Historical Pitch of the A above middle C.

(this will be expanded as I have time) As as physicist I know that the frequency of an oscillation corresponds to the acoustic variable pitch. I also know that frequency is a continuous variable, so that nature provides an infinite number of pitches to an octave. In our wisdom, we have reduced this number to 12, the western equally tempered scale. Still the physicist, I wonder about this. Why 12? What makes this work? Is it a fancy compromise or deeper? I think it is a compromise that makes instruments like the piano possible. Perhaps I will put up some web pages on the acoustic variable pitch.

This page is about our attempts to standardize pitch. In 1955 some commission or other attempted to make 440 cycles per second the official standard pitch, corresponding to the A above middle C on a piano. Most America orchestras conform to this (but I have heard whispers that the Boston symphony plays at 448). Most European orchestras play slightly higher at 442 or 445.

It is often said that pitch has risen over time, and I repeat this as well. But this is only partly true. The organ Bach played at his home church was tuned at A = 480, much higher than today.

I have assembled a database of known pitches of historical situations, such as tuning forks known to be used by, say, the Paris opera in 1820. The sources stopped at 1900 so my data does also. You will see that there is an upward trend but that the scatter is very great. The line of best fit, which jargon infested people call a "regression line," is given. In this case it is clearly not very meaningful, but I show it just to demonstrate that regression lines are often poor fits to real data.

Each dot represents the pitch of an A for some musical organization in some year.