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Concert pitch is the pitch reference to which a group of musical instruments are tuned for a performance. Concert pitch may vary from ensemble to ensemble, and has varied widely over time. The ISO defines international standard pitch as A440 , setting 440 Hz as the frequency of the A above middle C .
The following year, Swinburne represented the Musical Association at a preliminary conference to determine the British stance on concert pitch. British piano tuners had adopted A439 as the standard in 1899, but Swinburne pointed out that 439 was a prime number, whereas 440 could be more easily factored and electronically synthesized.
Pitch is a perceptual property that allows sounds to be ordered on a frequency-related scale, [1] or more commonly, pitch is the quality that makes it possible to judge sounds as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies. [2] Pitch is a major auditory attribute of musical tones, along with duration, loudness, and timbre ...
Tuning is the process of adjusting the pitch of one or many tones from musical instruments to establish typical intervals between these tones. Tuning is usually based on a fixed reference, such as A = 440 Hz. The term "out of tune" refers to a pitch/tone that is either too high or too low in relation to a given reference pitch. While an ...
In vocal music, the term High C (sometimes called Top C [5]) can refer to either the soprano's C 6 (1046.502 Hz; c ′ ′ ′ in Helmholtz notation) or the tenor's C 5; soprano written as the C two ledger lines above the treble clef, with the tenor voice the space above concert A, sung an octave lower. Sometimes written with “8v” below the ...
In instrumental music, a style of playing that imitates the way the human voice might express the music, with a measured tempo and flexible legato. cantilena a vocal melody or instrumental passage in a smooth, lyrical style canto Chorus; choral; chant cantus mensuratus or cantus figuratus (Lat.) Meaning respectively "measured song" or "figured ...
Scientific pitch notation is often used to specify the range of an instrument. It provides an unambiguous means of identifying a note in terms of textual notation rather than frequency, while at the same time avoiding the transposition conventions that are used in writing the music for instruments such as the clarinet and guitar.
An example, is the different concert pitches used by orchestras playing music from different styles (a baroque orchestra using period instruments might decide to use a higher-tuned pitch). Compound intervals (intervals greater than an octave) can be more difficult to detect than simple intervals (intervals less than an octave).