What’s A

Summary

---

Podcast Summary: Unexplainable – "What’s A"

Date: September 24, 2025
Host: Emily Siner (Vox)
Featured Guest: Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian, Author of Tuning the World)

---

Overview

This episode of Unexplainable explores the surprising history and controversy behind the musical note "A" and its journey to becoming the global standard of 440 Hz. Host Emily Siner and music historian Fanny Grebensky dive deep into how scientific, aesthetic, and cultural considerations created, fractured, and continue to challenge this "universal" standard. The episode uses the story of “A” to illuminate how scientific standards are created, the messy human parts of standardization, and why the quest for harmony is rarely as perfect as it seems.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Ritual of the “A” Note

• Opening Scene: Emily Siner describes the familiar concert ritual where the oboe plays an “A” for the orchestra to tune to.
• Fanny Grebensky: Unpacks how this ritual represents musicians’ need to agree on a starting point.

  “All of the other instruments will pick this note to tune to it... It's become so usual that we don't even pay attention to it.” — Fanny Grebensky (01:48)

---

Early Chaos: Pitch Without Standards

• Historical Context:
  • Before universal pitch, musicians tuned to the most inflexible instrument available, often the organ, which would change pitch with humidity or temperature.
  • Wildly different pitch standards existed—even within a single country or city.
  • Example: In 1700 France, “A” could be 374 Hz in the north and 563 Hz in the south, compared to today’s 440 Hz (04:29).
• Historical Consequences:
  • This disunity led to chaos, confusion, and rising anxiety among musicians, especially as music traveled and older works became revered.

---

The Drive for Rational Standardization

• French Revolution’s Rationalism:

  • The spread of the metric system influenced the push for a standardized pitch.
  • Fanny highlights how the first attempts mirrored national pursuits for measurement and order:

    “One of the first scientists who proposes the adoption of a standard... explicitly references the metric system.” — Fanny Grebensky (05:28)

• Tension Between Science and Aesthetics:

  • Standardizing pitch was about more than physics—it had major implications for performance and aesthetic tradition.

    “It’s a very antagonizing question... what should our starting point be? And on what principles should we establish this starting point?” — Fanny Grebensky (06:00)

  • Changes in pitch made some music unplayable or extremely difficult, driving anxiety about losing the “canons” of classical music (08:05).

---

The First Attempts at Standardization

• France Sets A435:
  • In the 19th century, France set "A" at 435 Hz. This “French standard” spread but didn’t stick everywhere.
  • Fanny notes how the mere discussion of pitch made people more aware and invested in the matter, even if most couldn’t discern the difference in practice (10:53, 11:31).

---

Why Musical Standards Are So Slippery

• The Need for Human Buy-In:

  • Unlike the clock or metric system, pitch can’t just be imposed; every musician must continually choose to tune to it.

    “With music, you always need the collaboration of musicians, right? Like, music is not something that stands out there ready to be grabbed at any point... it only exists in its performance.” — Fanny Grebensky (12:41)

• Rise of Competing Standards:

  • America and Britain introduced their own standards (439 Hz, 440 Hz), often for practical or commercial reasons.
  • Percussion maker John Deegan in the US lobbied for A440—possibly to corner the instrument market.

    “If he was able to convince American practitioners that the standard...should be his own standard, then it was also a way of closing the market to his competitors.” — Fanny Grebensky (15:14)

---

The American Standard and Global Adoption

• A440 Takes Over:
  • American musicians, instrument makers, and organizations adopted A440.
  • The US set a new global trend, dovetailing with the country’s rising influence in music and culture.

---

World War II: The Unexpected Standard-Setting Summit

• European Conference, May 1939:

  • Representatives from soon-to-be warring nations (Germany, England, France, Italy, Netherlands) met at the BBC to unify pitch standards.
  • Strikingly, their aim was to foster unity in a tense, fractured Europe:

    “There is this idea that if we can create a community of listeners... this will help foster peace. Wow. And of course, they failed, obviously.” — Fanny Grebensky (21:14)

  • In the end, Europe agreed to follow A440—the American standard.

• Technological and Political Power:

  • The “tech bros” of the BBC—engineers and broadcasters—wielded increasing influence as music shifted into the electroacoustic era (22:22).

---

Is Standardization Final?

