Mine are tuned to 442. Most aren't really tuned to anything I didnt follow the link, but i think ive read it b4. Its the kind of BS that thrives on FB. I think ive seen it convincingly debunked
The connection of A440 with Nazis is pure bunk. And all the A432 stuff going around is pretty fanciful, kind of like the wishful thinking that this or that plant or household substance will miraculously cure cancer.
Pitch standards are just a way of everyone agreeing so that they can be in tune with each other, a lot like standard time.
Pitch standards for centuries were purely local, and varied both up and down considerably from the later A440 standard. Read an unbiased history with no axe to grind and you'll see.
I personally tune to A442, which works in most situations. Amateur fiddlers tend to tune to A440 and then play flat from that, so that can be a struggle. Symphonic violinists tune as high as A446, so that's a whole other adaptation. =========== Winslow
The Low E Seydel I just purchased for a customer seemed a bit sharp, it was probably at 443. I tuned it to harmonic minor, probably 442--tonic was at +8 cents . . .
Whether you are more psychologically susceptible to A=440 or A=432 depends on the exact construction of your tin foil hat! ;-)
Articles like the one in the link rely on just enough real science to make it seem plausible to a non scientist. Resonance is very real and very powerful. Resonance depends on the size of things, tubas resonate at lower frequencies than trumpets. People have resonant frequencies too, but they are not all the same. That is partly why favorite key to sing in is an individual thing.
Much more important that where you set A, is how you distribute the Pythagorean comma through the scale. We have names for the more common distributions, equal temperament, just intonation, well temperament (as in the "Well Tempered Clavier") etc. Harmonica players tend to be more familiar with temperaments than most other musicians. If you are interested in the real physics of music I highly recommend Ross Duffin's "How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care)" and John Powell's "How Music Works".
Last Edited by STME58 on Jan 08, 2016 1:57 AM
I showed this article to a blues/R&B bandleader (multiple IBC finalist) a few months ago and he started fooling around with A432 and liked it so much he now has his band tune down to A432. They sound GREAT. But they also sounded pretty damn good when they used to tune to A440. But I must say that A432 is very pleasant to the ear. Personally, my harps are tuned to A442, except my Eb, E and F which are tuned to A441. These tunings puts me in tune with a band tuned to A440 when I play. But I haven't sat in with my friend's band since they began to tune to A432, so I have no idea how I would sound with them.
Last Edited by hvyj on Jan 08, 2016 8:25 AM
I get asked by guitar players about tuning a harp or two to A=432Hz somewhat often. It's usually guitar players who ask.
One fellow told me he pulls out a particular acoustic guitar that he keeps tuned to 432 to perform a few songs as part of his sets.
My theory is that some instruments actually do sound better when tuned to a slightly different pitch. They resonate better and the difference is probably quite palpable to the player. I don't think there is a universal pitch that resonates with us humans one and all. But I do think there are lots of factors that can affect how an instrument sounds and change the pitch at which is resonates best.
Here's an interesting fellow talking about Chladni plates:
@Stevelegh -- It could possibly be a problem coming from the particular browser you may be using. ---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
No, I checked the second time to make sure the thread posted OK and that it wasn't my imagination. Funny thing is, the post is in no way controversial or even pithy. No idea what's up here...
if you entered the correct captcha, your post should not disappear. you used the secret handshake, that is there to prevent spam. it does not work. if i have a key to your car i can drive away. if i have the password to your bank account i can steal all your money. but if i eneter the correct code on this web site, it means nothing. your post will disappear faster tha a bottle of thunderbird on skid row. the spam filter on this site needs to go. it only seems to keep members that are in good standing here out! ---------- if you appreciate what you have... it becomes more.
Last Edited by 1847 on Jan 08, 2016 9:22 AM
I tuned my guitar down the other day. I don't want to suggest it was something special, although it did feel easier on the ear. Whilst I know that could just be relative to being attuned to A440, it was an interesting exercise.
Stevelegh, it's the spam filter, not us. After behaving a little better lately it seems to be back on the rampage with 3 yesterday and 6 today. If I remove or edit a post (and that's incredibly rare, you'd have to be making crude threats of physical violence or something) I'll add a post explaining my reasoning, and it would have to be so far beyond the pale that the user in question would also get a follow-up email separately.
1 0 1 4 2 1 1 0 0 1 0 3 3 1 2 3 6 (That's the running tally per day for the last couple weeks) ---------- Nate Facebook Thread Organizer (A list of all sorts of useful threads)
I recently moved a digital piano into my practice space and am a bit shocked at how far off some of the reeds are from they keyboard. I'm finding I need to bend a lot of notes down to match the intonation (find this on the diatonic too). The low notes of the chromatic in particular require major adjustments to my embouchure to be in tune with the keyboard. The 1 draw on my 16-hole feels ridiculously sharp compared to the keyboard (but is in tune with the 5 draw when played as an octave).
this stuff is just mystifying. I don't know if it's my embouchure, the harp is too sharp, or if this is just normal for harmonicas when compared to keyboard. I just want my notes to be in tune!!
sorry for thread jack!
