Mondo Knows Facts
Some instruments sound at a different pitch from the notes written
A written C on a B flat clarinet comes out as B flat Transposing instruments let players switch between sizes of the same family without relearning fingerings. The score is written a fixed interval away from concert pitch so the same fingering gives the same note name. Conductors and arrangers must keep the intervals straight. 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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More facts like this
Do-re-mi traces back to an 11th-century monkGuido of Arezzo developed the four-line staff and sight-singing syllablesThe five line staff is a medieval inventionGuido d'Arezzo's teaching methods led to the notation still in useSonata form sets two ideas against each otherExposition, development and recapitulation is the usual patternA single note already contains a whole chordThe harmonic series stacks octave, fifth, fourth and third above the fundamentalA minor key lowers the thirdFlattening one note changes the whole emotional colour of a scaleYou must sample at least twice as fast as the highest noteBelow that rate, frequencies fold back and appear as false tones
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Tags: notation, instruments, theory
Some instruments sound at a different pitch from the notes written: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- A written C on a B flat clarinet comes out as B flat. 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.