Keri wrote:Amazingly it is the voice that everyone seems to be talking about, with regards to tuning A = 432 Hz, as apparently it has less strain on the vocal chords, which is why many opera singers and singers around the world, particularly in Italy, Germany and America, are lobying to have Conert Pitch at A = 432 Hz rather than A = 440 Hz. To me the voice is the oldest instrument, so I find it fascinating that professional singers are wanting Concert Pitch changed for health reasons.
Well singing slightly lower is going to be easier for the voice than singing high.There wasn't any standard pitch for orchestras until relatively recently, though its probably true that the majority tuned lower than now. Historical tuning forks show pitches from 380 up to the mid 400s. It stabilised somewhere in the mid 420-450 in the early 19th century. The French settled on 435 for a long time.
As instrumentalists have tuned higher and higher over the years to get brighter sounds from their instruments there has definitely been a creeping up of pitch over the centuries. This is still happening, I know some European orchestras tune at 443 or 445 compared to the American standard of 440.
It makes sense to me that vocal parts written when 'A' meant a note anything up to 5 semitones lower than today would be very difficult to sing at modern A=440. Folk and rock singers just change the key to be comfortable, but this option isn't open to orchestras whose instruments are constructed to play inn certain keys and changing the key often results in a dramatic change in tone colour, or worse still takes a part out of the range of some instruments.
I don't imagine this demand by singers is to do with any mystical qualities of 432, more to do with the fact that some vocal parts are now, after 400 years of rising pitches, almost unsingable.
Apparently the most precisely tuned instrument created was the Strativarius violin, was originally tuned to A = 432 Hz. Instruments from ancient cultures including Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Greecian times have been found to have this tuning also. This of course does not apply to all ancient instruments as there has indeed been such a variety of tunings all around the world, for instance some pipe organs in Churches around Europe are known to have high pitch tuning, to be closer to the heavens (which is a bit of a strain on the vocal chords of choirs, so I've heard).
Do you mean the Stradivarius was tap tuned to 432 (ie the body resonated at 432- or more likely whatever G would be in a scale with A at 432) or that when it was played the strings were tuned to a scale with A at 432 Hz? Both would seem hard to prove, most Strads have been extensively modified and only a couple exist with their original necks (the Baroque fiddle had a smaller neck, lower bridge and lower tension strings than is standard now) so that would make getting a sense of the tap tuned natural resonant frequency of the instrument difficult. As I said above, the tunings of classical music have varied greatly, and pitch pipes and tuning forks give different frequencies even within the same area and time. So how would one prove that an instrument had been played with the strings tuned to a given pitch?
I make ancient instruments for a living and I'd love to know your sources for the tunings of ancient Egyptian and Greek instruments. Could you post them here?
Tuning forks were only invented around 1700, so it would be hard to know the pitches instruments were tuned too. Stringed instruments can obviously be tuned to widely differing pitches depending on the thickness, material and tension of the strings. Even if an Egyptian lyre had survived with strings inttact there would be no way to know how it was tuned, beyond a wide range of possibilities. Likewise reed instruments pitch depends on the set up of the reeds as well as the structure of the instrument, size of holes and length/bore of the tube. That leaves us with flutes. The ancient Egyptians had transverse flutes, which would give a fairly narrow range of pitch for a given fingering (though this can be changed with embouchoure). There are surviving Egyptian flutes, which according to some scholars seem to show they used an odd whole tone scale, (though I am always suspicious of these things, I bet other scales were possible with cross fingering), whilst other scholars point at flutes which produced an 8 note octave with semitones. I'm not aware of their being any agreement as to the pitch of these instruments, but I'd love to know if you have a source for that. I don't know anything about modern scholarship on surviving Greek flutes, I do have a book from about 15 years ago on Greek and Roman music, and it doesn't mention any standardisation of pitch in these ancient instruments. Again, I look forward to finding out more from you about this.
Old pipe organs tend to be very high pitched, not because they were made that way, but because as they are tuned and retuned the pipes tend to get shorter and shorter.
I agree that so called 'new age' music seems to be going pitch crazy, and some of it just sounds awful, even in tuning A = 432 Hz..................
However there are some WONDERFUL recordings out there. For example I got a CD a couple of months ago from CD BABY: Kimba Arem "Gaearth Dreaming", an amazing musician who plays ancient instruments from around the world; the album cover even has water crystal photos taken by Dr Masaru Emoto, of her music. Her entire CD has the tuning A = 432 Hz.
I am not claiming to be an expert in the fields of science, maths or music; I have simply wanted to voice my experiences and findings to like minded people, and to find out other people's experiences with A = 432 Hz.
Bright Blessings,
Keri Patten
I'm sure peoples musicality (or lack thereof) will come across, however they fine tune their instruments!
Lastly, and most importantly, you talk about A=432 tuning. What about all the other notes in the scale? If we tune our A to 432, we must still decide how to tune all our other notes. The standard today is to have an octave divided into 12 equal semitones, this is called Equal Temperament and was popularised by Bach. However it isn't the only way to tune our notes. Up till Bach people used a variety of tuning systems with semitones of different sizes. Equal Temparament is a very modern invention, and sounds very nasty to people who haven't got used to it, like us!
Still in much world music there is no agreement on the size of semitones (Indian music for instance uses variable semitones depending on the raga, and the instruments have moveable frets to accommodate this). Some European folk musicians tune to Just Intonation, where the relationships of frequencies between the notes are decided by small whole number ratios. Pythagorean tuning, derived from the position of harmonics on a string, is an example of a system of Just Intonation. Then we come to exotic but still nature derived scales, such as the NatureTone scale used in some Scandinavian and Eastern European folk musics, where the intervals between the notes are derived from the harmonics generated by an open and closed ended pipe, like a willow flute, fujara or koncovka. These intervals are wildly different from either Just Intonation or Equal Temperament.
So having decided we will put our A at 432 Hz, where shall we put the rest of our notes? This decision will impact more on the sound of our music than the position of our A. I may be playing in a scale or mode that doesn't even have an A in it for a start!
So what assumptions about scale are we making when we talk of A=432Hz?
I'd love to hear of other people's experiences of Nature's Music Pitch........
You'll be able to find LOTS of info on A = 432 Hz tuning.
