Curious Facts
Page 21 (all about music)
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Prior to 1939 there was no agreement about the pitch to which different musical notes should correspond. Musical instruments in different places were therefore tuned to different pitches.
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In 1939 an international conference recommended that the A above middle C should be tuned to 440 Hz. This is now known as “concert pitch”.
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“Perfect pitch” is acquired through training, generally before the age of 6. Prior to 1939 people with “perfect pitch” from different places would have been out of tune with each other.
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“Perfect pitch” is more common in countries such as China which have languages in which the meaning of words can change according the pitch at which they are spoken.
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In Chinese, the word “ma” can mean “mother”, “hemp” or “horse” depending on whether it is spoken in a high, medium or low pitch.
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Although Mozart had “perfect pitch”, what he considered to be the note A (422 Hz) is now considered to be a slightly out of tune G#. (This is known because his tuning fork is still in existence.)1
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The frequency of Royal Philharmonic’s original A above middle C (prior to 1939) was 439Hz. This was difficult to reproduce electronically because 439 is a prime number.
[When the BBC broadcast the A=440 Hz note it was derived from a piezoelectric crystal which vibrates at 1,000,000 Hz. An Electronic divider reduced the frequency to 1000 Hz, after which is was multiplied by 11/25 in order to produce the frequency of 440 Hz.]
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If the note A2 is played on an instrument which produces the harmonics 110 Hz, 220 Hz, 330 Hz and 440 Hz, the note you will hear is the lowest, 110 Hz, which is known as the fundamental frequency. However, if the fundamental frequency is removed and only the harmonics 220 Hz, 330 Hz and 440 Hz are played, you will still hear the note 110 Hz, even though it is not being played. This is because 220 Hz (A3, one octave higher than A2) does not have the harmonic 330 Hz. The harmonics of 220 Hz are 220 Hz, 440 Hz, 660 Hz, 880 Hz etc.
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Vaughan Williams based the second movement of his Third Symphony on a single mistake that he heard an army bugler make while he was working as an ambulance driver in the First World War.
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Most of the information stored on a music CD is inaudible to humans. It is either hidden (when one sound/instrument obscures another) or of a frequency which is too high or too low for humans to hear.
Most of the facts on this page are taken from How Music Works by John Powell, Penguin Books Ltd 2010.
1. Alexander J. Ellis in “Studies in the History of Music Pitch: Monographs by Alexander H Ellis and Arthur Mendel (Amsterdam: Frits Knuf, 1968; New York: Da Capo Press).
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