[78-L] What key is that in?

[Malcolm Rockwell]

All well and good if you have an instrument in front of you. I taught 
myself to figure out keys by relating what I'm hearing to the resonant 
frequency of my chest (C below A440). That never changes. Kinda. When I 
smoked it was almost a whole tone (B flat) below what it is now that 
I've been off tobacco for around 20 years. The interval between me and 
the source I am listening to tells me what key a piece is in. It used to 
be called "ear training."
Concert orchestras and other musicians generally tune to a standard 
tone. Currently it's A440, but it was not always so. Around the turn of 
the 20th century there were (at least) three standard pitches. The bitch 
is that instruments were manufactured to center around any one of the 
three standard pitches and the reason many of the concert orchestras 
sounded out of tune is... they were! Mixing an instrument manufactured 
to an A440 standard with another set at A426 makes for interesting 
unisons. You can tune each instrument somewhat to make up for this but 
nothing changes the lengths of the piping on a trumpet - that is a 
physical fact. The scales will be slightly off pitch, even with movable 
fittings on the instrument to adjust for that.
Pianos have it even worse. They're out of tune (tempered tuning) to 
begin with. One reason it's done is so a G flat major scale will sound 
almost as good as a C major scale when played. And it's why each key on 
a piano has its own "personality." Another reason is psycho-acoustic and 
takes into account that the ear hears low notes slightly flat the lower 
the note is and slightly sharp the further up the scale one goes (I 
think that's right, I could be mistaken and it might be the other way 
around. It's been awhile since I've delved into this topic) and the 
tuner adjusts the pitch accordingly. Thus the scale is "tempered."
What I was describing is a digital tool that transfer and/or restoration 
engineers could use while transferring discs to a digital format. 
Sometimes we're talking microtones off pitch here (fractions of a tone) 
and others, well the sky's the limit. I have a recording that was made 
on a field trip in 1928. There was something wrong with the lathe set up 
because the piece not only began in one key and ended in another 
(without any key change in the tune), it was all over the place during 
the tune. How it ever got released is anybody's guess. Cleaning it up 
would be a nightmare.
Malcolm

*******

On 6/8/2014 2:16 PM, Mark Bardenwerper wrote:
> On 6/8/2014 5:59 PM, Malcolm Rockwell wrote:
>> It just occurred to me... how come there isn't an app or a plug-in for
>> Audacity (or any other audio file modifying software) that determines
>> the pitch of a file? I'd think doing a quick average of the first few
>> seconds could determine the key that the start of the piece is in. Then
>> there might be an option that would allow the listener to shift the
>> records pitch digitally to raise or lower it so it's in tune to a set
>> pitch (like A440).
>> Another neat trick would be having the ability to show key changes
>> within a piece. Maybe like this Part 1 = C; Part 2 = G; Part 3 (1) = C;
>> Part 4 = Am; Part 5 (1) = C, and so forth. Note that in my example Parts
>> 1, 3, and 5 have the same key and melody.
>> Just a thought.
>> Malcolm
>> _______________________________________________
>>
> Found this. What do you think?
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bQouq9a_CA
>