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antiquesounds · 5 years

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A440. Not A435. Why?

I had a wonderful time looking through the original armistice and supporting document that showed that in 1919, the post-war European community and North America committed to 435 Hz for the standard Diapason Normal.

However, anyone who follows Western music knows that the current standard is 440 Hz. The next phase of this quest begins with the looking at some political impact of the Treaty of Versailles. Not only is what I am going to write, “arm-chair” history, it is also based a lot on my limited grade school training (may I say, ca 1970′s-biased) and based upon very small selected reading about the era of mid-late 19th and early 20th century geopolitics. And, as an amature affectionatto of comic art, a lot of what I see about U.S. posturing and waffelling during the early 20th century is based upon the wonderful political comics from the era. As my parents used to ask me when I was young, “How’d you know that?” And I’d point to the political cartoon from the paper that day.

Source Ohio State University - https://hti.osu.edu/opper/lesson-plans/wilsons-14-points/images/barring-his-way

Coincidentally, I heard a wonderful interview with an author that has just released a book on this subject in general. How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwar is on my to-read list. The book has more to do with territorial United States. But the general imperialist drive was as strong as ever post-war. Like a nasty big brother trying to take most of the cake after the fight was over, the political posturing inside and outside the U.S. was mostly to take and make itself more globally important and culturally powerful.

In the 1930′s (pre WWII), there is little argument that the United States delivered a global political posture of Imperialism - if not outright colonialism that had extended from the Spanish-American war through the Roosevelt era. A lot has been written about Wilsonian policies. You wouldn’t think this would have anything to do with concert performance standards in Europe post-war, but in fact, one of the most amazing things I learned while perusing the Treaty of Versaille is this entire section 2. Section 2- Article 282, has all of the kitchen sink items that the countries deemed necessary to settle once and for all. I liken this to being the part where the negotiators say to the parties, “And sirs, is there anything else you guys want to settle here once and for all?” Like a kid saying, “Yeah, and I wanted that candy, too!” So a whole bunch of interesting stuff came out of that list. I will share some of that later.

Deeper reading into the history of diapason normal debates going back to the 1855 treaty mentioned in the prior post taught me that this battle over both the creation of the “normal” and the value of the normal (435 versus 440, versus other frequencies) went way back prior to the 19th century especially in Europe (North America still being a western world social pariah in the 18th century.) So I can easily accept that this would be on the list of “wish we coulds” for the armistice of 1917. Now that I saw the context of the list of things included in that section, it became more obvious that it actually makes sense to have this in the treaty. I am a converted man on this subject now. I am not longer scratching my head about it being referenced here. “No more fighting, boys. We addressed all of your issues. Okay?” If you want to be shocked at how extreme this is, check out the actual list (see page 170)! Here it is:

So far, pretty mundane. Mostly agreed upon tolls and tariffs and an interesting standardization of railroads #4 (tracks and such if you look into it). I will note some things that put this into context and save the details for my next post on this subject. But #2 is REALLY cool. I will share more on this that later. Any reference to “motor-cars” piques my interest. Also note #1 which makes sense post-war. And we go on...

With 12-14 back to tolls and tariffs. Then come the SOCIAL ones. This is what is so interesting. Again, take this in context. The winning powers (big brothers) after the fight are now going to pick the things they get to enforce on the world (or at least for Europe for now). The war to end wars is supposed to stop the bickering and delivery all the rules on how to behave. This includes a new set of social norms. I keep saying this, and I will say it again. I will get back to a few of these specific items on why they seem so silly here, but were of huge geopolitical social importance in 1919. Amazingly, look at #15, 17-18, and 26 as progressive and at the same time regressive social rules. And then look at #16 (what is that about? Matches???) and 25, bird? and our favorite “Concert pitch”. It is like a kitchen sink of items. I assure you that when you look at these in detail, they each represent a longer term social issue that was unresolved. And, often, the issue was quite significant to the overall worldwide population.

But I digress. The diapason normal was 335 Hz in 1919. After this, there was a push to make a formal standard committee embrace this diapason normal under a different set of standards - literally. I found evidence that going into this battle in Europe, in the United States, there was a belief that “science” showed little difference between 435, 438 (the compromise proposed) and 440 (the German standard). Even in the United States, there is documentation that describes how some scientists wanted to leave well enough alone and leave it at 435.

