String Theory of piano astro-physics 101

"Each partial of the whole string can also be thought of as the 1st partial of a virtual string having a complete partial series composed of all the partials of the whole string whose numbers are multiples of the number of the partial."
- Dan Levitan, The Craft of Piano Tuning

Actually, the concept is not too hard to understand when you are sitting at a piano armed with even a basic knowledge of the harmonic series of partials. The difficult part to grasp is it's depth relating to the interconnectedness of all the coincident partials produced by each note. Now you might say, well who cares? It's only a stupid piano? True, but the idea of "the vibrating string" which the piano makes copious use of, is one of the simplest models used in physics to convey one of the most fundamental and foundational phenomena in the universe - energy transference. So, this mathematical and physical evidence of the interconnectedness of all the different vibrations of a (properly tuned) piano's 230ish strings and their 1000s of partials - when applied on the largest scale, that of the entire universe, which is essentially composed of energy in various states - it ends up not only being a kind of neat observation, but one that can literally sound like Mozart.

That is until you introduce the factor of inharmonicity. But that is for another post... ;-)

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