Thank you for responding to our post and I will try to answer each of your concerns.
Your comments are in “”.
My comments are in bold type.
“Firstly, your point 2&3 is pretty much the same”
Due to the fact you have not specified which two comments were “pretty much the same”, I will have to respond with an explanation for both comments marked 2 & 3.
2. The clarinet note lies more in the middle range of the human ear which makes it more recognizable by the majority of the players.
The main focus of this statement is to establish that the clarinet is more in the middle of the range of all of the instruments were the tuba’s tuning note is still below the playing range of the majority of tunable instruments in a band.
3. Being a reed instrument, the clarinet is better equipped to center and reproduce the tuning note more consistently than the same note played on an instrument generating vibrations through the use of lip muscles.
The point made in this statement is that the vibrating read is much more stable to pitch change than is the lip on a tuba player.
Point # 2 was decidedly different than issue #3.
2. The low frequencies of the tuba are more difficult for the female members of the ensemble to hear than their male counterparts. In school bands, more girls than boys tend to play most woodwind instruments, especially flute, and more boys than girls tend to play brass instruments, saxophone, and percussion.
Read from the following- (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_band)
The main issue with this statement is the FACT that there are more girls in a band than there are boys and this conclusion is verified in the Article from Wikipedia.
3. The majority of members of a band are most often females. Due to the fact that females are not as sensitive to the low vibrations of a tuba, the majority of the players are at a disadvantage when tuning to that instrument.
Read from the following-(http://www.ask.com/wiki/Hearing_range?oo=2739&askid=176bd9bb-1deb-4cf2-b339-1be29ee006c0-0-us_gsb)
This source substantiates my claim that girls are equipped with hearing mechanisms which are more sensitive to higher frequencies than boys. If the females hearing equipment is better suited to hearing higher frequencies than their male counterpart, it is only logical to assume their more sensitive hearing at higher ranges would also limit them in the lower ranges.
Point # 2 was decidedly different than issue #3.
“but more seriously they are hogwash”.
hog•wash
[hawg-wosh, -wawsh, hog-] Show IPA
noun
1.
refuse given to hogs; swill.
2.
any worthless stuff.
3.
meaningless or insincere talk, writing, etc.; nonsense; bunk.
Few would agree to your statement that the information stated in these two Wikipedia articles could be considered worthless, meaningless, nonsense or inferior writing.
“Females (as shown in the citation you’ve used) are more sensitive to “higher frequencies” than men are. This is not to say that they are less sensitive in lower frequencies”.
It stands to reason that if the female hearing components are built differently than the male, the advantage in the high range would equal a similar amount of loss in the low range. You can’t have one advantage without losing in the other range.
“Secondly the evidence surrounding this is thin”.
Due to the fact that both source were the beliefs of Wikapedia, I feel that the information and the eventual conclusions were ample evidence to prove my assumptions.
“A better argument is that tuning is pretty much about detecting differences in frequency (which usually manifests itself as pulses where the mismatching frequencies). The more of a mismatch, the more frequent is the pulsing effect”.
I’m not sure what you were trying to say. Your opening remark, “A better argument is that tuning” puts me at a loss. My post discusses the advantage of tuning to a clarinet as opposed to tuning to a tuba. The remander of your sentence is completely off the subject for “A better argument is that tuning”, does not relate to anything I have covered in the post.
“However, when tuning against a tuba where the fundamental frequency is way below most of the orchestra (wind orchestra anyway, this advice doesn’t apply for a tuba orchestra) you are in effect tuning the weaker overtones of the tuba – where the pulse effect would be less pronounced than for two signals of similar fundamental frequency”.
Sounds like you agree with me on this one but what is a “tuba orchestra?
”Similarly it is common to tune to oboes in orchestral settings (for a variety of reasons), mainly because they are pretty much in the middle of the spectrum frequency-wise and they project such that they are distinct even when everybody is tuning. Tubas, not so much.
Sounds like you agree with me on this one also.
I appreciate your comments on this topic and as more comments come in, I will be addressing each one individually.
Why tune to the tuba? Because it’s the most stable instrument. Say you’re playing outside in 40* F weather, like Minnesota during the early winter months. People start to blow into their instruments to warm them up. A trumpet is a grand total of 4.5 to 5 feet long or so and a clarinet is something like 2 feet long. These instruments take very little time to warm-up and consequently very little time to cool down.
A BBb tuba on the other hand is 18 feet long (or thereabouts). It takes on average between 20-45 minutes to warm these suckers up. Yes the valve tubing is relatively short in comparison to the total body length, but the open tones rely soley on the open bugle (duh). Once the tuba is warmed-up is takes about the same amount of time for it to cool down.
So you’re band – like a marching band using sousaphones – is on the field for halftime or pregame. Everyone has warmed up and tuned, and are now standing at attention. Let’s say their waiting on a procession of people or for the sideline/aux percussion to set up. The sousaphone players have their mouthpieces still on their faces but their instruments are still quite warm, where as the trumpets and clarinets have their instrument held in front of them and are already cooling down…
You see the problem?
As soon as the band starts playing the trumpets and clarinets are flat, but the sousaphones and large/longer instruments are relatively stable, maybe a smidgen more flat than they were 10 minutes ago, but not to the extend that they have their tuning slides all the way in. So what does the band sound like? Bottom end is in tune, but the top end is horribly flat because their instruments haven’t been able to hold the heat like the large brass.
Sure, most instruments are made sharp so that you can pull out the main slide to bring it in tune. But if the instrument is short, it’s tuning fluctuates more often when compared to a longer instrument, simply because it’s a smaller instrument.
That’s why the band tunes to the tuba.
Of course looking at the orchestra, the tuba rarely plays in most classical music (because it wasn’t invented until the mid 1800s). Here, the clarinet (or oboe) or trumpet makes the most sense to tune to because of how often it plays. If the orchestra tuned to the tuba, on some piece the tuba only plays one movement or comes in after a couple hundred measures – the rest of the orchestra has been playing, but the tuba has been sitting around (cooling down).
That’s why the orchestra doesn’t tune to the tuba.
Oh yes, a couple more things…
The tuba is the foundation of most chords in band music, you can complain all you want but if the bottom note isn’t in tune, the upper harmonics and higher brass have nothing to rely on. You never tune to a triple high C on trumpet do you?
Why are most women on woodwinds and most men on brass? Gender stigmatization. Unless you look at, say any band before 1950 or even some European bands today, where men were only allowed to play (except for the few all-female jazz bands/orchestra during the early 1900s).
When kids are in high school boys want to play the trumpet and trombone, because if they chose flute or clarinet … well you know… Girls have it easier because they don’t have the same stigmatization to play a certain instrument, yes they play most often the woodwinds because all the boys are playing the heavier, larger instruments (like having the lung power for the tuba or holding up the trombone and having the reach for 7th position). Men are simply larger (on average) than women