What’s A

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1:04Almost every classical music concert I've been to begins with this particular ritual. First the lights go down. Then the audience gets quiet. The first violinist walks out. And then? Before we hear the piece that we've come to listen to, we attend this kind of weird performance of listening to someone giving a note. This is Fanny Grabensky, a music historian, and this note is an A note. So the instrument that usually gives this note is the oboe. and then all of the other instruments will pick this note to tune to it. So first the violins and then other string instruments and then wind instruments.

1:59And then you get this sort of cacophony of this attempt to get in tune with one another. It's become so usual that we don't even pay attention to it.

2:18We often think of musical notes as just existing, like an A note as a certain pitch that's intrinsic to nature. We don't even question it. But Fanny did. She wrote a whole book about it called Tuning the World. And she loves this oboe example because it shows, in real time, how in order to play music, a bunch of people need to agree to a standard. They need to agree on what an A note is. Turns out, that's really hard to do. This is Unexplainable. I'm Emily Seiner. And today on the show, what the difference between this and this can teach us about how scientific standards come to be, and how they fall apart.

3:16You don't have to be a tuba to know that the most normie, most common Western musical scale, a major scale, has seven notes. You've got your do, your re, your mi, your fa, and so on. This story is about la, a.k.a. a. Today, there's a universal standard for an A note. It's 440 hertz, or a note that creates 440 vibrations per second. But it hasn't always been that way. Like, say you're playing in a church in Europe in the early 1600s. This is before the invention of the tuning fork. People were just starting to talk about the existence of sound waves. So when you played music, you just had to figure it out for yourself.

3:56You would tune to whatever instrument in the room was the hardest to tune on its own. And oftentimes, the least flexible of all instruments will be the organ.

4:10You know, if you want to tune an organ, you have to change the length of the pipes. And so that's not something that anyone can do, right? You have to be an organ builder to do that. Plus, the organs pitched that day would depend on whether it rained or whether it was hot or cold. Which means the pitches varied a lot. According to music historians, a city in northern France in the year 1700 may have played an A note like this. That's 374 hertz, whereas a city in southern France might have played it at 563 hertz. For comparison, 440 hertz today's standard is this. Even into the 1800s, the city of Paris alone had at least six different tuning standards, depending on which opera house or which orchestra you were playing with.

5:05But by this time, France had reformed itself after the French Revolution. It no longer had a king appointed by God. It had a government ruled by rationalism, goddammit. So why couldn't it create a rational standard for things that had previously been haphazard? Of course, the metric system is an invention of the revolution. And so one of the first scientists who proposes the adoption of a standard pitch and indeed one of the first voices to really articulate the idea that the nation should have something similar to the meter for music is a scientist who explicitly references the metric system.

5:45Fanny says it was the first time that the conversation about pitch standards really took off, and people were very anxious about it. The moment when people have to decide, you know, what is our common, what is our shared, you know, point of departure to perform music, it has very deep implications, right? And it's a very antagonizing question. Like, what should our starting point be? And on what principles should we establish these starting points?

6:19Here's what makes musical standards so antagonizing. Music is not just scientific. It's not just about picking a number that seems the most rational. It's also aesthetic. A slightly lower pitch makes it easier for a singer to access high notes. A slightly higher pitch might make a wind instrument ring out a little more. Like, opera singers will complain that makers of brass instruments, for instance, are trying to, you know, raise the pitch because it makes their instruments sound better. And even that, you know, without even discussing what the frequency should be, but what is the sort of philosophy that should guide this decision, this is incredibly controversial.

7:08All of this coincided with a cultural shift. In the mid-1800s, people were starting to embrace historical music. Like stuff written by those guys we think of today as the greats. You know, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven. The classical world today features a lot of music written by dead people. But this actually wasn't always the case. Fanny says up until that point, musicians mostly performed new stuff. And so when this sort of modern relationship to music started to emerge, they started noticing that when they performed music that had been written, say, you know, 50 years ago, they started noticing these discrepancies between what would have been the pitch at which they were performed in the past and the pitch of the instruments that were around at their time.

7:57And as Fanny describes it, they were all extremely anxious that the pitch would continue to rise until everything the masters of classical had written was out of reach. So one sort of interesting example in that regard is a very famous aria in the history of classical music is the Queen of the Knights aria in the Magic Flute.

