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Re: playing in hot weather

Author: wrowand
Date: 2006-07-22 14:42

I think the biggest problem with playing outdoors in the heat (or even indoors when it's very hot) is that all of the wind players tend to go sharp. This isn't because of fatigue or lack of support -- it's due to the simple physics of sound in air.

As the temperature rises, the velocity of sound in the air will rise. Since the size of our instruments is fixed (neglecting thermal expansion of the instrument, since this change is about 2 orders of magnitude smaller), this means that the pitch produced for an instrument of a given length will rise as well.

The amount of the rise in pitch will be about 3 cents per degree C, or about 1.7 cents per degree F. Coping with this can certainly make you tired, but you can compensate by having a variety of reeds at different pitch levels.

What do other people do in this situation when sounding the tuning A? I've tried sounding the A a little bit sharper when the temperature is significantly higher since I figure the wind players can more easily play in tune if the overall pitch is higher (the string players can just tune sharper). On other occasions, I've tried to just keep the A at 440Hz regardless of the heat but I don't think this works as well.

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lucyw

2006-07-22 00:09