Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
Unlike with guitars and violins, pianos’ strings can never be perfectly tuned to one another. The solution? As this short animation from MinutePhysics explains, the instrument’s 88 strings across more than seven octaves means tuning a piano using harmonic intervals will inevitably lead to notes being fractionally off-pitch, with the issue compounding across octaves. So instead of using harmonics, piano-tuners generally keep octaves perfect, while leaving every other interval out of tune by just a tiny fraction. This workaround forsakes the appealing mathematical patterns of harmonics, but makes it possible to keep the kind of uniformity that is so valued in an era of mass production and reproduction of music.
Video by MinutePhysics
video
Computing and artificial intelligence
The ‘cloud’ requires heaps of energy to stay aloft. Could synthetic DNA be the answer?
12 minutes
video
Art
A puppeteer makes sense of an overwhelming world by shrinking it down to size
5 minutes
video
Biology
Brilliant dots of colour form exquisite patterns in this close-up of butterfly wings
3 minutes
video
Anthropology
Does Mogi’s future lie with her horses on the Mongolian steppe, or in the city?
16 minutes
video
Genetics
Why it took a century to work out that humans interbred with Neanderthals
22 minutes
video
Art
The sprawling mural that depicts an unflinching people’s history of Los Angeles
7 minutes
video
Art
In his poem ‘London’, William Blake crafted a bleak vision of the city he loved
9 minutes
video
Evolution
How – and how not – to think about the role randomness plays in evolution
60 minutes
video
Art
A prisoner in Guantánamo finds some escape in building intricate model ships
6 minutes