According to Zucker, the Institute offered a bill in Italy to impose scientific notation on state-sponsored musicians that included provisions for fines and confiscation of all other tuning forks. The Schiller Institute initiative was opposed by opera singer Stefan Zucker.

The Institute's arguments for the notation included points about historical accuracy and references to Johannes Kepler's treatise on the movement of planetary masses. Even though Verdi tuning uses 432 Hz for A 4 and not 430.54, it is said by the Schiller Institute to be derived from the same mathematical basis: 256 Hz for middle C. The Institute called this pitch 'Verdi tuning' because of the connection to the famous composer. In 1988, Lyndon LaRouche's Schiller Institute initiated a campaign to establish scientific pitch as the classical music concert pitch standard. One solution he proposed was scientific pitch and he had little success. Later, he indicated that 432 Hz would be slightly better for orchestras. In 1874 he wrote his Requiem using the official French standard diapason normal pitch of A 4 tuned to 435 Hz. In the 19th century, Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi tried to stop the increase in pitch to which orchestras were tuned. The notion was revived periodically, including by mathematician Sir John Herschel and composer John Pyke Hullah in the mid-19th century, but never established as a standard. Sauveur's push to standardize a concert pitch was strongly resisted by the musicians with whom he was working, and the proposed standard was not adopted. In 1713, Sauveur changed his proposal to one based on C 4 set to 256 Hz this was later called 'philosophical pitch' or 'Sauveur pitch'. (Other contemporary researchers such as Christiaan Huygens, Vittorio Francesco Stancari and Brook Taylor were finding similar and lower values for A 4, as low as 383 Hz.) In 1701, Sauveur proposed that all musical pitches should be based on a son fixe (fixed sound), that is, one unspecified note set to 100 Hz, from which all others would be derived. He found several frequency values for A 4 as presented to him by musicians and their instruments, with A 4 ranging from 405 to 421 Hz. The French acoustic physicist Joseph Sauveur, a non-musician, researched musical pitches and determined their frequencies. However scientific tuning implies an equal temperament tuning where the frequency ratio between each half tone in the scale is the same, being the 12th root of 2 (a factor of approximately 1.059463), which is not a rational number: therefore in scientific pitch only the octaves of C have a frequency of a whole number in hertz.Ĭoncert tuning pitches tended to vary from group to group, and by the 17th century the pitches had been generally creeping upward (i.e., becoming ' sharper'). With a Verdi pitch standard of A 4 = 432 Hz = 2 4 × 3 3, in just tuning all octaves (factor 2), perfect fourths (factor 4:3) and fifths (factor 3:2) will have pitch frequencies of integer numbers, but not the major thirds (factor 5:4) nor major sixths (factor 5:3) which have a prime factor 5 in their ratios. Since 256 is a power of 2, only octaves (factor 2:1) and, in just tuning, higher-pitched perfect fifths (factor 3:2) of the scientific pitch standard will have a frequency of a convenient integer value. Instead of A above middle C (A 4) being set to the widely used standard of 440 Hz, scientific pitch assigns it a frequency of 430.54 Hz. The octaves of C remain a whole number in Hz all the way down to 1 Hz in both binary and decimal counting systems. Scientific pitch is not used by concert orchestras but is still sometimes favored in scientific writings for the convenience of all the octaves of C being an exact round number in the binary system when expressed in hertz (symbol Hz). It was first proposed in 1713 by French physicist Joseph Sauveur, promoted briefly by Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi in the 19th century, then advocated by the Schiller Institute beginning in the 1980s with reference to the composer, but naming a pitch slightly lower than Verdi's preferred 432 Hz for A, and making controversial claims regarding the effects of this pitch. Scientific pitch, also known as philosophical pitch, Sauveur pitch or Verdi tuning, is an absolute concert pitch standard which is based on middle C ( C 4) being set to 256 Hz rather than 261.62 Hz, making it approximately 37.6 cents lower than the common A440 pitch standard. Problems playing this file? See media help.

528 hz frequency tuning fork