed it, you know. And then I got to work, and I went and immediately made the repair. I had what they called a crash kit on site, to where I had all the replacement strings necessary. And I got that string on, and I, honest to goodness, I am pulling it up in pitch and doing the final touch up of the unison. And the maestro is walking across the stage.

Dan: 1:01

Oh my gosh, that's terrifying! Were you anxious?

Peter: 1:06

Yes. And he comes up to me, and I extend my hand, and I said, "Maestro Bronfman, welcome to Pittsburgh." And he said, "Thank you. How's the piano?" And I lied right through my teeth. I said, "It's never been better." And he never knew the whole time that he was in Pittsburgh that a string had broken right before that. You know, we got through the whole series, and I got the job.

Dan: 1:42

I'm Dan Heath, and this is what it's like to be. In every episode, we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession. An archaeologist, a conductor, a mystery novelist. We want to know what they do all day at work. Today, we'll ask Peter Stumpf what it's like to be a piano tuner. We'll hear what he talks about with concert pianists before they perform. What stretching an octave means, and also what kind of weird stuff happens when he tunes inside people's homes. Stay with us.

This Is Uncomfortable Promo: 2:23

I'm Rheema Krais, and on This Is Uncomfortable, we talk about the emotional side of money, what it does to our relationships, our sense of self, and the choices we make. Each week, I talk with real people and experts about the parts of money we usually keep to ourselves. Tune in every Thursday to hear conversations and stories about life and how money messes with it. Listen to This Is Uncomfortable on your favorite podcast app.

Dan: 2:51

When you press a piano key, you set off a chain reaction that's completely invisible to you.

Peter: 3:00

So the key must be thought of like a seesaw. There's a fulcrum point in the middle, and when you push it down in the front, it's going to go down roughly a centimeter.

Dan: 3:11

Now the back of the key tips up, and it...

Peter: 3:14

Pushes a very complicated assembly that is about 200 years old now in design, and accelerates the hammer towards the string, and then lets it fly at the very last second on its own.

Dan: 3:27

The hammer hits the string, and the string starts to vibrate. A piano has 88 keys, but roughly 230 strings. Most keys have three strings, but the lowest notes on the piano have one, and then the next section has two. When Peter is ready to start tuning, he begins right in the middle of the piano.

Peter: 3:50

I get out. My tuning fork and I listen to a C, and I first note that I tune is middle C, C4 on the piano. And I put the tuning lever on that appropriate pin and I adjust it clockwise or counterclockwise. Clockwise will tighten the string, making it go up in pitch. Counterclockwise will lower the pitch, make it go down. And what I want to do is I want to match the frequency of that string with the frequency produced by the tuning fork.

Dan: 4:18

Now, I've always heard that phrase "tuning fork," but I actually don't know what that looks like. Like, what does the tool look like?

Peter: 4:24

Well, yeah, it's about...

Dan: 4:26

Is it fork-like?

Peter: 4:27

Yeah, fork-like. There's, there's two prongs, typically.

Dan: 4:29

Okay.

Peter: 4:30

And then there's a handle coming out of the bottom. So think of it like a fork that has just two prongs on it.

Dan: 4:35

Okay.

Peter: 4:35

And then the prongs are of a very specific metal, very specific length. That if they're struck in such a way, you get a nice sustain of a very given frequency for ten or fifteen seconds.

Dan: 4:45

Okay. Okay.

Peter: 4:46

So you hold it by that stem, and you do hit it on a hard surface. Now you don't want to hit it on the piano. Because it'll leave a mark, or any other metal surface, because you could damage the fork. So what I end up doing is I hit it on my knee. There's like a bone kind of on the side of your knee. Yes, and I just give it a boom right there, and I can get about a twenty second sustain out of that. And as long as you continue to hold it only by the stem, it will continue to vibrate, but slowly, obviously, fade away for about twenty seconds.

Dan: 5:21

That is so counterintuitive to me that that works. I would have thought like the skin and the flesh would like have muted it to the point where you wouldn't even be able to hear it. That's fascinating.

Peter: 5:29

That's because it travels up through that U shape, not down through the stem. So here's here's the next step. This is the the part that gets weird, as if that wasn't weird enough. So in order to tune middle C, I need my left hand to play the note on the piano. I need my right hand to turn the tuning lever that is attached to the tuning pin. So both my hands are occupied, and I have to continue to hold this tuning fork that is vibrating.

