![]() Swinburne was also a music lover, a dedicated amateur pianist and organist. (Representatives from Switzerland and the United States sent their views by mail.) Into the fray stepped Sir James Swinburne, an electrical engineer who, in search of better insulating material for electric gadgets, had been instrumental in the development of plastics. In May, 1939, delegates from France, Germany, Holland, and Italy joined their British counterparts at Broadcasting House, the London home of the BBC, to settle the question of concert pitch. ![]() Bureau of Standards to broadcast time and frequency, was sending out an hourly A440 tone for the benefit of musicians in radio studios across the country. By 1936, WWV, the radio station run by the U. Deagan, a manufacturer of bells and tuning forks. In America, where, after all, everything was faster, brighter, louder, A440 became, more or less, the official benchmark – adopted by the American Federation of Musicians in 1910 – due to the efforts of J. In Italy, opera’s natural habitat, the singers had railed against the gradual rise in pitch 435 became the upper limit. Ensembles in Paris and Vienna adopted the French diapason normale, 435 vibrations per second. The Royal Philharmonic in Britain, between the 1820s and the 1850s, swung from 433 to 455, the latter also becoming the standard for British army bands. A few took up “Stuttgart pitch” – Johann Baptist Streicher, in Vienna, who had just inherited the family piano-manufacturing business from his parents, started tuning his products to 440 – but regional differences still held sway. When the German Society of Naturalists and Doctors held its annual meeting in 1834, in Stuttgart, Scheibler proposed A440 as a reasonable average. In Paris, he found that A ranged from 426.7 to 440.7 the Berlin Philharmonic tuned to 441.62 the Vienna Philharmonic had six different tuning forks, from 433.66 up to 444.87. He traveled around Europe, measuring the exact pitch of other tuning forks in various cities and institutions. He invented and built a tonometer: a mounted collection of dozens of microtonally-graduated tuning forks. Johann Heinrich Scheibler was a successful German silk dealer, but his consuming hobby was acoustics. Still, variance remained the rule, though the variance was more precisely measured, thanks to another contemporary type: the well-off, enthusiastic amateur scientist. (The comparison with another by-product of the spread of steamships and trains – standardized time zones – is apt.) As the 19th century went on, pitch standards converged, and, in general, became higher those old, low-tuned organs became relics. Soloists and, especially, singers preferred a reasonably constant tuning from city to city and country to country. Chamber organs, on the other hand, were tuned sharp – sometimes as much as a third higher.īut the advent of steam power birthed a new species: the traveling virtuoso. Even into the 1800s, some French cathedral organs still maintained an A in the 370s, nearly a third lower than the current standard. For centuries, pitch had been a local trait, based around the tuning of what was normally the biggest instrument in town: the organ. How did that come about?īecause of steam, mainly. (ISO 15 concerns the proper categorization of ball bearings.) It’s everywhere. It’s an industrial benchmark: ISO 16, as designated by the International Organization for Standardization. It’s a factory preset for electronic keyboards and tuners. Pitch pipes and tuning forks are adjusted to it. The oboist plays it to prime orchestra concerts. ![]() It’s the pitch used to ensure instruments are in tune, with themselves and each other. It is, at least in theory, the most often-heard pitch in Western music: an A, above middle C, vibrating at 440 cycles per second.
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