• Persistent Resistance & Modern Debates:

  • Despite global adoption, A440 is far from absolute:
    • Musicians routinely use tunings like A432 for historical ensembles.
    • Online communities and conspiracy theorists claim A440 is unnatural, or even sinister, sometimes invoking anti-Semitic tropes (24:27).
  • Fanny and Emily dispel these myths, clarifying the real, mundane, and political motivations behind the standard.

• The Nature of Musical Standards:

  “Standards are created for people to, you know, to mess around with them essentially. Like there is no standard that is like strictly be adapted and just enforced as is.” — Fanny Grebensky (26:07)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Pitch Anxieties:

  “If the pitch rises, we will never be able to perform this opera again. What are we going to do if our standards of performance do no longer accommodate musics from the past that have become increasingly valuable?” — Fanny Grebensky (08:48)

• On the Collusion of Technology and Culture:

  “It’s a really good question, and I think the answer is technological power...these are the people who know about controlling wavelengths, who have this sort of infrastructure to govern frequencies. And this moment of empowerment of the broadcasting world...has to do with a redefinition of sound.” — Fanny Grebensky (22:22)

• Summing Up Standardization:

  “Fanny’s hot take after all her research is that standard pitch doesn’t really matter because there’s no performance in which every note is played exactly in tune anyway. The pitch itself can fluctuate as the room warms up or if someone goes out of tune, music is just too fluid to standardize.” — Emily Siner (26:20)

---

Timestamps of Key Segments

• 01:12 – The concert ritual of tuning with the “A”
• 04:29 – Historical chaos in pitch standards
• 05:28 – The metric system and France’s first pitch standardization efforts
• 08:05 – The anxiety over rising pitch and “losing” classical music
• 10:53 – How public conversation raised the profile of pitch standards
• 12:41 – Why musical standards are hard to enforce
• 15:14 – John Deegan and American commercial motivations for A440
• 19:45 – The pre-WWII BBC pitch conference
• 21:14 – The utopian hope and realpolitik of the 1939 pitch conference
• 22:22 – The role of technological power in setting the standard
• 24:27 – Modern debates, alternative tunings, and conspiracy theories
• 26:07 – The enduring fluidity of musical standards

---

Conclusion: Standards Ask Us to Harmonize—Not to Conform

Emily Siner concludes that even the most “universal” standards in music, like A440, are ultimately negotiated moments of temporary agreement—less about cold, fixed truths and more about consensus, practicality, and human messiness. The opening A in a concert isn’t a metaphysical decree: it’s a gentle, communal starting point for making music together—just for that moment, just for that room.

---

Transcript

[Podcast Host (Sponsor Reads)]

Support for Unexplainable comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. You know those questions that keep you up at night, the ones that make you fall down rabbit holes until 2am Claude is an AI that can help you if you want to dive deeper instead of rushing to surface level answers. You can use Claude to help work through the complexity. You can upload documents, you can search the web, and you can explore different angles on problems that genuinely interest you. You can try Claude for free at Claude. AI Unexplainable.

[Sponsor Representative (Charles Schwab)]

Support for the show comes from Charles Schwab. At Schwab. How you invest is your choice, not theirs. That's why when it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices. You can invest and trade on your own. Plus get advice and more comprehensive wealth solutions to help meet your unique needs. With award winning service, low costs and transparent advice, you can manage your wealth your way at Schwab. Visit schwab.com to learn more.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

Almost every classical music concert I've been to begins with this particular ritual. First the lights go down, then the audience gets quiet. The first violinist walks out.

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

And then before we hear the piece that we've come to listen to, we attend this kind of weird performance of listening to someone giving a note.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

This is Fanny Grebensky, a music historian, and this note is an A note.

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

So the instrument that usually gives this note is the oboe. And then all of the other instruments will pick this note to tune to it. So first the violins and then other string instruments and then wind instruments. And then you get this sort of cacophony of this attempt to get in tune with one another. It's become so usual that we don't even pay attention to it.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

We often think of musical notes as just existing. Like an A note is a certain pitch that's intrinsic to nature. We don't even question it. But Fanny did. She wrote a whole book about it called Tuning the World and she loves this oboe example because it shows in real time how in order to play music, a bunch of people need to agree to a standard. They need to agree on what an A note is. Is. Turns out that's really hard to do. This is unexplainable. I'm Emily Seiner, and today on the show what the difference between this and this can teach us about how scientific standards come to be and how they fall apart. You don't have to be a tuba to know that the most normie, most common western musical scale, a major scale, has seven notes. You've got your do, your re, your mi, your FA and so on. This story is about la, AKA A. Today, there's a universal standard for an a note. It's 440 hertz, or a note that creates 440 vibrations per second. But it hasn't always been that way, like, say you're playing in a church in Europe in the early 1600s. This is before the invention of the tuning fork. People were just starting to talk about the existence of sound waves. So when you played music, you just had to figure it out for yourself. You would tune to whatever instrument in the room was the hardest to tune on its own.

