Pitch standards in Cold War-era Eastern Bloc

[calcbone]

A post on Facebook recently reminded me of something…

In 2008, I was in a university jazz band that had a performance in Beijing. Of course, we brought most of our own instruments (I brought an Olds Ambassador to avoid the risk of having my “good” peashooter damaged en route), but we rented a few of the large ones locally…including a baritone sax.

I don’t remember the make of the bari sax we rented, but it was marked “GDR” (East Germany). The reason this memory sticks out in my mind was that it played very sharp—our bari player had his mouthpiece just barely on the cork to get it close to in tune. It must have been built to a higher pitch standard than 440.

Anyone else here have experience with that phenomenon? Was this a common thing in the Eastern bloc/communist countries in general?

[robcat2075]

Connect-the-dots hypothesis not based on actual knowledge...

A440 had gained international backing by 1939 but there used to be a "high" pitch standard for band instruments that was around A452

High Pitch vs. Low Pitch by Peter Hales

My guess is that whatever East German factory was cranking out bari-saxes had resurrected some (way) pre-war tooling and forms that were made to that old standard. Those were all that were around after the A440 forms somehow found their way to the Western zones.

If the goal was to make saxophones that would be an easier entrée than creating proper new ones from scratch and it's unlikely that the expertise to do that would have been plentiful in the immediate post-war years.

Eventually they probably did update to modern pitch and then those old high-pitch instruments were gifted to their socialist brothers in China, for you to encounter 20 years after the GDR had ceased to be.

It's almost as epic as "The Red Violin".

[MrHCinDE]

I don’t know about the Cold War-era Eastern Bloc but in several groups in present day Germany we often play at A=443, occasionally A=444. I was brought up on A=440 and I think it took some time to adjust. For some of my horns that’s right on the limit of the tuning slide being fully in.

[BGuttman]

I don’t know about the Cold War-era Eastern Bloc but in several groups in present day Germany we often play at A=443, occasionally A=444. I was brought up on A=440 and I think it too some time to adjust. For some of my horns that’s right on the limit of the tuning slide being fully in.

Most of the groups here (US) playing "high on the pitch" tend to be symphony orchestras. For some reason string players like bringing up the pitch a little. They claim it "livens" the tone. Our "high on the pitch" tends to be a little lower than yours -- mostly A=442 Hz.

[robcat2075]

More "high pitch" info...

High Pitch, Low Pitch and Modern Pitch

And this relevant bit...

After World War One, the Treaty of Versailles included an international pitch standard that still holds today. Of course, this is A=440Hz. There was a lag time for most of the many thousands of bands around the world that were playing in higher pitches that couldn’t afford to make a sudden change. In the US, it happened fairly quickly, most changing well before 1930. Other regions, including most brass bands in Britain, Australia and southern Germany, among others, didn’t make the change to modern pitch until after 1960. Of course, less wealthy areas, including in Eastern Europe, Mexico, etc. this stretched into the 1970s or later.

btw, I'll note that the "Versailles" factoid is not quite correct. The Treaty of Versailles merely states that there should be an international standard agreed to.

[calcbone]

More "high pitch" info...

High Pitch, Low Pitch and Modern Pitch

And this relevant bit...

After World War One, the Treaty of Versailles included an international pitch standard that still holds today. Of course, this is A=440Hz. There was a lag time for most of the many thousands of bands around the world that were playing in higher pitches that couldn’t afford to make a sudden change. In the US, it happened fairly quickly, most changing well before 1930. Other regions, including most brass bands in Britain, Australia and southern Germany, among others, didn’t make the change to modern pitch until after 1960. Of course, less wealthy areas, including in Eastern Europe, Mexico, etc. this stretched into the 1970s or later.

btw, I'll note that the "Versailles" factoid is not quite correct. The Treaty of Versailles merely states that there should be an international standard agreed to.

Ah, that’s interesting!

[mrpillow]

Sort of...

