Sound Your "A"

The "standard yardstick" of music, to which instruments are tuned, is the "true A": a note with 440 vibrations a second. Musicians have now acquired an accurate, electronic gadget for sounding their "A."

When a symphony orchestra tunes up, it traditionally takes A from the oboe. But the oboe's bleat is too feeble to be heard above a blitz of tuning. Its A, though the truest available, does not always sound the same. It may be affected by variations in the temperature, the humidity, the reed --or the oboe player.*

It took a good musician and a good electronics man to improve on the oboe's A. Just such a combination is Norman Pickering of Oceanside, Long Island, whose main business is manufacturing electric pickups for record-players. As a musician, Pickering has played the French horn in leading orchestras.

Conductor George Szell of the Cleveland Orchestra first got him interested in the A problem. What orchestras needed for tuning purposes, Pickering decided, was a pure, unvarying note with no overtones. No ordinary loudspeaker (and no musical instrument) emits pure tones: what comes out is a mixture of dominant tone and any number of overtones.

Pickering designed a special loudspeaker which would give a pure tone when fed an electric current pulsing at A-frequency (440 cycles a second). He sealed in a vacuum a carefully compensated tuning fork that is kept vibrating electrically. An amplifying circuit picks up the vibrations, feeds them to the loudspeaker. The result: a loud, true A. It is not a very musical sound, for it lacks softening overtones, but it is accurate to one one-hundred-thousandth of a cycle.

The Cleveland Orchestra has been using the electronic A for nine months and the musicians are delighted with it. Recently Pickering delivered a portable model to New York's Metropolitan Opera. The Met's orchestra will use it in the pit; can take it on tour--regardless of its oboeists.

*A musicians' legend: all oboeists eventually go crazy. Their instrument has been defined (by Comedian Danny Kaye) as "an ill wind which nobody blows good."

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