From New Yak Timez
Why did they switch the standadr to 440 from 430 or 435? Explain. It seems like it would require instruments to be built differently, perhaps with tighter wood joints or such? Seems like a lot of work.
Also, why would it be worth changing? You can’t really tell the difference can you?
Despite your user name, you might find this article interesting.
Standard pitch had been creeping upwards for quite some time. In centuries past the A above middle C was typically around 415Hz. Orchestras would then start tuning their string instruments slightly sharp for a “brighter,” cheerier sound than people were used to hearing, and the woodwind makers would have to follow suit to stay in tune. The government of Austria started recommending a standard of 435Hz which was followed for a time until North American music became more dominant worldwide.
Eventually ANSI recommended a standard of 440Hz and American instrument makers adopted this standard. The ISO adopted the same standard later, although some European orchestras have crept up even further to around 442Hz, because, you know, screw the Americans.
I think some American orchestras also use 442.
I’ve heard some of the older string instruments, basses in particular, are in danger of cracking from the combination of higher tension and steel strings versus gut strings.
You can’t go any higher than 442, though, unless you want to retune the mallet percussion instruments like the glockenspiel, chimes, vibraphone, etc.. All the mallet instruments were tuned to 440, and would sound out of tune with anything above 442.
It wasn’t that they just arbitrarily decided to raise the pitch and make that the new standard. Back in the earlier days there was no standard pitch, and A could have been anywhere from close to 400 Hz all the way up to somewhere around 480 Hz. Generally, though, it was somewhere around 420 to 430 Hz. There were attempts to standardize the pitch but you know, the great thing about standards is there’s so many to choose from (old quote).
As friedo said, music went through a period where the pitch slowly rose in general, because it made the music sound “brighter” to most folks (similarly, today there’s a tendency for music to be “louder” to the point of where it causes distortion on CDs, which I personally find extremely annoying). In yet another of many attempts at standardization, someone slapped A=440 down onto something they called an official standard, and for various reasons that one tended to stick a bit better than other older standards.
The difference between A=435 Hz and A=440 Hz is fairly subtle but if you listen to them side by side the 440 will sound just slightly brighter. A comparison to older standards like 415 are much more noticeable.
I don’t know if they still do it, but music videos (back when MTV actually played music videos) were often sped up slightly so that they could fit more of their popular songs into an hour’s worth of play time. Movie channels (Showtime, HBO, etc) have slightly sped up movies for the same basic reason. You do have a point. If you’re not doing a side by side comparison and you’re not listening carefully you really won’t notice the difference.
There are youtube videos where you can find “corrected” versions of symphonies, where they claim to adjust back to whatever standard they think was intended at the time the symphony was written. They are interesting to listen to!
In those cases they may be using a lower pitch, different temperament system, or both.
Many European orchestras use 443 Hz, I understand, and the Berliner Philharmoniker has actually lowered the pitch from 445. I have no idea, though, how they do with mallet instruments.
Do they do this electronically, or by tuning the instruments differently for the recording?
Yeah, I only know about American mallet instruments.
In practice, it probably wouldn’t make enough of a difference to matter. It might make a difference if you were playing a marimba concerto with lots of long, sustained notes. Most mallet instruments have too quick of a decay (except for the vibraphone, which isn’t used all that often in orchestras) for it too be too big of a deal.
I’m pretty sure it was achieved electronically by just adjusting the pitch artificially (but not changing the tempo).
By tuning instruments differently and using antiques (or replicas) of things that can’t be tuned. ETA: And as drewtwo notes I’m sure some of those videos are just electronically edited. But there are orchestras who do that sort of thing for live performances.
I just checked the Adams and Yamaha vibraphone pages out, and it seems most (if not all–I didn’t check every one) of their vibraphones I tuned to 442. Same with a quick look at the marimbas.
al27052, I’ll have to ask a cellist I know about it when I run into him.
Yeah, but there are plenty of older really nice mallet instruments owned by symphony orchestras that are A=440. Steel-bar Deagan glockenspiels, amazing-sounding Deagan chimes, etc.. In fact, the old rosewood xylophones (again, Deagans were the best) are actually better than the newer ones for two reasons
Rosewood gets harder as it ages, making the bars less likely to dent/crack. This is important if you’re using hard mallets.
The older xylophones were made from old-growth rosewood trees, which had harder/better wood than the new-growth trees that were planted to replace them.
but again, moot point, because of the quick decay.
I checked it with my cellist friend. The orchestra he works in rarely go above 442 Hz and as for for marimbas etc. his explanation was the same as al27052’s.
Wouldn’t you notice it if you had a tremolo on the xylophone or marimba, or is 2 Hz just not enough to bug anyone?
According to my source, no.
That’s interesting. I just looked it up to see what the difference between 440 and 442 is in cents, and that’s almost an 8 cent tuning difference (I didn’t realize it was quite that big.) I guess the short decay must really help.
2 Hz, probably not. At 5 Hz, a slow, sustained roll on the low notes of the marimba combined with slow, sustained notes (from a wind or string instrument) on the exact same note that the marimba is playing would be noticeable, and probably annoying, to a trained ear. That’s about it.
such passages are extremely rare in the orchestral literature, however.