Article 282 of the treaty enumerates that the parties defers to the pre-existing agreement of the 1885 convention (Vienna Conference), which set 435 CPS as the diapason normal.

The kicker there being that the 435 CPS was dictated at 15°C, which equates to 440 CPS at 20°C. Much of the 435 vs 440 debate falls on failing to account for the specific temperatures of the particular standard, and looking only at the CPS.

Versailles did indicate a 440 CPS at 20°C pitch standard, thought it didn't write it out explicitly.

[robcat2075]

I recall previously trying to find an original text of that 1885 conference but never succeeding.

Is there one?

[mrpillow]

For a contemporary report and translation, see

Alex. J. Ellis. “Journal of the Society of Arts, Vol. 34, No. 1738.” The Journal of the Society of Arts 34, no. 1738 (1886): 439–445

For a TL;DR,

[robcat2075]

Hmmm.

59° for the concert hall! Brrr!

Since the "tuning forks flattens on increase" that won't get us to A440 as a standard they somehow tacitly defined.

A pipe organ that uses room temperature air will rise almost to 439 at 68°F (20°C) but it doesn't appear they are addressing or endorsing that result.

[mrpillow]

Of note is that the specification of 15°C is only relative to the temperature of the space in which the tuning forks are tested, which does not translate directly to the pitch/temperature of the instruments or a performance venue. An increase in ambient temperature will make a tuning fork for flat, unlike a wind instrument containing a column of air which behaves in the opposite direction.

They allowed that the wind instruments would need to be played in a space up to 24°C, within a margin of ±2% to match the standard of the fork, and for pipe organs basically said "do what works"

Organs should be brought to the standard pitch at mean temperatures suitable for the special circumstances under which they are used

All that said, the Treaty only made a rule, and it was certainly not followed to the letter.

[Chatname]

I don’t know about the Cold War-era Eastern Bloc but in several groups in present day Germany we often play at A=443, occasionally A=444. I was brought up on A=440 and I think it too some time to adjust. For some of my horns that’s right on the limit of the tuning slide being fully in.

Most of the groups here (US) playing "high on the pitch" tend to be symphony orchestras. For some reason string players like bringing up the pitch a little. They claim it "livens" the tone. Our "high on the pitch" tends to be a little lower than yours -- mostly A=442 Hz.

My violinist partner has another view on this. She claims it’s us wind players who drive the pitch upwards during performances, and they’re not able to follow the climbing pitch because of all the tones on the open strings-they cannot be played higher obviously. And the pitch of strings will be lowered when the temperature rises during a performance, as opposed to winds. She also feels that her violin sounds better in a slightly lower pitch; resonates better.

[BGuttman]

Not quite true.

If the overall pitch of the ensemble climbs, the string players simply need to "capo" the positions up to match. If the overall pitch goes below their tuning, they are SOL.

Wind instruments will tend to climb in pitch as they get warmer and lower as they get colder. This is a big problem for brass, who spend a lot of the concert not playing (and having the instruments get flatter and flatter). Also, if they tune while cold, the longer they play the sharper they go. It's related to the fact that the speed of sound increases with increased temperature so with a constant length, a cold horn is flatter than a warm horn:

pitch = speed of sound / wavelength (length of instrument)

[Chatname]

Yes, the strings can go higher by starting to avoid playing on open strings, which they claim is necessary when (according to them) winds push intonation up.
Anyway, I think intonation is far to complicated an issue for me to want to discuss it extensively here, and it’s not within the scope of this thread. I only want to point out that there seem to be generalized blaming going on, most of the time directed towards other orchestral groups, which I think is unproductive (excepting the fact that we trombone players always are right, of course!).
Intonation is hard to discuss also within an orchestra (at least in mine), intonation is like a musician’s personal hygiene: very private and not up for discussion.
I think the psychology of intonation is an under appreciated part of the problem; if everyone expects other groups to go higher and higher during performances, we will consciously or not contribute in the same direction, spiraling upwards together by no one’s fault.