Dan: 6:00

Right.

Peter: 6:01

So you strike it on your your knee and you bite it in your teeth.

Dan: 6:06

Oh no way! Wow.

Peter: 6:08

Yeah, kind of in the side of your mouth, like it's coming out like a cigar would.

Dan: 6:11

Uh huh.

Peter: 6:12

And because it is so close to your ear and it vibrates your teeth, you can really hear it. I mean, and you got about twenty or thirty seconds of a nice, clear tone that I can now play that note with my left hand. Turn the lever with the right hand and align those pitches.

Dan: 6:29

And so, do you have like different tuning forks for different notes?

Peter: 6:33

No, I just have the one tuning fork. I actually do carry an A fork, but I tune with the C fork.

Dan: 6:40

Okay, okay. So, how do you tune the whole piano with just one tuning fork?

Peter: 6:45

Well, once I get that middle C tuned, I absolutely just kind of lock it in and have the Pope come in and bless it because I'm not going to want to touch it again. You know it needs to stay right there. Then from C4, I will go down in tune F3, which is a fifth.

Dan: 7:00

A fifth? Sorry, I'm new to all of this. A fifth means what?

Peter: 7:04

A fifth is what seven semitones. So I'm going to go from that C down to the F. So if I had a piano here, I could just play a chromatic scale for you. But there's a relationship that all the notes have within the given octave. There's harmonics that line up, much like in mathematics. If I asked you to add the fractions one half plus one third. It wouldn't be two fifths. You know, you got to come up with lowest common denominators where they where they line up. And with pianos, when you play any interval, whether it's a fifth, a fourth, a third, we don't listen really to the fundamental, which is the very bottom part of the note. We listen to the harmonic series and where they interact with each other and how they're interacting. And that's where the tuning is done is in the canopy of the sound.

Dan: 7:54

The canopy of the sound. What a great phrase! Yeah. So you're saying you kind of get locked on to middle C, and then you're hearing the interaction between the notes from there, and that's how you calibrate.

Peter: 8:08

Yes. I will tune the F to the C to a very specific way, and then I will tune the other F to the C. And those two Fs should create a very pleasant octave. It should be an octave that my ear says is good. And from there, I have a temperament octave, meaning the foundation, the top, and the bottom note. And then I'm going to divide that up into twelve perfect pieces, much like dividing a pizza into twelve even slices.

Dan: 8:34

And when those twelve slices aren't perfect, he can hear it. So, is the dissonance that you hear is it more of an emotional reaction or a mathematical reaction?

Peter: 8:45

You know, actually, I think it's emotional. I'd never had anybody put it that way before. It's like, no, that's wrong. That that sounds. It could be so much better. There are some moments that are so pristine. You know that little moment of a Pathetique Beethoven's that's played so often, the second movement. If those chords, if that F seven, isn't really. Tuned properly, you've lost everything. You set a beautiful table, and then the house of cards just fell over. So you have the capacity. Jazz has some insanely complicated chording that really only works because everything is exactly the way it's supposed to be.

Dan: 9:38

How long does it take to tune a piano? I imagine the answer is it depends, but what's the range?

Peter: 9:44

Yeah, well, the in-home tuning is usually about an hour and fifteen to an hour and half is what I spend on.

Dan: 9:50

Oh, that's faster than I would have thought. But because you're, aren't you, manually touching all of those two hundred plus strings?

Peter: 9:57

Yes, yes. You just have to get efficient with it. My daughter knits, and I'm always fascinated at the speed and the precision in which she does things. And you can just sort of train yourself to go through these sequences. You, if you do a pin every fifteen seconds, it only takes you an hour to do a piano.

Dan: 10:14

But every fifteen seconds is really fast.

Peter: 10:17

Well, that's the hard part. Is the tuning pin, as I said earlier, it needs to be tightened or loosened, and not just tightened in general or loosened in general. It needs to be tightened or loosened to a very specific point.

Dan: 10:28

Yeah.

Peter: 10:29

And that's the hardest part is stopping right at that point. And if you learn to do that, think of it like putting. You know, I've played golf to where I've putted back and forth on the green five, six, seven, eight, nine times. What you want to do is put it right in the hole, and then go on to the next one and put it right in the hole. And I've gotten good at that as a piano tuner.

