Currently many people play instruments where a=440Hz but some baroque flutes have a standard of 415Hz. Now Hertz replaced cycle per second in the 1930’s and I don’t know how long cycles per second was used before that. So I assume there must have been a different way of noting what the pitch was and how it was measured. The tuning fork seems to be a simple way of producing a standard pitch, but even that wasn’t invented until 1711.
When did standards of pitch begin, and how were they named and measured? What was the progression and development?
Usually instruments like the organ were simply tuned to whatever the builder fancied, just getting it in tune with itself. Same idea for consorts of recorders
One ancient Chinese pitch standard defined the pitch by the week in the year… guess how that worked?
This pdf about historical standard pitch may be of interest.
It appears that before using pitch defined by scientific frequency measurement (Hertz) the pitch of an instrument was simply noted as dimensions of the instrument, like pipe organ dimensions. Michael Praetorius ‘church pitch’ (choir tone) of 424Hz was derived from his own diagrams depicting an organ pipe, which illustrates his notion of the correct pitch of the choir tone. Published in his treatise about music Syntagma musicum in 1618 I believe. He was familiar with the organs used in North Germany’s churches. Google for ‘Praetorius pitch’.
Yes, interesting. In the absence of standardized weights and measures, the only way to portably convey a pitch standard would have been to carry a physical reproduction of a reference pipe, or a full-sized (or scaled) graphical representation of the pipe.
That was the rationale for the Chinese system. The idea was that you made flutes out of the base joint of a certain kind of bamboo. The pitch changed as it grew, but all plants grew at the same rate. So you specifed a standardized pitch by saying what time of year you harvested it.