Mondo Knows Facts
Warm air makes instruments play sharp
Sound travels faster as temperature rises, lifting the pitch of wind instruments The speed of sound in air rises by roughly 0.6 metres a second per degree Celsius. Orchestras therefore warm up and retune on stage rather than in a cold room. String instruments drift the other way as their wood expands. It sits in Mondo's music collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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Musicians tune by listening for beatsTwo nearly matched frequencies produce a slow throb that stops when they agreeOrchestras tune to A at 440 hertz by international agreementThe standard was agreed in London in 1939Orchestras tune to A at 440 hertzThat number was agreed internationally only in the twentieth centuryEqual temperament divides the octave into twelve equal stepsEach semitone multiplies frequency by the twelfth root of twoTwelve pure fifths overshoot seven octavesThe gap is called the Pythagorean comma, about 23 centsA guitar is tuned mostly in fourthsE, A, D and G are fourths apart, with a third gap before B
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Tags: acoustics, temperature, tuning
Warm air makes instruments play sharp: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Sound travels faster as temperature rises, lifting the pitch of wind instruments. The figure is taken from Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a music fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Music shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.