Dan: 10:49

That's a great analogy. Yeah, just with your expertise, you can just putt it in every single time and...

Peter: 10:55

Or pretty close.

Dan: 10:57

Huh. And what's the longest tuning job you can remember?

Peter: 11:01

The very when I was in school, it took me ten hours to tune my very first piano.

Dan: 11:04

Whoa!

Peter: 11:05

Yeah, and I was like distraught because I knew I'd never be able to make a living at this because you can't charge ten hours, you know.

Dan: 11:12

Yeah.

Peter: 11:13

So I told my teacher about it, and he took a look at the way I was doing things and made some adjustments the way I manage the tools and things like that. And the next time I tuned a piano, took six. And I thought, well, that's still not much better. And he goes, that's a whole lot better. You know, by the time I was done with school, I was at about two, two and a half hours, and off you go.

Dan: 11:37

Would the tuning for a concert featuring a Beethoven composition be different than the tuning for, you know, the piano in a rock band, or is tuning tuning?

Peter: 11:50

At the basic point, yes, they are all pretty much the same. There are people that, especially in the rock world, that sometimes they like stretched octaves.

Dan: 12:00

What does that mean?

Peter: 12:01

Well, that means you oversize the... An octave has a standard, internationally recognized value of twelve hundred cents. It's supposed to be this big.

Dan: 12:10

Okay, you're going to have to just handhold me all the way through this. So, I know what an octave is from like F to F or G to G. But what what does the twelve hundred cents thing mean?

Peter: 12:19

Well, there are twelve semitones in every octave. So when you go from F to F, there's twelve half steps that'll get you there.

Dan: 12:28

So both the white and the black keys, each one being a half step.

Peter: 12:32

Yes, so there's five black keys and seven white keys, and then you're at a new octave. So that distance that we hear as an octave is twelve semitones, and each semitone, by definition, is one hundred cents.

Dan: 12:46

And cents—what's the spelling of the word you're using there? Like cents, like pennies? C E N T S?

Peter: 12:52

Exactly. I think that's where they stole it from. It's one one hundredth. Above a dollar of so, and that's really used for analysis purposes. There's electronic tuning devices that are made today that go and measure where certain notes and frequencies are, and they check everything and compare it. And using the cents or or a tenth of a cent, even

Dan: 13:15

So, this is almost like the millimeters on a ruler. Like if you really really want to get granular on something.

Peter: 13:21

Yes, I think it's an excellent comparison.

Dan: 13:24

Okay, so back to you were saying stretching an octave.

Peter: 13:27

So if you make that octave twelve hundred and two cents, three cents, you know oversized, it becomes more excitable. And if you're doing a lot of...

Dan: 13:37

Really

Peter: 13:38

Yes if you're playing, say a lot of octaves, you know a lot of who was doing Jerry Lee Lewis back in the day, Great Balls of Fire, just up there hammering those octaves. In order for it to be heard and bright and loud, it needs to be almost out of place, a little bit sharp of everything, so that it really cuts through. So yeah, and there are circumstances where I might do something like that at a request for rock. But I've tuned for bands like like Radiohead, and they just want regular tunings.

Dan: 14:07

After the break, what happens in the meetings with artists before a concert? Stay tuned.

Sidedoor Promo: 14:14

Have you ever had the urge to sneak behind the cordoned off areas of a museum or roam the halls after closing time? The Smithsonian's flagship podcast, Sidedoor, will sneak you behind the scenes of the world's largest museum and research complex. Come learn about the ghosts that supposedly walk the museum halls after dark. How a train robbery gave rise to criminal forensics. Why leeches are actually the coolest thing ever. And how to get away with murder in the Arctic. Maybe. You'll discover stories of history, science, art, and culture you won't find in a display case. You can listen to Sidedoor wherever you get your podcasts, or find us online at si.edu/sidedoor.

Dan: 15:03

When Peter meets with an artist before a concert at Heinz Hall, there's a certain protocol.

