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Thread: The great 440 Hz conspiracy, and why all of our music is wrong

  1. #51
    Registered User DavidKOS's Avatar
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    Default Re: The great 440 Hz conspiracy, and why all of our music is wron

    Quote Originally Posted by SincereCorgi View Post
    Regarding Guido, I don't think this is quite right. Moveable Do as we think of it is something that presupposes the existence of different keys and uses Moveable Do to allow singers to sing in a tonal framework in any of those keys by reassigning the tonic. Guido and musicians of that era weren't interested in reassigning the the tonic- the idea of modulation wasn't even a notion yet. They just trained singers using whatever he local reference pitch was, presumably a pipe organ.
    Not really. They could sing with no instrumental pitch reference. This was very early in the Middle ages, before much of what we know now, including the modern keyboard, was developed.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guidonian_hand

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_of_Arezzo B 991/992 – d after 1033

    It's more like today's system is a result of many permutations of that system.

    " reassigning the tonic"

    That was the point about all the various systems of solemnization - the writing of the music and actual pitch was not necessarily the same thing for a long time.

    Even much later in music history, there were many variations in actual pitch - chorton, kammerton, etc.

    Pitch wasn't standard for centuries. the reason do was moveable was so they could reassign the tonic to whatever was the pitch they were using.

  2. #52

    Default Re: The great 440 Hz conspiracy, and why all of our music is wron

    Pitch wasn't standard for centuries. the reason do was moveable was so they could reassign the tonic to whatever was the pitch they were using.
    Anyone who has tried to play along with old recordings or who participated in jam sessions prior to electronic tuners knows fully well that pitch has not been very standard even in relatively modern times. At least in practice even if it was intended to be standard.

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  4. #53
    bass player gone mando
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    Default Re: The great 440 Hz conspiracy, and why all of our music is wron

    I have nothing to add, but I enjoyed reading this thread. :-)

    I have seen threads on Mandolin Cafe, though, saying that the A string is the hardest string on the mando to tune. Something about the gauge.

    Now that I think about it, I *really* have nothing to add. And I gotta go tune ...
    Collings MT O
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    Weber Bitterroot Mandola
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  5. #54
    formerly Philphool Phil Goodson's Avatar
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    Default Re: The great 440 Hz conspiracy, and why all of our music is wron

    Quote Originally Posted by DavidKOS View Post
    ....
    Pitch wasn't standard for centuries. the reason do was moveable was so they could reassign the tonic to whatever was the pitch they were using.
    As recently as my childhood, in fact; when the church piano only got tuned about every 10 years or so.
    Phil

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  7. #55
    Registered User Drew Streip's Avatar
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    Default Re: The great 440 Hz conspiracy, and why all of our music is wron

    Here's a question: For people who have perfect pitch, is their reference point constant and consistent -- or does it change based on the conventions of the era? For example, would somebody today recognize 437 as being "A" but a little flat? Or would anything in the realm of, say, a quarter-tone either direction qualify?

    Would somebody in 1900 have heard 440 and thought "My goodness, they are sharp!"?

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  9. #56

    Default Re: The great 440 Hz conspiracy, and why all of our music is wron

    Quote Originally Posted by Drew Streip View Post
    Here's a question: For people who have perfect pitch, is their reference point constant and consistent -- or does it change based on the conventions of the era? For example, would somebody today recognize 437 as being "A" but a little flat? Or would anything in the realm of, say, a quarter-tone either direction qualify?

    Would somebody in 1900 have heard 440 and thought "My goodness, they are sharp!"?
    Drew... that is the question that I was about to ask.
    My best guess is that people with 'perfect' pitch learn to recognize the accepted pitch of their environment... or as you say "the conventions of the era".
    I'm pretty sure the few people I know personally who have perfect pitch recognize a 440 Hz tone as an A.
    The tone they can hear in their head, without any outside reference is the tone they've learned to recognize as a certain note.
    I really don't know though. Interesting question.
    "I play BG so that's what I can talk intelligently about." A line I loved and pirated from Mandoplumb

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  11. #57
    Registered User sblock's Avatar
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    Default Re: The great 440 Hz conspiracy, and why all of our music is wron

    The answer to this question is that people with perfect pitch are able to recognize the absolute pitch (i.e., the tone frequency), but they assign it to a word-name (say, "Bb") that they were taught is used to describe that pitch. If they grew up, for example, being taught that 415 Hz is called "A", then they will name that note as an "A." If they heard a note at 440 Hz (the modern A standard), then they would tend to find that pitch to be a bit on the sharp side. Conversely, those with perfect pitch who grew up learning today's modern A standard would find a note at 415 Hz to be a bit on the flat side.