[robcat2075]

Organs should be brought to the standard pitch at mean temperatures suitable for the special circumstances under which they are used

This sounds like a recipe for disaster since they are expecting the organ to be tuned to 435 at all temperatures, something the wind instruments can not do

[mrpillow]

One has to wonder whether they were considering the stipulation for organs as purely solo instruments, or only for accompanying choral ensembles.

[robcat2075]

In an article that is somewhat snarkier in tone than is typical for the Encyclopedia Britannica, the writer for the 1911 edition chronicles a plethora of previous pitches over several centuries ranging from A377 to A505.

Pitch, Musical

He indicates that the "high" pitch standard for bands is something bound in British Band regulations

PhilharmonicPitch.jpg

He notes the inherent problem of a 15°C standard but says the Vienna conference voted against setting a 20°C standard.

Diapason.jpg

I wonder how anyone was counting vibrations per second in the pre-electronic age.

[robcat2075]

I've been looking into the problem of identifying an exact frequency with only 19th Century technology.

The "Tonometer" of Scheibler, mentioned in the above encyclopedia article is just a set of tuning forks, tuned in small intervals. One identified a frequency by comparing it to the sound of a tuning fork and counting the "beats", if any, to know the exact deviation.

https://americanhistory.si.edu/science/tuningfork.htm


But the problem remains... how did he get any fork calibrated to a specific frequency at all?

I asked on Quora and someone suggested that wheel could be made to vibrate a membrane, rather like putting playing cards in the spokes of a bicycle wheel.

That would work. Driven by an accurate clock mechanism, that would be a way to mechanically generate a pitch of known frequency.

But I can't find that anyone ever did such a thing.

[JohnL]

But the problem remains... how did he get any fork calibrated to a specific frequency at all?

There's an equation for calculating the pitch of a tuning fork. It's based on the dimensions of the fork and the elastic modulus of the material the fork is made of. Not sure how long that equation has been around, though.

[robcat2075]

But the problem remains... how did he get any fork calibrated to a specific frequency at all?

There's an equation for calculating the pitch of a tuning fork. It's based on the dimensions of the fork and the elastic modulus of the material the fork is made of. Not sure how long that equation has been around, though.

I presume things like that get tested.

How would they test the fork to confirm that what they targeted is what they actually get from it?

[BGuttman]

Probably the same way you test the diameters of holes. You would have a "calibrated" set of tuning forks and compare. It's circular to be sure (somebody accepts a particular set as "standard" and everything else is tested to it) but it's a technique used in a lot of industries where it's hard to pin down a standard value.

[robcat2075]

Circular won't work here.

[BGuttman]

Circular won't work here.

Sure it would. You would have a collection of tuning forks at different pitches that are calibrated based on one pitch. You can determine the "offset" of another fork by measuring the beats to the first. Now you have a full set of forks at frequencies against which you can now test a new fork. Note that most people buy one fork in A and the oboe tunes to that. Everybody else tunes to the oboe. Even piano tuners would have one fork for A and tune the rest of the piano to intervals. Piano tuners used to need good pitch sense.

The invention of the strobo-tuner by Conn made all this stuff unnecessary. Now we have electronic doo-dads that would make a 19th century musician drool.

[robcat2075]

Sure it would. You would have a collection of tuning forks at different pitches that are calibrated based on one pitch. You can determine the "offset" of another fork by measuring the beats to the first. Now you have a full set of forks at frequencies against which you can now test a new fork.

Already covered in a previous post. That process doesn't begin to answer how the first fork could be known to vibrate at a particular frequency.

Remember that my question was...

I wonder how anyone was counting vibrations per second in the pre-electronic age.

If all they wanted to do was propose that a particular tuning fork was the desired standard to which other pitches should be compared, they would not need to assert a frequency for it. They could just give it a name. "Philharmonic" or "Vienna" or "Diapason"

But they did assert a frequency... without needing that one tuning fork be the undisputed model for.

