[CAUT] temperature and pitch

Fred Sturm fssturm at unm.edu
Sat Dec 19 13:54:14 MST 2009


On Dec 19, 2009, at 10:24 AM, Jeff Tanner wrote:

>  And perhaps if that were the case, your pitch didn't move as much  
> as it would have otherwise.


That is certainly possible. I wasn't wanting to assert that this was  
an extraordinarily precise experiment (determining that 10F drop in  
temp = 2 cents rise in pitch), just that the observations I made were  
suggestive. I was more interested myself in the fact that the pitch  
changed in this case pretty much as a whole, without distortion across  
the scale. I would have expected more variance, say between plain and  
wound strings, or between long and short ones.
	What we need in order to learn something really solid, of course, is  
actual controlled experiments. But that takes more time and logistics  
than any of us have, I guess. Doing a truly controlled temperature  
change where other things like RH are kept constant isn't a simple  
matter. If that ability were available, it wouldn't take much work to  
do the observations. Maybe someone will be inspired to recruit a  
science or engineering class to investigate.
Regards,
Fred Sturm
University of New Mexico
fssturm at unm.edu







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