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From: alves@calvin.usc.edu (William Alves)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: Transposing early music (was: Perfect Pitch)
Message-ID: <31234@usc>
Date: 21 Mar 91 00:37:55 GMT
References: <1991Mar19.082948.10987@athena.mit.edu> <3722@ssc-bee.ssc-vax.UUCP> <1991Mar20.154120.24561@eng.umd.edu>
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In article <1991Mar20.154120.24561@eng.umd.edu> tpermutt@eng.umd.edu (Thomas Permutt) writes:
>In article <3722@ssc-bee.ssc-vax.UUCP> carroll@ssc-vax.UUCP (Jeff Carroll) writes:
>>In article <1991Mar19.082948.10987@athena.mit.edu> jsc@riddler.MIT.EDU (Jin S Choi) writes:
>>
>>>the difference. A slightly more relevant case: many classical tapes are 
>>>recorded to play back at a slightly higher pitch than recorded. This is 

Deliberately? I've never heard of this. Do you know of any examples?
>>
>>	I believe that this does serious violence to the composer's music.
>
>What do you advocate doing about early music?  There is evidence that A
>in, say, Handel's time was lower than today (I can't remember how much,
>but more than a semitone).  

The theory that standard pitch has shifted slowly upward over the years is
an oft-repeated myth. There was no standard pitch in Handel's time, nor 
really until the twentieth century. Studies of pitch references from 17th,
18th, and 19th centuries have revealed that A could be as much as a minor
third sharp OR flat of 440. If you did take an average, it would probably
come out to about 440.

However, the point is well taken that how can you know if a transposition
does "violence" to a composer's work if it may originally have been per-
formed at a pitch level completely different from today's standard?

>Aside from the psychoacoustic subtleties
>you mention, there are real differences:  the sound of a tenor singing
>his highest note is quite a bit different from that of a note a semitone
>or two lower, and sensitive composers used these differences to good effect.

This is why I would not advocate transposing recordings. As anyone who has
sampled a voice will tell you, timbre, as well as pitch, changes signifi-
cantly as you transpose because of the corresponding transposition of the
formants of the voice. While this effect is less noticeable on instruments,
it can still change the quality of the sound quite a bit.

This is the same phenonmenon, in a much more subtle form of course, that
gave us the Chipmunks.

Bill Alves