How much off pitch is considered acceptable to human ears?

[GC]

I think much of it depends on the situation, like the tolerance level of a symphony player vs a teacher who works with young children.

[barry grrr-ero]

If you're within 5 cents, I would worry more about balances, matching tone color and other more musical issues. Playing exactly together and balancing things will do 100 times more than pinning the tuning needle to the back wall.

And to offer an answer to your very first question, ever go to rock shows in crappy clubs?

[Rick Denney]

The phrase “the perfect is the enemy of the good” means something, because all too often, trying for perfect ends up with nothing at all, because the owner runs out of time and money.

Rick “perfection is unattainable” Denney

[Rick Denney]

I'm pretty sure that my posting was clear.

"Trying for perfect" (within obvious limits that are even seen by those who strive towards it) is completely attainable, and often results in "good".

Yes, but that wasn't the statement I was responding to.

You talked about the time you took to build your shed, and my thoughts on reading that was: You build a shed like an amateur, not like a professional, in the true sense of those words. (And that is a compliment, really--amateurs can pursue perfection while professionals have to eat.) I built a staircase to the attic the same way. Professionals in the trades can't afford to be perfectionists, though they, of course, should always strive to do the best work they can. There are stories aplenty on this very forum of instruments that wait years and years to be returned to their owners because the person restoring it gets bogged down in the pursuit of perfection. That pursuit leads to a backlog, and the insistence on it leads to an unmanageable backlog. The trick is to find the boundary between the pursuit of perfection and the realization of the excellent on any given project, and communicate that boundary clearly with the owner.

Engineers face this always--I had a college professor who said an engineer can design and build something for a dollar what any fool can do for ten. I wish that was even remotely true--it isn't. But there is a cost to spending more time pursuing perfection that may exceed the diminishing return of getting closer to it.

But art is in a different category, and the boundary between art and craft is variable and moving. In the pursuit of perfect tuning, any beat at all can be heard, even if just as a slow phase shift. That's where perfect and good enough merge, even though consistently attaining it is more challenging for some of us than for others. And that answers the question: How much off pitch is considered acceptable? None. Yet the whole violin section is wiggling their left hand back and forth to do what? Vary the pitch to achieve a section sound that is filled with intentional inaccuracy to cover the unintentional inaccuracy. That's been done so assiduously that the trick has become the form of expression, much like in singing. I always respect with some awe those, both singers and instrumentalists, who perform early music with historical accuracy--without vibrato. The instruments are more difficult to manage, and any inaccuracy at all more glaring.

If I decide that I can't perform in public until I can do so with perfect intonation, however, I would never perform in public, and would soon give up playing music altogether. So, how much off pitch will we tolerate in order to keep playing music? And that leads to answers in this thread. But those are two different questions.

Rick "who does his best" Denney