---------- 4' 4+ 3' 2~~~ -Mike Ziemba Harmonica is Life!
Historically, there has been issues with pitch inflation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch
On Fibonacci's sequence, it is a very useful formula, but keep in mind that although it's relationship is an important constant, our definition of hertz is man made. Our seconds aren't a universal constant, just a convenient standard we've agreed on, and since frequency involves time vs. repetition if one of those two 'constants' is artificial then the whole thing is. In other words, 440 would be some other number if we varied the length of the second. That doesn't mean that doing Fibonacci things to it aren't fun or even useful, just that our starting points are artificial.
@slaphappy, most keyboards are tuned equal temperament so when playing along with a keyboard an ET harp will work best. Changing the temperament on a piano is a big job. There is no reason why a digital keyboard could not have a settable temperament, but I have not yet seen this on one. I'm not expert on keyboards though.
In a keyboard tuned ET, the key the song is transposed to will not change the feel of the music as much as it will with other temperaments. It the temperament has a perfect fifth between C and G, other fifths can not all be perfect. When you are playing in C major the tonic will be in tune but in other keys the tonic will be out of tune. This has a much larger effect on the character of the music than just a shift up and down in pitch. With ET no matter how you transpose it, all the chords are equally out of tune.
Now, to get back to the topic of the OP, which is the Nazis using musical pitch to change behavior, there is another theory you can find out there that says Nazis used fluoride to pacify prisoners, and that the real reason modern governments fluoridate water is to keep us all from fomenting revolution!
Last Edited by STME58 on Jan 09, 2016 12:33 AM
On first look, your comment on time being an arbitrary measure we've agreed on seemed reasonable, but didn't quite sit right with me so I did a few searches and I don't think its a stretch to say that the measurement of time was discovered and as we learn more about it we tweak and change our definition and understanding of it. Not trying to force a square peg into a round hole or anything, but this subject has piqued my interest.
Chromatics out of the box tend to be tuned quite high, which helps with pitch depression from player’s breath - you can always push the closing pitch of a reed down, but never up.
I recently ran across a chart where I plotted all the reeds of six new chromatic harps from Hohner, Suzuki, Bends, Seydel, and Hering. This was for a series of review articles for harmonicaessions.com. All were inconsistently tuned with individual reeds tuned anywhere from 442 to 447. =========== Winslow
@Stevelegh, I would say that the attributes of time are discovered, but the way we measure it is arbitrary. Just like distance. Two points on earth are the same distance apart whether we express it in feet, mm, miles or kilometers. We could arbitrarily use another unit of time to measure frequency and get different numbers to describe a given note. If I double my unit of time A=440 becomes A=880 but notes defined in these ways from the two systems will be the same. The relationship between octaves and fifth is not arbitrary and will be there no matter how you define the unit of time. An octave is a doubling of the frequency, a perfect fifth multiplying the frequency by 3/2. Two notes exactly an octave apart will sound in tune. If they are not quite an octave apart you will hear a beat frequency. The beat frequency will be numerically the number of frequency units one note is away from an exact doubling of the other. You could calculate the beat frequency using two different units for time, and the results would match when you converted them from one system of units to the other.
Last Edited by STME58 on Jan 09, 2016 10:33 AM
Stevelegh, the story is...sometimes the spam filter thinks your post is spam even though youve solved the capcha code...it puts these posts in a separate folder. every day Nacoran looks at said folder and reinstates the posts. when he does, they turn up exactly where they would have appeared if they hadnt been diverted. its been happening like this for quite a while. everyone hates it and the hosting service says they cant/wont do anything about it and the proprietor of this site refuses to change the platform for reasons best understood by him...so until the membership get annoyed enough to stop visiting and posting this is what we got. if someone was to set up an alternative site without all that crap and a nucleus of folks got it up and running maybe that would be bad news for this site, but maybe not because there are other reasons to come here besides the forum...i keep forgetting that
Superbee, the problem is inertia and expertise. Unfortunately we don't have a ton of expertise, and there are a lot of technical issues involved in migrating sites while keeping old posts (particularly from less mainstream forum software) and without disturbing the all important Google rankings. I've looked into what it would entail, and it's more than I can take on myself, even assuming we had a good migration plan in place. (I looked particularly at Simple Machines Forums, which has nice software). It would involve, at the very least, finding a new forum software (SMF would work) a new main forum software, a new hosting site (since the hosts here only use their proprietary blend) and dealing with the backend with Google to migrate the page rankings.
Why our hosts don't use SMF or one of the other free, open source software packages with a lot more features I'm not sure. I suspect it's got a lot to do with inertia on their end too.
