distributions of pitches

Bill Alves wrote:

>For example, if you were to go back to 18th-century Europe and empirically
measure many harpsichords of the best musicians, you would probably come up
with a statistical distribution around certain points (after correcting for
differences in absolute pitch of course). Would this mean that those
musicians were all, consciously or not, trying to tune to the mid-point of
that distribution? Of course not. The distribution would have simply masked
the wonderful variety of irregular temperaments, each with its own musical
advantages.

You are right to urge caution here - but I certainly didnt take Dan
Akkocs suggestion to imply an assumption that the distributions be
normally distributed (perhaps the implication of using the "mean" as
the best predictor?). In the example you suggest, you should be able
to see from the distribution that the performances cluster into two
(or more) groups, that is, that the distribution is bi- or multi-modal. I
think this is why Dan is measuring individual performers.