Pitch

Pitch, in music, highness or lowness of a musical sound, as determined by the rapidity of the vibrations producing it. Standards of exact pitch have varied over the centuries. During the Renaissance, woodwind instruments were usually built so that A above middle C was about 466 hertz (466 vibrations or cycles per second), that is, about a semitone higher than modern A. The pitches of organs varied widely, however (although this situation is complicated because some genres of church music were considered to be transposing, sounding at a different pitch from the written notation). Woodwind instrument builders during the late 17th century, using the pitch of Parisian organs, effectively set the standard for the following century at about A = 415, or about a semitone below modern pitch. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, wind instruments for use in bands and orchestras were built to increasingly higher pitch specifications, reaching about A = 452 (Old Philharmonic Pitch) by the mid-19th century. Various efforts were made to fix the standard of pitch, the most influential being that of a French commission of musicians and scientists who met in 1858-1859. This commission reported in favour of A = 435, the widely used French pitch. In 1887 this was formally adopted by the Vienna Congress, an international conference on pitch, and is now often called international pitch, or diapason normal. French pitch was not universally accepted, however, and Great Britain and the United States eventually adopted A = 440, which remains their standard pitch in the 21st century, despite some pressure to move it still further upwards.