Can we really be in tune?

Modern technology should, in theory, help musicians be more in tune than ever; but, Tom Service argues, it may actually distort how we hear the music we perform

t’s a phrase we use all the time, not least on Radio 3, where our drivetime show is literally called . But that begs the question; what does being ‘in tune’ really mean? It seems obvious: being out of tune as opposed to in tune is the contrast between Florence Foster Jenkins’s exquisitely appalling attempts to sing the Queen of the Night’s Act II aria from Mozart’s and the way any professional soprano sings the same aria, with those high Fs pinging gloriously in the right place. It’s the difference between the gleeful massacring of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony by the Portsmouth Sinfonia – riotously out of tune – and how the Hallé Orchestra might play it, with decorous in-tune-ness.