Cents

The Equal Temperament

Chapter 10: Cents

A cent is one hundredth of a semitone, which is to say one twelve-hundredth of an octave, which is to say a unit of pitch so small that most human ears cannot perceive it, a unit that exists not for the purpose of hearing but for the purpose of measurement, the way a micrometer exists not for the purpose of seeing but for the purpose of measuring distances too small to see, and Clara had spent twenty-eight years hearing in cents the way a watchmaker spends a career seeing in thousandths of an inch, the unit becoming not abstract but perceptual, not mathematical but felt, the ear trained to hear a deviation of two cents the way a baker's hand is trained to feel a difference of two grams in a lump of dough.

She was losing cents. Not all of them — not the cents in the middle of the keyboard, not the cents at 440 hertz or 880 or 1,760, the frequencies where her hearing was normal and her discrimination was intact — but the cents at the top, the cents above 6,000 hertz, the cents that measured the deviations in the highest octave, the cents that were the finest unit of her craft's finest work, the resolution at the edge of the resolution, and these cents were fading, were becoming blurry, were losing their edges the way a landscape loses its edges in fog, the features still present but the outlines softened, the distinctions less distinct.

February became March. March became April. Clara stopped taking ibuprofen, as Dr. Chau had recommended, and switched to acetaminophen, which was less effective for the back pain — the lower back that protested the tuner's forward lean, the occupational ache that had been her companion for two decades — but which was not ototoxic, which would not damage the cochlea, which would not contribute to the destruction of the hair cells that she could not afford to lose. The switch was a bargain — more pain in the back in exchange for less damage to the ear — and Clara accepted the bargain the way she accepted all bargains, with the pragmatism of a person who understood that every choice was a compromise, that every gain required a sacrifice, that the perfect solution — a medication that eliminated the back pain without affecting the hearing — did not exist, in the same way that the perfect tuning system — intervals that were pure and a keyboard that was versatile — did not exist.

She waited. Dr. Chau had said "potentially reversible," had said that the NSAID-related component might recover if the medication was discontinued, and Clara waited for the recovery the way a tuner waits for a new string to settle, with patience and without certainty, checking periodically, testing, listening for the change that would indicate that the treatment was working, that the hair cells or the stria vascularis or whatever the ibuprofen had damaged was healing, regenerating, returning to function.

She tested herself every evening. She would sit at the Knabe and play the top octave, note by note, slowly, and listen for the quality of the sound, the presence or absence of the upper partials, the brightness or dullness of the tone, and she would compare what she heard tonight to what she had heard last night, last week, last month, searching for the improvement that would validate Dr. Chau's "potentially," searching for the sign that the tide had turned, that the frequencies were coming back, that the cents were sharpening.

The improvement did not come.

Or it came so slowly that it was imperceptible, which was the same as not coming, because a change that cannot be perceived is, for practical purposes, not a change, is a hope rather than a fact, a wish rather than a measurement, and Clara was a person who dealt in measurements, who dealt in facts, who dealt in the audible and the quantifiable and the real, and the inability to measure the improvement — the inability to determine whether the improvement existed or was imagined — was maddening in a particular way, the way that uncertainty is maddening to a person whose profession is certainty, whose entire working life is organized around the determination of whether a pitch is correct or not correct, sharp or flat, right or wrong.

She continued to tune. She tuned seventeen pianos a week, eighty per month, and the tunings were good — the temperaments were clean, the octaves were matched, the unisons were alive — and the compensations she had developed were becoming habitual, were being incorporated into her technique the way a limp is incorporated into a walk, the body adjusting to the limitation, the limitation becoming part of the body's way of moving through the world.