Peter: 15:09

So after the piano's all ready to go, I usually go over it briefly right as I'm waiting for the artist. The artist loves to see the piano being serviced. See, I want to give them the full package. You know, like at a steakhouse, you know, you get the sizzle and all that stuff. And I want them to know that I'm I'm right there and I'm working right up every minute that I have available. I'm working on the piano and I come up and introduce myself and I tell every one of them, you know, welcome to Pittsburgh, Mister Bronfman, whoever it is. I like starting off with a with a welcome, and then they'll sit down at the piano. And often, I will go out into the house if there's time permitting and listen to them play a few passages and listen to how it's projecting and what he wants. And at Heinz Hall, they have two different pianos that they can select from. There's one that's about twenty three years old, and there's one that's about three years old. And artists will go back and forth depending upon what they feel is most suitable for, and then they will come up and make final selection.

Dan: 16:11

And so, give us a sense like what might be something that they would say to you after that initial play period.

Peter: 16:18

Yeah, well, that's the fun. You know, one of your questions was, "What are you like most afraid?" And there is an absolutely black hole that you can go into very quickly because many of these artists are filled with adrenaline and anxiety, and you've got to take some of that into account. And an artist will say, "Oh, this piano is perfect. I love it. Perfect." Question. And once they say question, you know something. This E, I'm noticing that, and and there could be something very, boy. Occasionally, you need to be a detective. Something in the field, or something they're hearing, or something, and you can't dismiss it. With an artist, if they make a request for something, even if you don't completely agree with it or even hear it, I can't do nothing. And it still needs to be within the realm of perfect because you can't have a problem going forward. If it's a distraction for the artist, it's going to interfere with their ability to perform.

Dan: 17:19

Oh, that's so interesting. So you're saying sometimes they'll flag something. There's something off with the e, but even they don't know what it is, and they kind of just, you know, are drafting you into duty to figure it out.

Peter: 17:31

Yes, I'm a translator, if you will.

Dan: 17:34

Wow. And sometimes you don't hear what they hear.

Peter: 17:37

I don't, but I know that some things that I can try. And very often, you know, we hear with our ears much in the same way that we taste. And where one person might not like raw green peppers at all, someone else will love them. And what I hear as being a good piano tone, someone else might hear as being harsh. So I try different things, and on the concert stage, there's never a lot of time to do things. So you need to do things in a very quick, efficient. You know, until you get more time. But often, I'm just using my fingers to mute part of the strings. Has this corrected the problem? The journey that that string took from the tuning pin before it got to the speaking length. There are several what we call segments. It's still all one piece of wire, but it goes over a few bumps and things like that. And those segments can sing along, sometimes very inharmonically. So an artist might hear one of those putting out a very high partial that is really interfering. I may not hear it. I'm sixty six years old, so it might be out of my range. It might be at fifteen thousand hertz at this point, but they hear it.

Dan: 18:46

Do you ever feel like there's just a placebo effect happening where you might monkey with some stuff, but ultimately it ends up being basically where it was? But now they're happy.

Peter: 18:56

Oh yes, oh yes. I had one this week where the a faculty member asked me to go in on his piano, and I said I could go in first thing Wednesday morning. Well, I didn't know that he was going to also be there. So by the time I got to the school, he had already arrived, and he said, "Oh Peter, thank you for taking care of that. It's fine." Oh wow! And I was arriving there to take care of it, but it was like a humidity change or something that it it kind of fixed itself. These things can happen.

Dan: 19:23

So it's sort of like, at least for the concert aspect, it's part technical skill and part just kind of bedside manner. It sounds like they just want to know that someone is there that's on their team.

Peter: 19:35

Yes, they need to hear that. They need to hear that everything is fine because there's enough. I mean, it's the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. There's thousands of people. There's going to be reviews. It may be recorded. You know, there's all sorts of different things. This is the beginning of their career. It's very hard to make a living as a concertizing pianist. So yeah, and they have to know that I'm on their side. I want nothing more than to hear that ovation at the end that the pianist and the piano that I prepared combined to give to the audience.

Dan: 20:09

What's the oddest request you've ever gotten from an artist?

Peter: 20:13

There was an artist that didn't like the lid prop. Now the lid prop is that stick when you put up a grand on a concert, you know, a big piano, and it's usually about three feet or so long, and it's what holds it up. And he felt that ours was insufficient, and he had his own lid prop.

Dan: 20:32

He brought a lid prop.