This indicates that in 1875 or earlier they had a reproducible way to create a pitch and know it was some exact frequency without having to compare it to some model for which the frequency was already known.

Circular won't get you that.

[robcat2075]

Although the ancients had ascertained some connection between string length ratios and the resulting notes, it appears that not until the 17the Century there is awareness that the vibrations of musical pitches might be quantified.

Wiki: Marin Mersenne

Mersenne's description in the 1636 Harmonie universelle of the first absolute determination of the frequency of an audible tone (at 84 Hz) implies that he had already demonstrated that the absolute-frequency ratio of two vibrating strings, radiating a musical tone and its octave, is 1 : 2.

I'm afraid my French is not good enough to read his treatise to know how he got to that one count.

FWIW, a diagram from Mersenne in which he seems to be explaining a system of temperament. Note the coverage of enharmonic tones as distinctly different pitches.

From E to shining e...

MersenneTemperament.jpg

The Wiki article on Concert Pitch notes that...

The frequencies quoted [in these discussions of historical pitch standards] are based on modern measurements and would not have been precisely known to musicians of the day. Although Mersenne had made a rough determination of sound frequencies as early as the 17th century, such measurements did not become scientifically accurate until the 19th century, beginning with the work of German physicist Johann Scheibler in the 1830s.

But, of course, all we know of Scheibler is that he had a set of tuning forks. We don't know how he calibrated even one fork to start his collection of reproducible frequencies.

[timothy42b]

Interesting question.

https://roelhollander.eu/en/tuning-freq ... 0in%201960.

This talks about measurement with a mechanical device, a rotating wheel. Fine, but how did they accurately measure the time (seconds)?

The organ at our church has chimes, and the little clock tune that the organist plays sounds wrong to my ears. So I recorded it and tried to use Audacity to analyze the pitches and overtones.

Weirdly, the Audacity pitches don't match the note my tuner hears. And the initial spike as the chime is struck is about a fifth higher than the steady state note after a little decay.

[robcat2075]

Interesting question.

https://roelhollander.eu/en/tuning-freq ... 0in%201960.

Great article. Thanks!

This talks about measurement with a mechanical device, a rotating wheel. Fine, but how did they accurately measure the time (seconds)?

The first guy they mention, Robert Hooke, would not have had a mechanism to gauge his wheel rotations but he was just cranking out notes as proof of concept anyway.

However, a few centuries later that stuff exists..

By 1834 the Frenchman Félix Savart (1791-1841) was building giant brass wheels 82cm across, with 720 teeth. Savart’s contribution was a mechanical tachometer connected to the axis of the toothed wheel. He calibrated a rotational scale with the tooth rate, and for the first time demonstrated that specific tones were associated with specific frequencies. He could determine the frequency of a tone heard in air by using his ear to match it with the toothed wheel and reading the frequency from the tachometer.

According to Wiki

The first mechanical tachometers were based on measuring the centrifugal force, similar to the operation of a centrifugal governor. The inventor is assumed to be the German engineer Dietrich Uhlhorn; he used it for measuring the speed of machines in 1817.

1834 might be a bit late for our other guy, Scheilber and his tuning forks, who dies in 1837.

But at least that solves the mystery of how they could be certain of a particular frequency in the pre-electronic age.

[robcat2075]

I've been peering at Mersenne's tuning scheme, shown above.

The numbers, which decrease as the pitch ascends, probably indicate some unit of length of a string or pipe.

I'm having a hard time finding a major or minor chord that could not be just-tuned in his system.

However, although I've seen "period" instruments that had some of the black keys split front-and-back to allow different pitches, Mersenne's system would make for a crowded keyboard.

E G A B will still be single keys
Everything else would have to be split, sometimes into four parts.

MersenneKeyboard.jpg

[mrpillow]

Not quite Mersenne's tuning but one of the closer instruments with the hardware to match it -

[robcat2075]

My dad's LP player made everything sound like that.