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

And oftentimes the least flexible of all instruments will be the organ. You know, if you want to tune an organ, you have to change the length of the pipes. And so that's not something that anyone can do, right? You have to be an organ builder to do that.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

Plus, the organs pitched that day would depend on whether it rained or whether it was hot or cold, which means the pitches varied a lot. According to music historians, a city in northern France in the year 1700 may have played an A note like this. That's 374 hertz, whereas a city in southern France might have played it at 563 Hz. For comparison, 440 Hz today's standard is this. Even into the 1800s, the city of Paris alone had at least six different tuning standards, depending on which opera house or which orchestra you were playing with. But by this time, France had reformed itself after the French Revolution. It no longer had a king appointed by God. It had a government ruled by rationalism. Goddammit. So why couldn't it create a rational standard for things that had previously been haphazard?

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

Of course, the metric system is an invention of the revolution. And so one of the first scientists who proposes the adoption of a standard pigeon, indeed, one of the first voices to really, you know, articulate the idea that the nation should have something similar to the meter for music is a scientist who explicitly references the metric system.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

Fanny says it was the first time that the conversation about pitch standards really took off and people were very anxious about it.

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

The moment when people have to decide, you know, what is our common, what is our shared, you know, point of departure to perform music? It has very deep implications, right? And it's a very antagonizing question, like what should our starting point be? And on what principles should we establish this starting point?

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

Here's what makes musical standards so antagonizing. Music is not just Scientific. It's not just about picking a number that seems the most rational. It's also aesthetic. A slightly lower pitch makes it easier for a singer to access high notes. A slightly higher pitch might make a.

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

Wind instrument ring out a little more like opera. Singers will complain that makers of brass instruments, for instance, are trying to, you know, raise the pitch because it makes their instruments sound better. And even that, you know, without even discussing what the frequency should be. But what is the sort of philosophy that should guide this decision? This is incredibly controversial.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

All of this coincided with a cultural shift in the mid-1800s. People were starting to embrace historical music, like stuff written by those guys we think of today as the greats, you.

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

Know, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

The classical world today features a lot of music written by dead people. But this actually wasn't always the case. Fanny says up until that point, musicians mostly perform new stuff.

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

And so when this sort of modern relationship to music started to emerge, they started noticing that when they performed music that had been written, say, 50 years ago, they started noticing these discrepancies between what would have been the pitch at which they were performed in the past and the pitch of the instruments that were around at their time.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

And as Fanny describes it, they were all extremely anxious that the pitch would continue to rise until everything the masters of classical had written was out of reach.

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

So one sort of interesting example in that regard is a very famous Arya in the history of classical music is the. The Queen of the Nights area in the Magic Flute. I can't really sing it, but maybe you can play it on the podcast.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

But I was going to ask you to sing it. So thank you for clarifying that you don't want to.

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

And so people were quoting that as an example of saying these are the extreme, the most extremely high pitches that a human voice can produce. And if the pitch rises, we will never be able to perform this opera again. What are we going to do if our standards of performance do no longer accommodate musics from the past that have become increasingly valuable?

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

I mean, was this anxiety true, do you think? It's true that it would have led at some point to pitches being just so high that entire canons of music were out of reach?

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

Well, the sort of surprising thing in these debates is the idea that pitch was this sort of autonomous phenomenon that was rising on its own, as if, again, it was some sort of thing that people had to try and keep under control, where, in fact, there were discrepancies between different musical scenes. And in some places, pitch was not rising at all.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

Whether or not it was true. Didn't matter. In the end, this anxiety settled the debate. When the French government convened a commission to decide what is an A note, they set it at 435Hz. It was lower than what many places in Paris had been doing, but all the better to sing the classics. For a while, this French standard, a435, seemed to be gaining traction. It spread across Europe and then the United States. At the Boston Music hall in 1869, there was even a concert to unveil the French pitch, where the audience would get to hear all the musicians tuning down their instruments before the program started, which is so incredibly nerdy. Were everyday people interested in this, or was it really just like, the heads of orchestras and the instrument makers and kind of like the elites of the music world?

