* History of Pitch Standards

[Geoff Sykes]

I have placed on the Los Angeles PTG website two wonderful articles from the
1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition. The first is titled
"Pianoforte", and is pretty much a history of the piano starting with the
Pythagorean monochord, working its way through the introduction of iron into
the pianoforte, and then gradually working its way through to the Apollo
player piano in 1900. Lots of very detailed engravings and footnotes as well
as a full column of references. The article runs 16 pages.

The second article is titled "Musical Pitch". It starts by defining what
pitch actually means and includes a very good history on everything you ever
wanted to know about "A4" and its theoretical standard frequency. Includes a
number of tables documenting what pitch was used when, and who the authority
was. Also talks about what standards some piano manufactures chose. This
article runs 4 pages.

Both articles are available free for the download. The Encyclopedia
Britannica informed me that the entire edition is long out of copyright and
gladly gave me permission to share it. Both articles have been carefully
scanned at high print resolution, cleaned up and combined into a single .pdf
file, (Acrobat Reader), for convenience.

** Special dial-up warning ** This is a 20 Mb file and even with a high
speed DSL connection it takes close to 2 minutes to download.

To download, please visit: http://www.la-ptg.org/additionalResources/

-- Geoff Sykes
-- Assoc. Los Angeles



-----Original Message-----
From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf
Of ed440 at mindspring.com
Sent: Sunday, October 01, 2006 4:37 PM
To: pianotech at ptg.org
Subject: * History of Pitch Standards


For an extensive, interesting and easy to read paper on the history of pitch
standards, please see Ed Swenson's web site via the member web site page of
<ptg.org> If anyone knows of a better compendium of documented information,
please let us know. Ed Sutton