WinTemper determines pitch using a form
of autocorrelation, rather than relying on fast fourier transforms (FFT). This
means that WinTemper performs well in conditions where other tuners are less
satisfactory. In particular, WinTemper can cope with missing fudamentals, and
just as the upper-harmonic content of a tone can influence our perception of the
pitch, it influences WinTemper's measurements in a similar way.
WinTemper's meter shows a green bar. You
can safely assume you're in tune if you're within a cent of 0 cents. The box on
the left tells you what pitch it's hearing (in this case, the pitch of my tuning
fork in a cold room). The box on the right tells you how far away you are from
being perfect (in this case my tuning fork is 0.2 cents sharp:
I haven't got the equipment to measure WinTemper's
accuracy, but I estimate it has an accuracy of about 0.3 cents when tuning a
pitch of 440Hz. The tuner is less accurate when measuring higher pitches. For
most real-life situations, though, I've found it to be accurate enough.
You can create any number of new temperaments with
WinTemper, or edit the ones that come with it. The only limitations at the
moment are that you are restricted to 12-note temperaments. I admit the
user-interface for doing it isn't very exciting, but it's a start:
WinTemper generates tones in the temperament of your
choice. Using the toolbar, you can listen to single notes, minor thirds, major
thirds, perfect fourths, perfect fifths, minor triads and major triads.
WinTemper comes with the following preset temperaments.
At some stage, I'll provide details of these temperaments here - I found it
quite hard to get reliable data when I was researching this stuff. If you find
any mistakes while using WinTemper, please let me know.