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

Well, I think it's not clear to me that it's always something that people could actually experience, but because, you know, it was talked about, they could read about these debates in newspapers, because sometimes there were concerts where pitch was staged as a controversial question. Pitch became this thing that people started to pay attention to. And, you know, people start to cultivate this idea that, you know, pitch is something that is very important and defining for musical aesthetics, whether they, you know, really hear it or not.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

So it almost becomes like, because we're having a conversation about it, people notice it more, people place more importance on it, and then we have more of a conversation about it.

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

Exactly.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

And this could be where the story ended. If French standard pitch had really taken off, we'd all be singing our favorite songs ever so slightly lower. But it turns out making a musical standard stick is even harder than deciding on one in the first place.

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

You know, when a standardization process succeeds, it pretty much means that we forget about it. There is no question it's an accepted kind of social item, Right?

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

Take standards around time. We've decided that a standard day has two halves of 12 hours each. We've all accepted that's the way we do it. And even if you're a real contrarian and want to divide the day into multiples of nine, you're kinda on your own. You buy a clock, it has 12 numbers on it. The. But music is different because when you set a standard pitch, you need to convince the people playing the music to tune their instruments to your standard every single time.

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

With music, you always need the collaboration of musicians, right? Like, music is not something that stands out there ready to be grabbed at any point. It's something that only exists in its performance.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

And so maybe it's not supposed to surprising. What happened next? Outside of France, people kept messing around with other standards. The British were getting into playing an a note at 439 hertz. And in America, this one guy named John Deegan became obsessed with a pitch that is ever so slightly higher. 440. I want to play for a second. The difference between 435Hz, 439 and 440. If you're not really paying attention, you don't even hear it. So how does that happen? How do you supersede a standard with something that's almost but not exactly the same?

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

The history of this change between the two standards is very much a history of the new dominance of the United States and popular music in the debates.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

In the 1800s, France had been an epicenter of arts and science. Opera was the cultural force. But by the 1900s, that changed. Now popular modern music was made in America. Vaudeville, jazz, scoring for movies like the this very fun Disney cartoon from 1929 featuring Mickey Mouse in a haunted house. The focus was less about the operatic voice and more on percussion instruments. And this guy Deegan, he was a percussion maker. He made bells and xylophones and marimbas, all of which produce a pitch. And they're also harder to tune than like a violin. So it's more likely that a musician playing it would just accept whatever pitch it comes with. Fanny did extensive research on Deegan for her book, and even she isn't entirely sure why he was obsessed with 440Hz. He made a lot of arguments about it, like how acoustics work, and he even claimed that Beethoven favored the pitch. But Fanny has a slightly more mercenary theory. Remember, Deacon was a businessman who sold instruments tuned to a certain pitch.

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

I mean, if he was able to convince American practitioners that the standard that should be used was not a European standard, but American standard, in other words, his own standard, then it was also a way of closing the market to his competitors. Right?

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

And he did. Deakin convinced the American Federation of Musicians to adopt this new standard. So did the Piano Manufacturers association, the American Guild of Organization Organists, the Music Teachers National Association. Like an orchestra tuning against an oboe, all the official music organizations fell in line. A440 was the American way. We know now how hard it is to get a bunch of people on board with a musical standard. So this was pretty remarkable. But something even more unlikely happened later, when a bunch of enemy countries came together on the eve of World War II to decide whether to adopt the American standard. That's coming up after the break.

[Podcast Host (Sponsor Reads)]

Support for Unexplainable comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. There's something magnetic about mysteries. Does free will exist? Do the ends justify the means? Is Atlantis real? Claude is an AI that can help you explore different angles of all of these questions. You can upload papers and have Claude analyze them. You can ask it to give you counterarguments. You can learn about competing explanations that you might otherwise miss. Instead of settling for surface level answers, Claude can help you explore different angles and encourage you to keep digging deeper. Maybe you're confused or curious about an article that Claude recommended. You can go back and forth, you can get the exact level of detail you're comfortable with, and you can feel confident before you get to the next step. Claude doesn't rush to simple answers. It explores the genuine complexity with you. You can try Claude for free at Claude aiunexplainable and see why the world's best problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner.

