legends · 4 min read ·
Pitch Log
A piano tuner finds the same unplayable pitch in forty houses on one street, and a gap exactly one voice wide.
**Halloran Piano Services — Tuner's Visit Log (Arthur Halloran, tuner-technician)**
*Entries record: address, instrument, pitch before/after (A4 in Hz), condition, notes.*
· · ·
**3 Sept · 4 Harbour Row · Upright (Kemble, 1962)**
Pitch before: 437.5. After: 440.0. Condition: fair, one cracked pin block. Tuned. All keys level.
Note: customer plays hymns on Sundays. Offered a biscuit.
**5 Sept · 11 Harbour Row · Upright (Challen, 1975)**
Pitch before: 435. After: 440.0. Condition: good.
**8 Sept · 17 Harbour Row · Baby grand (Broadwood, 1938)**
Pitch before: 439. After: 440.0. Condition: very good. A real pleasure.
· · ·
**11 Sept · 21 Harbour Row · Upright (Eavestaff, 1955)**
Pitch before: 440.0. After: 440.0.
**Note:** The piano was already at pitch. Every string within one cent. I tuned from habit. In the middle of the keyboard, between E4 and F4, the string for F#4 sounded a fraction flat against its octaves. I corrected it, and it flattened again, slowly, as I watched, like a spirit level settling.
A pitch that returns to flat by itself is a pin that has slipped. I checked the pin. It was tight. I checked the string. It was sound.
I noticed that the note that was flat was not F#4. When I played it against a reference fork, the note on the keyboard sounded a pitch that is not in the equal-tempered scale. About 38 cents above E, which is nothing. It was a pitch between the notes.
· · ·
**12 Sept · 25 Harbour Row · Upright (Knight, 1971)**
Pitch before: 440. After: 440. Same note. Same drift. A string that settles to a pitch that is in no scale. Customer says it has always done that.
**14 Sept · 29 Harbour Row · Upright (unknown, c. 1930)**
Same.
· · ·
**Visit log, 16 September**
I am a tuner, not a physicist. I recorded the note at all six houses and fed the files to a spectrum analyser at the college. The result: in each of the six, the odd string settles to the same frequency, 329.63 Hz + 38 cents, a value that falls on no scale I know.
I asked my friend at the college whether the six pianos might share a common cause. A seismic vibration, a resonance, a standing wave in the street. He said any such thing would show up in the other strings. It did not. Only one string in each piano had it.
I asked him what the frequency was. He said: "It's close to the lowest frequency a human can say a vowel on without voicing it."
· · ·
**Visit log, 20 September**
I walked Harbour Row with a pitch meter. I stood outside each house with my meter held to the wall. At every house on the row, from No. 1 to No. 40, the meter picks up the same note at the same pitch. It comes through the brick. It comes from the pianos. It also comes from the pavement, and from the sea wall, and from the iron railings. It is not a sound. It is a pitch the street is sitting at.
I tuned my own piano that night. The string drifted to the pitch before I had put away the lever.
· · ·
**Visit log, 4 October**
I have stopped tuning in Harbour Row. I explained to my customers that it was a question of the humidity. Mrs. Voss at No. 17 said she preferred the piano as it was. She said the note was the only one that sounded right. She played it for me, once. A long gentle tone, with a beat in it, like breathing.
I sat in her front room for a minute, and I understood what it was. It was not off. It was the note the rest of the scale was tuned to avoid.
· · ·
**Visit log, 30 October**
At the end of the month I returned to Harbour Row to take final readings. All forty pianos are playing the note, softly, without being touched. Each of them has the string in the middle of the keyboard vibrating at the pitch, a long low tone, and under it, in the case of each instrument, very faintly, the others.
It is a chord I have never heard on a keyboard. It is sung. It is forty houses long. At the end of the row, at the sea wall, there is a gap in the chord the exact size of one voice, and I have been standing in it since I arrived.
I have switched off the meter. I am humming the pitch.