8:26I can't really sing it, but maybe you can play it on the podcast. I was going to ask you to sing it, so thank you for clarifying me. You don't want to.

8:40And so people were quoting that as an example of saying, these are the extreme, you know, the most extremely high pitches that a human voice can produce. And if the pitch rises, we will never be able to perform this opera again. Like, what are we going to do if our standards of performance do no longer accommodate musics from the past that have become increasingly valuable? I mean, was this anxiety true? Like, do you think it's true that it would have led at some point to pitches being just so high that entire canons of music were out of reach? Well, the sort of surprising thing in these debates is the idea that, you know, pitch was this sort of autonomous phenomenon that was, you know, rising on its own, like as if, again, it was some sort of thing that people had to try and keep under control, where in fact, you know, there were discrepancies between different musical scenes.

9:38And in some places, pitch was not rising at all. Whether or not it was true didn't matter in the end. this anxiety settled the debate. When the French government convened a commission to decide what is an A note, they set it at 435 hertz. It was lower than what many places in Paris had been doing. But all the better to sing the classics.

10:13For a while, this French standard, A435, seemed to be gaining traction. It spread across Europe and then the United States. At the Boston Music Hall in 1869, there was even a concert to unveil the French pitch, where the audience would get to hear all the musicians tuning down their instruments before the program started, which is so incredibly nerdy. Were everyday people interested in this, or was it really just like the heads of orchestras and the instrument makers and kind of like the elites of the music world? Well, I think it's not clear to me that it's always something that people could actually experience.

10:51But because, you know, it was talked about, they could read about these debates in newspapers, because sometimes there were, you know, concerts where pitch was staged as a controversial question. Pitch became this thing that people started to pay attention to. And, you know, people start to cultivate this idea that, you know, pitch is something that is very important and defining for musical aesthetics, whether they, you know, really hear it or not. So it almost becomes like, because we're having a conversation about it, people notice it more, people place more importance on it, and then we have more of a conversation about it.

11:32Exactly.

11:36And this could be where the story ended. If French standard pitch had really taken off, we'd all be singing our favorite songs ever so slightly lower. But it turns out, making a musical standard stick is even harder than deciding on one in the first place. You know, when a standardization process succeeds, it pretty much means that we forget about it. There is no question. It's an accepted kind of social item, right? Take standards around time. We've decided that a standard day has two halves of 12 hours each. We've all accepted. That's the way we do it. And even if you're a real contrarian and want to divide the day into multiples of nine, you're kind of on your own.

12:20You buy a clock, it has 12 numbers on it. But music is different. Because when you set a standard pitch, you need to convince the people playing the music to tune their instruments to your standard every single time. With music, you always need the collaboration of musicians, right? Like, music is not something that stands out there, ready to be grabbed at any point. It's something that only exists in its performance. And so maybe it's not surprising what happened next.

12:54Outside of France, people kept messing around with other standards. The British were getting into playing an A note at 439 hertz. And in America, this one guy named John Deegan became obsessed with a pitch that is ever so slightly higher, 440. I want to play for a second the difference between 435 hertz, 439, and 440. If you're not really paying attention, you don't even hear it.

13:35So how does that happen? How do you supersede a standard with something that's almost but not exactly the same. The history of this change between the two standards is very much a history of the new dominance of the United States and popular music in the debates.

13:55In the 1800s, France had been an epicenter of arts and science. Opera was the cultural force. But by the 1900s, that changed. Now popular modern music was made in America. Vaudeville, jazz, scoring for movies like this very fun Disney cartoon from 1929 featuring Mickey Mouse in a haunted house. The focus was less about the operatic voice and more on percussion instruments. And this guy Deacon, he was a percussion maker. He made bells and xylophones and marimbas, all of which produce a pitch. And they're also harder to tune than, like, a violin. So it's more likely that a musician playing it would just accept whatever pitch it comes with.

14:44Fanny did extensive research on Deegan for her book. And even she isn't entirely sure why he was obsessed with 440 hertz. He made a lot of arguments about it, like how acoustics work, and he even claimed that Beethoven favored the pitch. But Fannie has a slightly more mercenary theory. Remember, Deacon was a businessman who sold instruments tuned to a certain pitch. I mean, if he was able to convince American practitioners that the standard that should be used was not a European standard, but an American standard, in other words, his own standard, then it was also a way of closing the market to his competitors, right?