She leaned closer now. Always. When she tuned the upper treble, she leaned her ear toward the strings until her head was nearly inside the piano's case, her ear inches from the hammers, and the proximity amplified the sound, increased the volume at the eardrum, compensated for the decreased sensitivity of the hair cells by delivering more energy to the remaining cells, and this compensation worked — she could hear the upper partials better when she was closer — but it was a compensation, not a cure, was a workaround rather than a solution, and Clara was aware, each time she leaned in, that she was doing something she had never needed to do before, was performing an action that advertised her limitation to anyone who was paying attention.

No one was paying attention. Her clients did not notice the leaning. They did not notice the extra time she spent on the upper treble. They did not notice that she struck the highest notes harder than she used to, the increased force producing increased volume, the louder sound compensating for the decreased sensitivity. They heard the finished product — a piano in tune — and the finished product was good, was acceptable, was within the tolerance that their ears demanded, and their ears were untrained ears, ears that could not hear a three-cent deviation in the top octave, ears that accepted the tuning as correct because it sounded correct to them, and it did sound correct to them, and this was sufficient, and Clara told herself it was sufficient.

But it was not sufficient to Clara. Clara's standard was not the client's standard. Clara's standard was Clara's ear, the ear at its best, the ear that could hear a one-cent deviation in any register, the ear that could distinguish between a tuning that was correct and a tuning that was alive, the ear that Leonard had trained and that twenty-eight years of practice had refined and that the audiogram showed was diminishing, and the gap between Clara's standard and Clara's current capacity was the gap that mattered, the gap that Clara measured every day in the cents she could no longer hear.

The Korg became a regular part of her toolkit. She did not use it openly — did not set it on the piano in view of the client, did not consult it while the client watched — but used it at the end of each tuning, after the client had left the room or while the client was in the kitchen or after the client had thanked her and gone back to their work, and she would turn on the Korg and check the top octave, note by note, and the Korg would show her whether the notes were at the correct frequencies, and in most cases they were — the ear and the device agreeing, the tuning confirmed — and in some cases they were not, and she would correct the error, would adjust the pin, would bring the note to the frequency the Korg indicated, and the correction would take thirty seconds, a minute, and then she would turn off the Korg and pack it away and leave.

The Korg corrections were increasing. In October, when she first began using the device as a check, she had needed to correct approximately one note in fifteen tunings. By January, it was one in ten. By March, it was one in seven. The rate was accelerating, the errors becoming more frequent, the ear's reliability in the upper octave declining at a pace that the spreadsheet in Clara's mind tracked with the precision that Clara brought to all measurements, the numbers accumulating, the trend unmistakable.

She did not tell Yuki. The lessons continued on Wednesday mornings, the Knabe serving as the practice piano, and Clara taught and Yuki learned and the dynamic between them was unchanged — Clara the teacher, Yuki the student, Clara's ear the standard, Yuki's ear the developing instrument — and this dynamic depended on the assumption that Clara's ear was reliable, that Clara's judgments were correct, that when Clara said "the third is wide" the third was wide, and this assumption was still valid, was still true, in the frequencies where the teaching occurred, in the temperament octave and the mid-range and the bass, where Clara's hearing was undiminished and her judgment was certain.

But the assumption was becoming fragile at the top. Clara had noticed, during the last several lessons, that when Yuki tuned the top octave and Clara checked it, Clara's checks were less definitive than they had been, the judgments softer, the verdicts qualified — "that sounds clean" rather than "that is clean," "I think the octave is good" rather than "the octave is good" — and the qualification was not deliberate but involuntary, the language reflecting the uncertainty of the perception, the ear's doubt leaking into the speech the way a leak in a pipe seeps into a wall, the damage hidden but the evidence visible in the stain.

Yuki had not commented on the change. Clara watched for signs that Yuki had noticed — a hesitation, a questioning look, a second check of an interval Clara had already approved — but Yuki showed no signs, continued to accept Clara's judgments with the trust of a student who believes in her teacher, and Clara was grateful for the trust and also troubled by it, because the trust was becoming unearned, or was becoming earned in a diminished currency, the currency of an ear that was less than what it had been and less than what Yuki believed it to be.

