A Spanish company also recently launched an app allowing musicians to tune up with nothing more than their iPhone. Play any note, and the tuner will automatically detect which note it is, telling you whether it's sharp or flat. Most musicians now carry $20 electronic tuners the size of a pack of cards. Like most things, the humble tuning fork has been made obsolete by computers. Of course, even the most elaborate tuning fork has little use for most modern musicians. In 1860, a pair of German inventors even devised a battery-powered tuning fork that musicians didn't need to ring again and again. Luckily, you can also buy tuning forks that come mounted on top of a resonator, a hollow wooden box designed to amplify a tuning fork's vibrations. It's a myth, obviously, but if you have a cavity or a chipped tooth, you'll quickly find this method to be unbelievably painful. According to some urban legends, touching your teeth with a vibrating tuning fork is enough to make them explode. This has the unique effect of transmitting sound through your bones, allowing your brain to "hear" the tone through your jaw. It can be a bit tricky to hold a tuning fork while manipulating an instrument, which is why some musicians decide to clench the base of a ringing tuning fork in their teeth. Whether you're tuning a clarinet or guitar, simply play a concert A and adjust your instrument accordingly. The method is much the same for most other instruments. Once the "A" key is in tune, you would then adjust all of the instrument's 87 other keys to match. By either tightening or loosening the piano's strings, you reduce the warble until it's in line with the tuning fork. If the piano is out of tune, you'll hear a distinct warble between the note you're playing and the note played by the tuning fork the further apart the warbles, the more out-of-tune the piano. Most tuning forks are made to vibrate at 440 Hz, a tone known to musicians as "concert A." To tune a piano, you would start by playing the piano's "A" key while ringing an "A" tuning fork. A tuning fork's job is to establish a single note that everybody can tune to. If the instruments or voices haven't been adjusted to play in the same tone, they'll sound no better than an out-of-tune piano. A band, choir or orchestra works the same way. To hear them played together, it just sounds chaotic. But without proper tuning, they're nothing more than random notes cobbled together. Normally, the keys on a piano represent the different notes of a musical scale. Ever heard an out-of-tune piano? The piano's strings have been allowed to fall out of tune and as a result, the keys are no longer synchronized.
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