15:25And he did. Deakin convinced the American Federation of Musicians to adopt this new standard. So did the Piano Manufacturers Association, the American Guild of Organists, the Music Teachers National Association. Like an orchestra tuning against an oboe, all the official music organizations fell in line. A440 was the American way. We know now how hard it is to get a bunch of people on board with the musical standard. So this was pretty remarkable. But something even more unlikely happened later, when a bunch of enemy countries came together on the eve of World War II to decide whether to adopt the American standard.

16:08That's coming up after the break.

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19:11What are you listening to? I'm locking in my starting note. Hey, 440. Oh, sweet. You really can't talk about the history of pitch standards without talking about, of all things, World War II. May 1939, right before, you know, the world is falling into this major conflict, you see all of these representatives from, you know, Germany, England, France, Netherlands, Italy. All these European countries come together for a conference about pitch standardization because the U.S. was full steam ahead on A440. Should they do it too? The main institution that's very instrumental in bringing this agreement to sort of a final point is the BBC.

20:01and around the table are all these radio engineers from various European countries who are actually trying to get in tune with the United States. Imagine the scene, if you will, at the BBC headquarters in London. Representatives from all these countries are sitting around the table, talking music. In September, England will declare war on Germany. The next spring, the Nazis will invade the Netherlands. Italy will declare war on France. But here all of them are in May, trying to find some harmony. Yeah, I mean, it just seems so unusual that all these countries that are about to fight each other would come together on the eve of a world war to discuss, you know, musical frequencies.

20:45Right. Why do you think they did it? So the conference is opened by the head of the BBC at the time, who gives this very, very political, very emotional speech. He's talking about the fact that in an age of discord, at a time of political tension, the work of broadcasters who are trying to unite essentially like European soundscapes is very important and very key in trying to prevent what people are increasingly aware that is going to happen. There is this idea that, you know, if we can create a community of listeners that are united by common musical tastes, a common experience, this will help foster peace.

21:37Wow. And of course, you know, they failed, obviously. Yeah. I mean, that's so sweet. That's so, like, lovely to think about. But also, part of me is like, who made these guys the king of music? Like, why do they get to decide what everyone in the Western world experiences? It's a really good question. And I think the answer is, you know, technological power, if you want. I mean, these are the people who know about, you know, controlling wavelengths, who have the sort of infrastructure to govern frequencies. And it's this moment of empowerment of the broadcasting world in the negotiations has to do with sort of a redefinition of sound as this electroacoustic phenomenon.

22:29Things shift to the benefit of, you know, engineers and this side of the industry. It's like they were the tech bros of the interwar period. Pretty much. When the tech bros emerged from the BBC headquarters in 1939, they had not figured out world peace. But they did figure out something. They announced to the world all of Europe would now match the United States. 440 hertz was now the standard. And yet. Let's tune my violin down to 432, see if you notice, see how I feel, see how you feel. We actually believe that 440 hertz is just not in sync with our bodies. Modern music is tuned to a 440 hertz distortion frequency that is meant to scramble coherence.

23:17Today, if you Google, what is an A note? You'll get the answer that the tech bros came up with in 1939. 440 hertz. If you buy a digital tuner, it will use the standard. But for something that's now supposed to be universal, I've been surprised to find how many examples there are of musicians not using it. Like, there's a whole YouTube channel that just takes pop music that wasn't recorded in A440 and repitches it so that it's easier to play along with at home.

23:50Some classical ensembles today intentionally play in much lower tunings, because that's how they think it was written way back in the day. And then there are the conspiracy theories. A440 might be this, you know, Nazi standard. Yeah, Hitler is the one that definitely used the 440 frequency. He had a certain tempo and mannerism and things to do with that, but he also used the 440 frequency. The standard that, you know, is harmful is something that has been created to, you know, manipulate the bodies of audiences or to harm the bodies of listeners. People reported an increase of negative mood after listening to music tuned to 440 hertz.

24:32One particularly confusing theory I saw online blamed the Rothschilds, the Jewish banking family, which is a notorious anti-Semitic trope, and also said that the Rothschilds were funding Nazi officials in promoting 440 Hertz, which doesn't even make sense because the Nazis hated Jews. Anyway, just to recap, people from the Nazi government were at the table in 1939, but it was actually the British who led the charge, and they were just agreeing to what the American music industry had already decided. At no point in Fanny's extensive research did she find anything about a desire to inflict bodily or societal harm.