Peter: 20:34

Yes, he did. So we physically removed it, just unscrewed, and inside his lid prop, it was beautifully made. It was a piece of I don't know hickory or something. But there was a little compartment that he had crystals, and every once in a while, he needed to replace the crystals because they were healing, powerful musical crystals.

Dan: 20:53

That is so interesting.

Peter: 20:55

And when you close that off and you put it in place, and once again, it's what the artist needs to do what they feel they need to do. I don't know what it's like to prepare for a performance like that. And if having crystals in the lid prop makes him feel that he's going to play better, then so be it.

Dan: 21:14

Have you ever been in the audience for you know a proper recital at one of the concert halls that you serve and and and heard something off?

Peter: 21:23

Oh yeah, and that's one of the things that piano techs can tell almost immediately. Even fine recordings, I'll listen to recordings of Errol Garner or you know Bohemian Rhapsody is a classic one. You know that you can hear that the piano's out of tune.

Dan: 21:36

Really?

Peter: 21:37

Yeah. There's just little moments, just unisons here and there, but it it absolutely captures the ear. And piano techs would catch that all the time.

Dan: 21:46

So I knew this interview was coming up, and so my eyes kind of popped out. I literally just stumbled across this quote, totally unrelated to our conversation. But I wanted to share with you. I'm sure you've heard it a hundred times. It comes from some coach. I wasn't able to quickly figure out what coach it was, but anyway, here's the quote... A team is like a piano recital. You've got piano movers, piano tuners, and piano players. You need all three. You can't have all piano players. What is your reaction to that quote?

Peter: 22:16

Oh, it's perfect.

Dan: 22:18

Had you heard that before?

Peter: 22:19

I hadn't, but I really love it because it's it really helps explain where I fit into the equation. I never needed to see my name in lights or in the program or any of that kind of stuff. I like the fact that there's an invisibility to me. I mean, I do like that because there's less stress involved with that, and I don't have to answer a lot of questions. You know, it's just a better place for me. So I really think that that's a good thing. I also do see working at a place like Heinz Hall, which is a union facility. You need to have someone turn on the lights. If you don't have that, if you need to have some people set up the stage, so everybody has a job, and that's what makes music.

Dan: 23:01

Why do you think the invisibility appeals to you?

Peter: 23:06

Well, I've never been. You know, I always get very frightened at piano recitals. So if I am out there thinking that people are there for me somehow, then it's taking away. I feel it should be more what I have to offer as opposed to me. So I've never really liked the idea of of getting a lot of attention. You know, even in the odd occasion that it is drawn my way. You know, if it comes along, that's fine. But you know, I look at life like an orchestra. I'm a member of an orchestra, and the whole rest of the world is the rest of the orchestra. You know, and I'm playing this constant duet, and and sometimes I really don't like what the rest of the world is playing. Kind of makes me mad, you know. And other times, maybe it's playing something magnificent. It's carrying me, you know, through some difficult times. You know, so that's just kind of how I look at this. I have a part to do, and as long as I can, I love what musicians call make ensemble. That's where you take your skills and what you can do, and you blend them as beautifully as you can with the other members of the orchestra, the other members of the musical team, to make it all work together as best it possibly can. You're listening to the volume and the pitch and the timbre and everything. Musicians do it all the time, but even myself, I have to find a way. Many times, I'm tuning a piano on the stage at Heinz Hall while someone else is making reeds, or tuning the timpani, or working on a bass excerpt. And it's a noisy environment, but I've learned to do that because they need to prepare as well. And if I can open up stage time for them through me learning to tune through their noise, so to speak...

Dan: 24:50

What do piano tuners talk about when they get together?

Peter: 24:55

Usually, the dealerships or the movers. Yeah, because they're not enemies. But anytime you have to work with somebody, and these people tend to complicate your workload. You know, piano movers can complicate anything because no matter what's going on, if the piano doesn't get there in time, you know everybody else is waiting. So yeah, we we like to bust on movers, but in the end, I don't want to move it. I don't want to.

Dan: 25:17

Yeah.

Peter: 25:17

In the end, I tend to be very thankful that they're around.

Dan: 25:21

We've mostly talked about Peter's work on the concert stage, but he estimates he's tuned five or ten thousand pianos in people's homes. And in a home, you never know what you're walking into.

