[CAUT] A440, once again...

[Jeff Tanner]

One reason I am somewhat skeptical is a little experiment I tried the other night. Sounding a 442 fork and a 440 fork simultaneously and holding them to a table one hears how out of tune they sound. But if you strike them and place one over one ear and the other over the other ear, they don't sound that much out of tune with each other! Granted, it isn't the same as two forks of the same frequency. You do hear a bit of a "chorus" effect. But not nearly what you hear when both ears hear both forks. I've heard pretty good choirs and instrumental groups not be able to tune that close.

But whether one can indeed hear the difference between 440 and 441 or 442 is not the same as there actually being a discernible musical difference being tuned at one or the other. I suspect most who request non-440 pitches do so because somebody else they know or have heard of does. Most folks in the world are followers.

Tanner
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Fred Sturm 
  To: caut at ptg.org 
  Sent: Wednesday, November 11, 2009 4:23 PM
  Subject: Re: [CAUT] A440, once again...




  On Nov 10, 2009, at 5:06 PM, David Skolnik wrote:


    Jeff, Paul, others -
    I'll agree that there is always a psychological component in all of this... people trying to hide their own uncertainties, inadequacies, deficiencies, but I would be a bit more circumspect in my assertions of dissemblance, were I yous, meaning, don't be so sure.



  I agree. And not just wind players. Though it is a rare person who can tell 440 from 442, or possibly 441, without any reference, I think a lot of those people are conductors. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the conductor of the New Mexico Symphony could tell - he is one sharp musician.


    Looking forward to hanging out for a few weeks at the Performing Arts Library @ Lincoln Center, in order to read the $90 opus Fred recommended:  A History of Performing Pitch: the story of "A" by Bruce Haynes.  I may wait for it to come out as an i-book, or for a Kindle to read the whole thing, but I'm really hoping to get a look at it soon.  I wonder how many of your institutions own a copy in their music libraries.
     

  This is not a book to read straight through, at least not for most of us. More a book to dip into, look at a bit of one section, a bit of another, maybe go back and try to clarify something.
  If you want to find a book like this in a library, worldcat.org is the place to look. It has listings of library collections from an amazing number of libraries, I think something like 70,000, including nearly all university libraries. You can put in your location, and it will list libraries that have the book sorted by distance from you. There are many copies in Manhattan, including Columbia U and NY Public Library.
  Interlibrary loan is one of my favorite perks of the job. We can access worldcat through our library portal, and things show up in a different format, including a link to request the item on interlibrary loan. Click on it, and you go automatically to the ILL request page, with a request already filled in with the data. Click submit, and wait a week or two for it to show up. Amazing!

    David Skolnik
    Hastings on Hudson, NY



  Regards,
  Fred Sturm
  University of New Mexico
  fssturm at unm.edu









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