12tone
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2020–2022
10:00 · 270K views · Jan 11, 2019
12tone tells the story of pitch inflation and how concert A came to be standardized at 440 Hz, including attempts at legal standards. It is a short music history explainer.
HN recommends it as an interesting explanation of how concert pitch ended up at exactly 440 Hz.
3 comments from Hacker News
Lots of people here mentioning that concert pitch wasn't always A = 440 Hz. Here's an interesting 12tone video explaining how we ended up at exactly that: this video (Spoiler: It involves nothing less than the Treaty of Versailles.)
Putting aside that notes don't really have to be in tune to be notes, this is not where A=440hz originated. Correction: upon further research, this is where 440hz originated. However, it was not the original standard (or where musical notes come from), and I find the history interesting, so I'm going to post it anyway. Tuning used to be based off of whatever instrument was not easily tunable (the piano or organ), or some other instrument (oboe?) if there was none. For much of musical history tuning was significantly lower than A=440, albeit with a lot more variation; however, it tended to rise[0][1] in order to create a more brilliant-sounding timbre (particularly in larger venues), especially among instrumental pieces. This led to some contention, especially with vocalists who found the increasingly-high notes more and more difficult to sing. There were several efforts to readjust tuning to something more reasonable, but ultimately none of them worked for long. Frequency was actually orignically standardized in Article 282, section 22 of the Treaty of Versailles.[2] This may not make a lot of sense at initial glance, but when thinking about it as how good orchestras sound, it does make some sense as an economic policy This is where I originally messed up, though. The Treaty of Versailles references something else (which I don't have a link for), but which, per [1], standardizes to... 435hz. But again this crept up, and apparently the US and UK did some shenanigans with inter
I remember watching a video by a music theorist on YouTube (12Tone) where he mentioned that laws were made to define what Concert A would be - this video