Klarinet Archive - Posting 000441.txt from 1998/09

From: charette@-----.org
Subj: Re: [kl] Re: Pitch standards
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1998 15:35:10 -0400

Ed said:
>I'm having some trouble understanding what you are saying here, or perhaps
>why you are saying it. When a physical apparatus, such as a musical
>instrument, is involved, temperature always comes into play. When the
>Fox company makes a bassoon, they say that the pitch level is something
>like A=440 or A=442 *at a certain temperature,* such as 70 or 72 degrees
>Fahrenheit. And, if the instrument must be played at 60 degrees, or 90
>degrees, that its pitch level will change seems so obvious as to not need
>to be stated.
>
>I just received a letter from the Heckel company in Germany, in which they
>responded to my request for information about my instrument. They told me
>that it was made in 1923, and that it originally was designed to play in
>tune at A@-----. Also, those notorious pitched percussion
>instruments which have been discussed are also intended to play at their
>nominal frequency, whatever that may be, but only at a specified
>temperature. Now, the situation is made even more complicated due to the
>fact that the reason an instrument changes temperature is due to a change
>in the temperature of the ambient air. And, those changes also affect the
>frequency of musical sounds.
>
>So, how is it that you feel that temperature never comes into the play?

Ed,
nothing here implies any _standard_. What it says is that if you finger
what should be a concert A (which in 1923 _was_ defined as 435 Hz) and
produce a note when it is a certain temperature the frequency will be 435
Hz. At any other temperature it may not be a _standard_ A; it may be something
else.

So temperature comes into play where you're trying to produce a concert A,
but not if you're describing it. If I have some highly accurate device, not
temperature sensitive, that produces a frequency of 440 Hz, and you have
a device that _is_ temperature sensitive and drifts when trying to produce
the same frequency, which one would you use as an absoulte reference
frequency?

Mark Charette@-----.org

PS - I hope I'm not boring too many people. Standards are something I did with
the American national Standards Institue and the International Standards
Organization, and I truly believe that understanding this difference with
distiction is important to the real question - why do we keep changing the
note that we tune to?

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