I think Cabbage has come the closest to an objective truth on this. I have noticed an apparent pitch flattening on recordings of pop songs which fade out at the end. I don't hear it on all that do, but I hear it consistently on the same songs.
Spike >Message: 10 Date: Mon, 30 May 2011 11:25:54 -0400 From:[email protected] Subject: Re: [Hornlist] Offstage brass To:[email protected] Message-ID:<[email protected]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" This has been an interesting discussion. Steve H is correct in pointing out the distinction between pitch and frequency. Frequency is how many oscillations per second there are in a sound; pitch is how high or low we perceive a sound to be. Musicians often use these terms as synonyms. However, there are times when sounds of the same frequency are perceived as having different pitch. One example is the old breathing helium stunt: some people say that the pitch of your voice gets higher, whereas what actually happens is that the high frequency harmonics are amplified at the expense of the low frequency harmonics. (The actual frequency of your voice is determined by how your vocal fold oscillate. That's not changed by the helium.) A second example is a loud and a soft sound of the same frequency are sometimes perceived as having different pitch. I notice this when I hear an organ play a loud chord followed by silence; as the loudness of the sound falls due to reverberation, I hear the pitch go slightly flatter. Studies have shown, however, that this effect is different with different people. It could be that the off-stage players need to retune to compensate for a similar psychological effect, but I couldn't say for sure. If I am standing off stage, and if I have to push in a tuning slide to play in tune, is it because 1. The orchestra sounds sharp, so I have to play sharper to compensate, or 2. I sound flat to the orchestra. I will point out that Hans, as an opera player, is accustomed to greater distances between the off-stage players and the orchestra than symphony musicians would be. Here's an experiment to show that the speed of sound does not change the frequency. Get a tuning fork, strike it, and hold it near your ear. Then hold the base of the tuning fork to your upper teeth. The frequency is the same, even though the sound goes through the air in the first case, and through the bones of your skull (at a much higher velocity) in the second case. Hope you sanitized the tuning fork first. Gotta go, Cabbage _______________________________________________ post: [email protected] unsubscribe or set options at https://pegasus.memphis.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/options/horn/archive%40jab.org