In April, on a Wednesday morning, Yuki asked a question that Clara had been anticipating.

"I want to tune the Bösendorfer," Yuki said.

They were sitting at the kitchen table with coffee, the pre-lesson ritual, and the question arrived the way questions between teacher and student often arrive — not from nowhere but from a long preparation, a gradual building of confidence that had been accumulating through fourteen months of lessons and practice and solo tunings at schools and churches and private homes, the confidence growing the way a plant grows, slowly, steadily, each successful tuning adding a layer, each positive judgment from Clara adding a leaf, until the plant was large enough to produce this flower — the request to tune the best piano in Portland.

Clara looked at Yuki. "Mrs. Ashford's Bösendorfer."

"Yes."

"Why."

"Because it's the best piano I've ever heard. Because you've tuned it for twenty-two years and your father tuned it before you. Because I want to know what it feels like to tune a piano like that."

Clara understood the desire. She had felt it herself, at twenty-four, standing behind Leonard at Mrs. Ashford's house, watching Leonard tune the Bösendorfer with the particular care he reserved for that instrument, the care that was indistinguishable from love, and Clara had wanted to put her hands on the lever and feel the pins turn and hear the strings come into tune, had wanted the experience of being the one whose ear decided whether the Bösendorfer was right.

"Not yet," Clara said.

"When."

"When I decide you're ready."

"You decided I was ready for the Franklin Yamaha."

"The Franklin Yamaha is a school piano. The Bösendorfer is the Bösendorfer."

Yuki was quiet. She held her coffee in both hands — not the way Martin held his tea, but her own way, the fingers wrapped around the mug from the top, the palms covering the opening, the heat rising through her fingers — and she looked at Clara with an expression that Clara recognized, the expression of a student who has been told no and is deciding whether to argue.

"What's the difference," Yuki said. "Technically. What makes the Bösendorfer different from any other piano."

"The difference is not technical. The difference is relational. I've tuned that piano for twenty-two years. I know its voice. I know its tendencies — where it drifts, how it responds to humidity, which pins are tight and which are loose, which hammers need voicing and which are still soft. I know the room, the acoustics, the way the sound travels from the piano to the windows and back. I know Mrs. Ashford, what she hears, what she expects, what she plays. All of this is in the tuning. All of this is information that the ear uses, consciously and unconsciously, to make the tuning not just correct but right. You don't have this information."

"I could learn it."

"You will learn it. When you're ready."

The conversation ended there, at the boundary that Clara had drawn, the boundary between what Yuki was ready for and what she was not, and the boundary was real — Yuki was not ready for the Bösendorfer, not because her ear was inadequate but because her experience was insufficient, because the tuning of a great piano required not just the ability to hear intervals but the knowledge of the specific piano, the specific room, the specific client, the accumulated intelligence of years of listening — but the boundary was also, Clara admitted to herself, a form of protection, a defense of the territory that Clara was not yet ready to cede, the last bastion of her superiority, the one area where Clara's declining ear still outperformed Yuki's healthy ear, because Clara's knowledge of the Bösendorfer was not in her hearing but in her memory, in the twenty-two years of stored information that her brain could access even as her cochlea declined, and this knowledge gave her an advantage that Yuki could not yet match, a head start that no amount of talent could overcome.

Clara was protecting the Bösendorfer from Yuki. Or protecting herself from the moment when Yuki's tuning of the Bösendorfer would be better than Clara's, the moment when the student's fresh ear would produce a tuning that the teacher's diminished ear could not match. Or both. The protections were entangled, the way the frequencies in a chord are entangled, each note sounding independently but also interacting with every other note, the harmonics mixing and beating and producing the complex sound that was not any single note but all of them together.

