Concert Pitch vs. Philosophical Pitch: Questioning the Foundation

I began to become interested in well-tempered tunings and early pitch standards back when I discovered Davitt Moroney's recording of J.S. Bach's Art of Fugue. His pitch standards and tunings are those of Bach - as closely as can be reconstructed - and the sound is so sublimely wonderful that listening to any other pitch standard and tuning has become something that grates on my nerves.

As a guitarist, there is nothing I can do to slide the frets around and get J.S. Bach's variant of the Kirnberger III tuning system, which is certainly designed around the Golden Mean, but tuning the guitar to the Philosophical Pitch of C= 256 Hz (A= 430.5 Hz), is a piece of cake. I had thought about doing that, but there were no A= 430.5 Hz tuning forks around, and my Lexicon's built-in tuner was set at A= 440 Hz, and there is no calibration adjustment for it. Besides, I had no rational compelling reason to lower my pitch standard. That all changed today.

As far as the tuning system is concerned, I am stuck with the guitar's admittedly compromised version of equal temperament (Guitar intonation is NEVER perfect - even by equal temperament standards - due to the fact that the different strings start out at their own set pitch and progress base-E, base-A, etc. individually through their own version of the temperament), but I had already solved that cosmic conundrum: Since I play electric nylon string the vast majority of the time, I simply apply 36% of pitch-shift chorus to every virtual acoustic environment that I program. Combined with the Hall Reverb and various phase, flange, and comb filter effects that I use, the inherant nastiness of equal temperament is nicely ameliorated (Not to mention that my sound is "awesome" according to many of my audience members).

But there is that A= 440 Hz "thing". I thought that the foundation of our tuning system was a convienience that simply didn't matter, but then I read this article and all that changed. I'm going to need to re-read it several times to internalize it all, but I got goosebumps reading it because I knew I'd discovered something profoundly fundamental to add to my musico-philosophical outlook. I suggest you read it and question everything: The only truth about "conventional wisdom" is that it's conventional, because it certainly isn't wisdom, or even the truth!

Turns out there is a cool little chromatic digital tuner that can callibrate the pitch A anywhere from 420 Hz to 460 Hz, and it's small enough and cheap enough that I can buy five of them and put one in each of my guitar cases and gig bags. Bingo. The guitar is inaccurate enough that 430 Hz versus 430.5 Hz isn't of any practical or practicable difference anyway. I love the results. It's impossible to explain, but the effect it has on me is that the instrument and the music "breathes" easier and just has an... indescribable "niceness" to it.

Good luck to all you pianists out there ;o).

UPDATE: "Heh", as Glen Reynolds would say.

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Via Scott Spiegelberg, whose blog is woth much more than my little backwater.