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Thursday, February 8, 2007

How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?

How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?

14 comments:

  1. Think about it this way; in an average village in an average city in an average state how many pianos tuners are there(say x). So the answer would be, x.(#of cities).(#of states)=50x(# of cities in that average state).

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  2. lets say there are x piano tuner in an average village of y people.
    no of tuners = x/y*(population of the world which is 6.6 billion )

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  3. I think a more accurate way to analyze this problem would be to link it to a time element. Like this...

    Lets talk about the US only. The population of the US is around 300 million. Lets divide that by 5 for the average number of families. That would give us 60 million families. Lets say 30% of these families are rich enough to own their own piano. Thats approximately 18 million. Lets say half of these people are music freaks. Thats 9 million. The number of pianos in bars, hotels, ...etc would be negligible compared to this number.

    Lets say these pianos are tuned on average once a year. Lets say a tuner is used on average twice a month (i.e. 24 times a year) to tune 24 pianos. Therefore 9 million divide 24 would give you 375,000 piano tuners in the US.

    I personally think its much less than that.
    But I believe my attempt was quite interesting...

    Maybe I should have looked it from the perspective of where a piano tuner is usually; in schools, clubs, music centers, instrument repair shops. I would say there was one of these for every average sized district in the US, therefore one piano tuner for every 1,000 people which leaves 3,000 tuners. I think this is too little.

    Anywayz there isn't a correct answer to this open-ended question :D

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  4. Is the question about people or about a tool that is used to tune a piano? Anyone can tune a piano, just not correctly. What about parallel universes? Everyone here is answering the question: "How many professional piano tuners are there on earth?"

    Google, I would like three weeks vacation my first year, and a company car.

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  5. How many piano tuners are in the world? All of them are.

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  6. You can't just take "an average village in an average city", because there is no such thing. An average American village will have far more pianos than one in Afghanistan. There are far more pianos in China than there used to be, but they're very unevenly distributed.
    And pianos need tuning more often in the tropics and polar regions. You would need a much more complex series of algorithms.

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  7. I'd say... There are lots of pianos to tune. Who wants to try to tune one? How will it be accomplished? Is the accomplishment of tuning really that important to calculate the amount of piano tuners? You can tune a piano, but you can't tune a fish...

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  8. number of piano legs/4

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  9. I guess the right answer is : a lot

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  10. Far less tuners than there are pianos

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  11. Sampling problem. How accurate the answer is depends on how neutral the sample is.

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  12. we cannot say exact answer to this question,,,,

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  13. Here's my take on this question though I'm assuming it's at least partially wrong because I know nothing about pianos but I'd assume they're looking for an answer like.... First, we assume there are 6.6 Billion people in the world... of that population, you might expect the average household to be made up of 3 people(2.2 Billion households), of those households I might estimate that approximately 5% own a piano that needs to be tuned(110 Million pianos), then I'm guessing that each piano tuner can tune between 90-120 pianos per month(3-4 pianos a day) but we'll make it 100 for ease of math so that leaves us with a tuning population of 1.1 Million piano tuners if pianos needed to be tuned every month, I'd assume a piano needs to be tuned every 6-12 months but I'll make it 10 months which leaves us with a final population of 110,000 piano tuners in the entire world.

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