[Sponsor Representative (Alnylam/Mercury)]

Fox Creative this is advertiser content from Al Nylam Living with disease can be draining. Managing new symptoms and medications, Scheduling endless appointments and tests, Losing the flexibility and independence you're used to. The drip, drip, drip of disease takes its toll on a genetic level, disease is like a leaky tap. Our genes instruct our cells to produce proteins that the body needs to function. But sometimes genes instruct cells to produce unwanted proteins or too much of a protein, which can cause or contribute to disease. Most conventional medicines treat disease by targeting the symptoms, like mopping up the puddle rather than tightening the leaky tap. But an innovative class of medicines pioneered by Alnilam Pharmaceuticals targets disease at the source. With RNA interference, we can disrupt the production of unwanted proteins to silence the drip, drip drip of dise. This innovative approach to treating disease is already helping thousands of people around the world live amplified lives. And it's just the beginning. Learn more about RNAi therapeutics and Alnylam [e-mail] Alnylam silence disease, amplify life.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

Support.

[Sponsor Representative (Charles Schwab)]

For the show comes from Charles Schwab at Schwab. How you invest is your choice, not theirs. That's why when it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices. You can invest and trade on your own, plus get advice and more comprehensive wealth solutions to help meet your unique needs. With award winning service, low costs and transparent advice, you can manage your wealth your way at Schwab. Visit schwab.com to learn more.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

What are you listening to?

[Podcast Host (Sponsor Reads)]

I'm locking in my starting note, a 440.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

You really can't talk about the history of pitch standards without talking about, of all things, World War II.

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

May 1939. Right before the world is falling into this major conflict, you see all of these representatives from Germany, England, France, Netherlands.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

Italy, all these European countries come together for a conference about pitch standardization because the US was full steam ahead on a 440. Should they do it too?

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

The main institution that's very instrumental in bringing this agreement to sort of a final point is the BBC. And around the table are all these radio engineers from various European countries who are actually trying to get in tune with the United States.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

Imagine the scene, if you will, at the BBC headquarters in London. Representatives from all these countries are sitting around the table talking music. In September, England will declare war on Germany. The next spring, the Nazis will invade the Netherlands, Italy will declare war on France. But here, all of them are in May, trying to find some harmony. Yeah, I mean, it just seems so unusual that all of these countries that are about to fight each other would come together on the eve of a world war to discuss, you know, musical frequencies.

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

Right.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

Why do you think they did it?

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

So the conference is opened by the head of the BBC at the time, who gives this very, very political, very emotional speech. He's talking about the fact that in an age of discord, at a time of political tension, the work of broadcasters who are trying to unite essentially European soundscapes is very important and very key in trying to prevent what people are increasingly aware that is going to happen. There is this idea that if we can create a community of listeners that are united by common musical tastes, a common experience, this will help foster peace. Wow. And of course, they failed, obviously.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

Yeah. I mean, that's so sweet. That's so lovely to think about. But also part of me is like, who made these guys the king of music? Why do they get to decide what everyone in the Western world experiences?

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

It's a really good question, and I think the answer is technological power, if you want. I mean, these are the people who know about controlling wavelengths, who have this sort of infrastructure to govern frequencies. And this moment of empowerment of the broadcasting world in the negotiations has to do with sort of a redefinition of sound. As this electroacoustic phenomenon, things shift to the benefit of engineers. And this side of the industry, it's.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

Like they were the Tech Bros Of.

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

Right.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

The interwar period, pretty much. When the Tech Bros emerged from the BBC headquarters in 1939, they had not figured out world peace but they did figure out something. They announced to the world all of Europe would now match the United States. 440Hz was now the standard.

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

And yet, let's tune my violin down to 432.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

See if you notice.

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

See how I feel. See how you feel.

[Podcast Host (Sponsor Reads)]

We actually believe that 440 hertz is just not in sync with our bodies.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

Modern music is tuned to a 440.

