What does intonation mean in music?

Left hand & fingerboard

Intonation

Intonation is accuracy of pitch, on a fretless string instrument, the ongoing skill of placing each finger so the note is in tune with the harmony around it.

Unlike a piano, a string instrument has no fixed pitches, which is a burden and an advantage. The burden is that every note must be placed and checked. The advantage is that a player can adjust, raising a leading tone toward its resolution, or tuning a third slightly low so a chord locks, in ways a fixed-pitch instrument cannot.

Practically, good intonation comes from feedback rather than effort: checking notes against open strings, listening for sympathetic resonance when a stopped note matches an open one, and using a tuner or drone to build a reliable internal reference. Cents are the unit of measurement, a hundred cents to a half step, with about five cents being the threshold where an average listener hears a note as out of tune.

Cents: A cent is a unit of pitch measurement equal to one hundredth of an equal-tempered half step, used by tuners to show how far a note is from true.
Open string: An open string is a string played with no left-hand finger stopping it, sounding the pitch the string is tuned to.
Vibrato: Vibrato is a small, regular oscillation of pitch produced by rocking the left-hand finger on the string, used to warm and sustain a tone.
Concert pitch: Concert pitch is the agreed tuning reference for an ensemble, standardly the A above middle C at 440 Hz, though many orchestras tune to 442 Hz.

Every term in this glossary is taught in context somewhere in Arco's curricula, on the staff, on the keyboard, and on your own fingerboard at the same time.

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