Peter: 25:35

You know, it's really strange because I've been in homes where people like start smoking pot. You know, they're they're watching TV and you can smell it coming across the room. I've been in homes where there's been domestic disputes that got really hot. You know, a lot of vulgarities thrown around. You know, I've been in homes where the people just disappeared. You know, they they went to the neighbor's house and I'm done tuning and I'm the only one in the house and I don't know what to do. You know, you have all sorts of odd things that can happen. But one of the stranger things that happened to me was I had a young couple. I was maybe fifty at the time, and a thirty-five-year-old couple who had me tune their piano on a Saturday morning. And the wife was very friendly. Just a sweet girl. And while I started tuning, she sat beside me on the bench, and she's like laughing at everything I say. And she said how fascinated. And then you know, every once in a while she would gently touch your forearm, you know, in the middle. Oh, she was just having a great time. And the husband is seething in the background.

Dan: 26:34

Oh my!

Peter: 26:35

He didn't say a thing. So she short in short order gets up and goes, and I never saw her again in my life. She just went upstairs in her home. And the husband's paying me at the end of the day, and he's writing the check, and he doesn't even look up. You know, he's just writing the check, and he says, "Yeah." The wife thinks I got a little friendly with the waitress last night.

Dan: 26:57

So you you were a tool in a marital drama of some kind.

Peter: 27:01

I wish the tip had been a little bigger, but yeah, that's exactly right.

Dan: 27:04

Oh, do you get tipped?

Peter: 27:06

At times.

Dan: 27:07

Is that normal?

Peter: 27:09

Well, it really depends. I have some people that ask me to do. I have some elderly customers that I'm changing like screen doors and stuff like that. So you do extra thigns.

Dan: 27:16

Oh, they're they're just treating you as a handyman.

Peter: 27:19

Well, did you see the movie Tuner? That came out? There was a few scenes.

Dan: 27:22

No, I didn't.

Peter: 27:23

Yeah, there were a few scenes in that that I could relate to. Like. How good are you at plumbing? You know, someone just shout from...

Dan: 27:29

The toilets backed up while you're here.

Peter: 27:31

You just never know because you have tools.

Dan: 27:33

You're good with instruments. Yeah.

Peter: 27:35

We are good at problem. The best piano technicians are good problem solvers. You do need to be able to do that.

Dan: 27:42

So, Peter, we always end our episodes with a quick lightning round of questions. Let me fire away here. What's the most insulting thing you could say about a piano tuner's work?

Peter: 27:53

You know, I really am a hard person to insult. You know, I just let things roll off my back, so I don't mind being called a piano tuner because at least it's a, you know, some guys say I want to be a piano technician, I want to be called a piano expert or doctor or whatever. But then I remembered one time somebody was badly explaining what what I do for a living. You know, one of those sort of things, and they said that all that I did was go into homes and increase tension.

Dan: 28:22

That's a good joke. That's a piano tuner joke.

Peter: 28:24

That's a piano tuner joke. So let's run with that. That's, I guess, that would be an insult if that's how they view it.

Dan: 28:31

What's a tool specific to your profession that you really like using?

Peter: 28:35

Yeah. Anytime you have a homemade tool, because first of all, you identified a need for it, and then you kind of came up with your own way of conceptualizing it and what you want it to look like, and you want to keep it lightweight and small so that it fits in your kit and it fits to your very hand. You know, there are a lot of times that just the curvature of your fingers and the way things fit. So, any time I get to use a homemade tool, it always really that voicing tool in particular. That is such a sensitive process that I go through when I do the between the string voicing. That I really want that tool to just be an extension of me. I can't reach between those strings. But when you make homemade stuff, and see, I think that's we're getting away from that. We buy everything on Amazon. You know, hundreds of years ago, guys had to make a whole lot of their own tools.

Dan: 29:25

Is there anything special or sentimental about your tuning fork?

Peter: 29:30

Yeah, I've had it from the start.

Dan: 29:31

Oh, really? It's the same one you had from the beginning.

Peter: 29:34

Yeah, my father gave it to me when I started tuning, and at one point, I did pitch it, meaning I made it a little bit sharper than it. The way you do that is if you make a tuning fork a little bit smaller, you can grind a little bit off the end, and by making it slightly smaller, it will go up slightly in pitch. The smaller it is, the higher the frequency is. So I made it just slightly sharp so that I could use it with the orchestra because I always have the orchestra just a tiny bit above pitch. I don't ever want it to be below pitch.