    In other words, the pitches (frequencies) are absolute, but the names we use to call these are malleable, and a result of cultural conventions.

    Consider this, which may make understanding this easier: if you had grown up and been taught that (what most of us call) red objects were called "blue," and vice versa, then you would always name red and blue exactly backwards, compared to the rest of us. But that linguistic idiosyncrasy would in no way imply that you couldn't see color! You can see colors perfectly well: you just use different words to describe them. The exact same thing is true for folks who speak foreign languages, after all, and therefore have different names for all the colors. Folks with perfect pitch can hear pitch (frequency) perfectly well -- unlike most of us. They might choose to use different words (for example, letter names with optional sharps or flats, or fixed solfegio instead) to describe those notes, however, depending on whatever they were taught. All of which makes perfect sense.
    Last edited by sblock; May-16-2018 at 1:39pm.

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  13. #58
    Registered User SincereCorgi's Avatar
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    Default Re: The great 440 Hz conspiracy, and why all of our music is wron

    Quote Originally Posted by DavidKOS View Post
    Not really. They could sing with no instrumental pitch reference. This was very early in the Middle ages, before much of what we know now, including the modern keyboard, was developed.
    Yes, really... or at least yes, sort of. Moveable Do/Fixed Do don't make sense as concepts until you have something like equal temperament. I'm not saying there was a 9th century A415 used as a reference pitch, but liturgical singers (which is all we know about) would use whatever organ was available to map their conception of the scale, and then used modes of that scale rather than transposing Do to different pitches of it.

    Anyway, like I said, this is a philosophical vocabulary argument rather than anything to do with mystical properties of different pitches. I had a very nice mandolin lady who told me about how she uses A432 tuning because its ancient mathematical purity is soothing to schoolchildren, and didn't seem to understand that her fretboard was designed for equal temperament. I keep my mandolin inside a crystal pyramid.

  14. #59
    Registered User Tom Haywood's Avatar
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    Default Re: The great 440 Hz conspiracy, and why all of our music is wron

    Quote Originally Posted by SincereCorgi View Post
    I keep my mandolin inside a crystal pyramid.
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    formerly Philphool Phil Goodson's Avatar
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    Default Re: The great 440 Hz conspiracy, and why all of our music is wron

    Quote Originally Posted by sblock View Post
    ..... Folks with perfect pitch can hear pitch (frequency) perfectly well -- unlike most of us.....
    Seems to me that they don't HEAR pitch better. They are just able to REMEMBER the sound of the pitch and associate it with a name. I suspect most of us hear the same pitch but can't remember and reproduce its sound only a few seconds/minutes later.

    Is there data to show whether perfect pitch is more related to the ear vs the brain??

    From day to day, we REMEMBER what "green" looks like.
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  17. #61
    Registered User sblock's Avatar
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    Default Re: The great 440 Hz conspiracy, and why all of our music is wron

    Quote Originally Posted by Philphool View Post
    Seems to me that they don't HEAR pitch better. They are just able to REMEMBER the sound of the pitch and associate it with a name. I suspect most of us hear the same pitch but can't remember and reproduce its sound only a few seconds/minutes later.

    Is there data to show whether perfect pitch is more related to the ear vs the brain??

    From day to day, we REMEMBER what "green" looks like.
    Actually, what we call "perfect pitch" is the ability to distinguish the absolute frequency of a given note (as opposed to relative pitch), and this involves BOTH hearing and memory, not the one or the other. The association of a sensory input (e.g., I listen to a note) with a word (e.g., I choose to call that note an "A") is done inside the brain, not in the ear. But when scientists use the word "hear" in the context of perfect pitch, we're talking about the entire auditory pathway, not just what happens in the ear. The processing of sound is done by the brain, mainly in the auditory cortex, and we certainly include this processing whenever we write "hear." Perfect pitch involves not only the auditory cortex, and also those parts of the brain that process language (Broca's area and Wernicke's area, etc., plus a lot of the dominant hemisphere), since it involves an association of pitch with language.

    Furthermore, there are degrees of perfection, so to speak, associated with the phenomenon of perfect pitch. That is, some folks with this ability can remember/distinguish, and therefore name, tones better than some others. Put another way, not all individuals with perfect pitch exhibit identical performance when tested. Moreover, most folks have at least some sense of absolute pitch, although it might not be good enough to distinguish the notes of a musical scale. Finally, there is some evidence that a sense of perfect pitch can be improved with practice, although that remains somewhat controversial.

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