"Let's work on the temperament," Clara said, and they went to the Knabe and Yuki set the temperament and Clara listened and the temperament was good, was better than good, was approaching the quality that Clara called "smooth," the quality of a temperament in which the beat rates progressed evenly from interval to interval, the fifths uniformly narrow, the thirds uniformly wide, the whole system consistent, balanced, the grid of equal temperament laid down with an evenness that was becoming second nature to Yuki, the ear having absorbed the pattern through repetition, through the thousand iterations of the same twelve intervals set on the same twelve notes.

"Good," Clara said, and she meant it.

Yuki finished the piano and they sat on the bench together, the teacher and the student, and Clara played a chord — C major, the most basic chord, root position, three notes — and the chord rang in the room, and the major third beat at approximately ten beats per second, the rapid flutter of the tempered third, the sound of the compromise, and Clara said, "What do you hear."

"Beats. The third. About ten per second."

"What else."

Yuki listened. "The fifth is almost clean. One beat, maybe less."

"What else."

"The — I don't know. What am I listening for."

"Listen to the whole chord. Not the intervals. The chord. What does the chord sound like."

Yuki listened. The chord sustained, the three notes ringing, the strings vibrating, the soundboard resonating, the room filling with the sound of C-E-G, the most fundamental harmonic structure in Western music, the chord that resolved every tension, that completed every progression, that was home.

"It sounds like home," Yuki said.

Clara looked at her. "Yes. It does. And it's not pure. The third is wide. The fifth is narrow. Every interval is a compromise. And it sounds like home."

"Because that's what home sounds like," Yuki said. "Not perfect. Just — right enough."

Clara felt something in her chest, not pain but a tightness that was adjacent to pain, the tightness of recognition, of hearing someone say a thing you have thought but never articulated, a thing that was true and that you needed to hear said by someone else for it to become fully true, and Yuki had said it — "not perfect, just right enough" — and the words were the words of a tuner, the philosophy of equal temperament expressed in human terms, the understanding that the system worked not because it was perfect but because it was sufficient, not because every interval was right but because every interval was right enough.

"Remember that," Clara said. "Remember what right enough sounds like."

They sat on the bench in the quiet living room, the teacher and the student, the Knabe in tune before them, the rain on the windows, the coffee cooling on the kitchen table, and Clara thought about cents, about the units of pitch she was losing, about the resolution that was fading, about the gap between what she could hear and what she needed to hear, and she thought that "right enough" was not just a description of equal temperament but a description of her current situation — her hearing was not right, was not what it had been, was not what she wanted it to be, but it was right enough, was sufficient for the work, was capable of producing tunings that were correct if not transcendent, and right enough was a standard she could meet, a standard she could maintain, a standard that was, like equal temperament itself, a compromise, a deliberate acceptance of imperfection in service of continued function.

Right enough.

She would hold to right enough for as long as right enough held.

The question — the question she did not ask, the question that waited beneath the surface of the right-enough like the crack beneath the surface of the Chickering's soundboard — was what happened when right enough was no longer enough, when the loss progressed beyond the threshold of sufficiency, when the cents she was losing were the cents she needed, when the compromise could no longer sustain the function.

She did not ask the question. She sat on the bench with Yuki and listened to the chord decay in the room, the C major fading, the strings' energy dissipating, the sound growing softer but not less correct, diminishing but not detuning, the chord maintaining its relationships even as it disappeared, the intervals holding their temper even as the volume dropped to nothing, and the fading was like a lesson — the chord teaching Clara that you could lose volume without losing pitch, could lose amplitude without losing accuracy, could lose the strength of the signal without losing the information it carried.

Could you, though. Could you lose enough volume and still hear the pitch. Could you lose enough amplitude and still discern the interval. Could you lose enough signal and still extract the information.

The chord faded to silence. The room was quiet. Clara and Yuki sat on the bench.

"Same time next week," Clara said.

"Same time next week," Yuki said, and she gathered her tools and put on her jacket and helmet and went out to the bicycle and rode away through the rain, and Clara watched her go and then closed the door and went to the kitchen and struck the fork.

A440. Clear. True. Present.

The one fixed point in a world of diminishing cents.