[Podcast Host (Sponsor Reads)]

Hz distortion frequency that is meant to scramble coherence.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

But if you shift to today, if you google what is an A note, you'll get the answer that the Tech Bros. Came up with in 1939. 440Hz. If you buy a digital tuner, it will use the standard. But for something that's now supposed to be universal, I've been surprised to find how many examples there are of musicians not using it. Like There's a whole YouTube channel that just takes pop music that wasn't recorded in a 440 and repitches it so that it's easier to play along with at home. Some classical ensembles today intentionally play in much lower tunings because that's how they think it was written way back in the day. And then there are the conspiracy theories.

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

A440 might be this Nazi standard.

[Sponsor Representative (Alnylam/Mercury)]

Yeah, Hitler is the one that definitely used the 440 frequency. He had a certain tempo and mannerism and things to do with that. But he also used the 440 frequency.

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

This standard that is harmful is something that has been created to manipulate the bodies of audiences or to harm the bodies of listeners. People reported an increase of negative mood after listening to music tuned to 440 hertz.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

One particularly confusing theory I saw online blamed the Rothschilds, the Jewish banking family, which is a notorious anti Semitic trope, and also said that the Rothschilds were funding Nazi officials in promoting 440Hz, which doesn't even make sense because the Nazis hated Jews. Anyway. Just to recap, people from the Nazi government were at the table in 1939, but it was actually the British who led the charge. And they were just agreeing to what the American music industry had already decided. At no point in Fanny's extensive research did she find anything about a desire to inflict bodily or societal harm. If anything, it was intended to unite a fractured world. Still today, there are lots of people who say we should set a different standard for an A note. And as we've seen, this could happen. But it would be a long and complicated path. You'd have to decide whose perspective matters and whose doesn't. You'd need to convince the people in the room to get on board with each other and then have enough power and cachet to convince everyone else to play along, literally. And then as soon as you set a new standard, you open yourself up to the backlash.

[Fanny Grebensky (Music Historian/Expert)]

Standards are created for people to, you know, to mess around with them essentially. Like there is no standard that is like strictly be adapted and just enforced. As is.

[Emily Siner (Host/Narrator)]

Fanny's hot take after all her research is that standard pitch doesn't really matter because there's no performance in which every note is played exactly in tune anyway. The pitch itself can fluctuate as the room warms up or if someone goes out of tune, music is just too fluid to standardize. I like to think of it like this. When you hear the oboe playing an A note at the beginning of a concert, it's not really about getting everyone to conform to a universal standard. It's to make sure that all the musicians in the room are playing in tune with each other. This is an A note, the oboe says. Just for us in this room at this moment, whatever it is, this is it. This episode was produced by me, Emily Siner. We had editing from Jorge Just and from Julia Longoria, mixing and sound design from Erica Wong and Christian Ayala, music from Noam Hassenfeld and from Erica Wong, and fact checking from Melissa Hirsch. Meredith Haddonott runs the show, Julia Longoria is our editorial director and Bird Pinkerton opened the wooden chest and pulled out a small winged boomerang. She walked to the center of the Runway and she took her position. As always, thank you to Brian Resnick for co creating the show and if you have any thoughts about our show, please send us an email. We're@ unexplainableox.com we really love hearing from you and we read every email. We'd also love it if you could leave a review or a rating wherever you listen. It actually does help us find new listeners. You can also support this show and all of Vox's journalism by joining our membership program. Program. You can go to vox.commembers to get ad free podcasts and a whole bunch of other goodies. And if you do become a member because of Unexplainable, let us know. It would make us really happy. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network and we'll be back next week.

[Sponsor Representative (Alnylam/Mercury)]

Support for the show comes from Mercury. What if banking did more? Because to you it's more than an invoice. It's your hard work becoming revenue it's more than a wire, it's payroll for your team. It's more than a deposit, it's landing your fundraise. The truth is, banking can do more. Mercury brings all the ways you use money into a single product that feels extraordinary to use. Visit mercury.com to join over 200,000 entrepreneurs who use Mercury to do more for their business. Mercury Banking that does more.

[Sponsor Representative (Adobe Express)]

Nobody knows your customers better than your team, so give them the power to make standout content with Adobe Express. Brand kits make following design rules a breeze and Adobe quality templates make it easy to create pro looking flyers, social posts, presentations and more. You don't have to be a designer to edit campaigns, resize ads and translate content. Anyone can in a click and collaboration tools put feedback right where you need it. See how you can turn your team into a content machine with Adobe Express, the quick and easy app to create on brand content. Learn [e-mail] Express Business.