Dan: 30:04

Why?

Peter: 30:05

Because that sounds. There's something about a singer. If a singer is a little bit low in pitch, you know she's flat. But if she's a little above in pitch, oh she's got a bright voice. There's something about the ear that we do not like things that are flat. So I always make sure, if anything, it's just a little above. If it's the old thing, if you're not early, you're late.

Dan: 30:28

This is so interesting to me. Are you aware of how much more fine tuned your ears are to most people?

Peter: 30:38

Yeah, sure. For example, any time I walk, there's a place on campus at CMU where you get a lot of odd reflections, and I love walking through there just because people come through, they talk, the sound of their shoes, and it's a neat little cacophony for a moment. You know, I love finding little experience moments like that where I can experience sound in in fun ways. You know, the sound that we listen to as a piano technician, when I'm comparing that fifth harmonic of the F to the fourth harmonic of the A. I'm going to come up with an analogy here. Suppose you're a painter and you need to paint a tree, so you need green, and you look at the green that you're looking for. You're looking, you know, you're thinking. You're no longer thinking green. You're thinking five parts yellow, three parts blue, and that's what we do in our ears. Is we kind of divide it out. I'm able to separate all those. There's all kinds of harmonics in these notes. You know, the bottom notes of the piano are packed with harmonics, and it can be you're rummaging through them almost trying to get to the one that you want.

Dan: 31:45

So the way that your musical discernment blows my mind is—is there someone like that for you? Like a a Jedi's Jedi that you're like? That person can hear things even I can't.

Peter: 31:58

Yeah, I had that when I went to school. I had a great teacher in David Hoffman, and he was a lot like me. There was a light-heartedness to him, but there was always a lesson to be learned in it. Like for example, I was saying that I could tune a piano on Heinz Hall while people were working on stage. When I had my tuning exam, my teacher thought I was doing a little too well, I guess, and he sent me into a practice room. To tune a piano for my final exam, and five minutes after I start tuning, right next door there's a trumpet player. You know, and I just I took it for a little bit, and finally I stopped and I went and banged on the door and I said, "Hey, you got to do me a favor here. Can you go to any other room? I'm taking my final exam. David Hoffman says I need to be in this very room." And he said,"Well, David Hoffman sent me into this very room." And it was part of the test, right? You know, and and he felt that you know he could do that, and that was his way of pushing me through." To me, the piano has been a lifelong friend. You know, it really has done so much for me. You know, I even had somebody ask me one time. They said, "Why do you work so hard to try to get the world to save the piano?" I'm like,"No, you got it wrong. I'm trying to get the piano to save the world." I think the piano is just a great way to spend your time.

Dan: 33:38

Peter Stumpf is a piano tuner in Pittsburgh. One of the things I love most about interviewing people for this show is hearing how their work has sharpened their perception. Take Peter... With one note from a tuning fork in an hour and change, he can tune more than two hundred strings by ear. Other professionals have this same kind of supercharged sensory perception. The archaeologist told me that on a dig, a volunteer might bring up a four thousand year old sherd and ask whether it's a rock. And meanwhile, he looks at that same sherd and thinks,"Middle Bronze, 2A." And it's not just sight. The infectious disease doc said there are certain infections you can recognize by their distinctive scent. And the tennis coach said he could tell the quality of a shot blindfolded just by the kind of pop it made. The massage therapist said she could recognize one client's left foot also blindfolded just by the way it feels. You and I can see and touch and hear the same signals as these experts, but to them the meaning is different. We hear a pretty musical note, while Peter hears a string vibrating at a frequency that's a smidgen too high. The experience enriches the sensory data, and in that way, the craft of an expert becomes a kind of sixth sense. Biting a tuning fork like a cigar, listening for harmonics inside a note, performing last-minute tweaks for world-class musicians, and making beautiful music possible without needing to be heard yourself. Folks, that's what it's like to be a piano tuner. A shout out to recent Apple Podcast reviewers. Lt O'Hura, Zinnia Smiles 68, Rate#1, One Dan in a Million, Momma Penguin 66. Thanks to you all. This episode was produced by Matt Purdy. I'm Dan Heath. See you next time.