I had never given any thought to A above middle C being fixed at 440Hz until I stumbled across this:
Sorry, we do not permit the following HTML tag or attribute: Parenthesis in HTML tag (look up Pitch at wikipedia.org)
440Hz seems like such an easy number to work with, along with 110, 220, 880, 1760 etc., but in today's digital age, putting C at 256 (a binary number) has a certain perfection to it. Have these changes created issues over the centuries and what do we do when nontunable instruments of antiquity are played in concert with modern instruments? I don't know if an oboe is tunable, but the article does mention that it was or is used as the standard by which to tune the orchestra.
<small>[ 12-30-2005, 09:29 PM: Message edited by: ai4i ]</small>