However, between the wars, it seems that the United States and German did not participate in the 435 standard. The Acoustical Society of America decided that the standard should be 440. Why? I do not know. But by 1936, the Americans sided with the 440 and placed it into their standard. This does not make it diapason normal, though. So for what seems to be the time between 1936 (WWII) and 1955, the United States joined with Germany in continuing to use 440 as the tuning standard, while the treaty said it should be 435! I was surprised by this. Several documents point to this, but do not explain why The U.S. was so bull headed about this. If the research (and I dare say, common assumptions) would tell you that once established, nobody can tell the difference, then why did the U.S by themselves put it into their standards in 1936 (less than 20 years after Europe resolved the issue). I have no answer on this. I have a post facto answer/excuse that arrives after the next stage, but nothing as to why this was such a big deal to the U.S in 1936. There are conspiracy theories about this because of the German connection but those seem like they are contrived.

After WWII, the same push that drove the standardization post WWI happened again after WWII but as far as I can tell, there was no post-WWII declaration of standard pitch. However, there was a push again for the scientific community to come together on international standards. In 1947, the International Standards Organization was formed (ISO). Many people are familiar with ISO. It establishes, documents, and helps evolve standards for just about everything. I have had personal experiences with ISO over the years with data communication and quality standards. One example that everyone experiences daily is the ISO 9000 standard suite for quality.

The ISO came out of a drive in the post-war era to deliver a more generic solution to that problem described in the post WWI days. In other words, for those things that require universal standardization (like concert pitch?), we need an international organization to address this need. For example, if we want to standardize on household electrical power norms -- even if we cannot change our world-wide deployment (110 volts versus 220 volts for example), at least we need to document and define these differing standards so that the worldwide community can interoperate. I consider this to be more of a meta-level approach to solving the same issue that the Treaty of Versaille Section II, Article 282 tried to address. This is a guiding principle of the organization, and remains a lofty goal. In 1955 the 440 Hz standard was officially entered as ISO 16. I did not pull it because it costs money to see it but it is here: https://www.iso.org/standard/3601.html.

This still bugged me though, because why would they have taken the U.S. request for 440 over older established 435? And, does this mean that diapason normal is not the same as ISO 16? Well, frankly, I am not completely sure on the last point. I see no formal migration to the ISO standard although I do see a relinquishing of stature in some supporting texts from the era. It is fair to say that the world has conceded, but I still do not see where it did so with a revised diapason normal declaration. Here is a funny clip from The Acoustical Society of America as late as 1971 was lamenting that Europe still had not come around on this.

[Note that ISO reformalized ISO 16 as A440 Hz in 1977. A coincidence?]

So here is where I found the most useful reasoning behind the continuing push by the U.S. to make everything based upon 440 Hz. It is because of warfare and communications. This is the punchline to the whole thing.

I found out that starting way back around 1949 the U.S. government was looking at which frequencies were best for different broadcasting needs. Assuredly, these all had to do with military and espionage usage There is evidence that they believed 440 and 600 to be the best for delivery of communication tones (audible). It is not a huge leap to assume that this belief also drove a campaign to enforce the standard on the world. The organization to look at is NOT ISO but rather, NIST (U.S. National Institute of Standards.) And, in hindsight, this makes complete sense to me. NIST would drive all U.S. standards especially as pertains to radio broadcast and military.

Here is an example of such a document. I misplaced the one that originally capped my discovery. But this is a representative similar document. And this one, too.

In fact, to this day, there is a growing stack of documents that describe how and why 440 Hz is used as the standard for synchronization tones. It’s the tone that is used when we listen to NIST WWV timeclock at the top of the hour. The reason is that this tone is apparently what was believed to be the best (least-lossy) audible tone frequency.

So possibly, the push to deliver a hard 440 Hz standard had something to do with 1949 -1960 thoughts on best possible audible tone over radio. It sure seems that way. And it is definitely the common NIST mantra since 1960. See the end of this doc for oodles of examples:

https://tf.nist.gov/general/pdf/1969.pdf

One parting thought on the A440. While researching this I found a whole bunch of crackpot theories about A432 being some sort of universal vibration. A432 is just another of the possible frequencies one could choose as a standard. And, indeed it was in the mix of options over the centuries this has been fraught. If you wanted to tune to any frequency that you want, you could. Who gives a darn? And just because 432 was used by someone for some reasons long ago doesn’t necessarily mean that it is “better”. It is a fixed tone used to derive other relative tones in music. So it really doesn’t matter until or unless you get all freaky-deaky about the differences in relative microtones for western scales. And if you care that much, 432 doesn’t solve all of those issues anyway.

All I can say is that it made me feel a bit better about myself seeing that others are more nonsensical about their 432 Hz desires than I was about my historic research. I thought I was wasting MY time doing all of this research. But think of all the wasted energy surrounding this sort of notion and the other various conspiracy theories about various pitches being part of betterment of life.

Next post will be about those other amazing discoveries associated with The Treaty of Versailles. cars, birds, and sulphur matches up next. Those side discoveries were the best part of it all.

#A440 #A435 #Diapason #ConcertA440

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