Where does President Trump's speech leave us with regard to where the war is headed? And it really was to me the story of the commander-in-chief who weeks into this war is deeply uncertain about how it ends. I'm John Feiner, co-host of the Long Game Podcast. This week, Jake Sullivan and I break down the President's speech and discuss what it's like to negotiate with the Iranians. We will also debate whether Iran should accept a deal. The episode is out now. Search and follow the Long Game wherever you get your podcasts. What goes up must come down, except when it comes to gas prices. The price tends to rock it up very quickly at the pump as when crude oil prices go up. But gasoline prices tend to take a little bit longer to go down in many cases. This week on Explanantime, why gas and everything else is so expensive these days. Find new episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jorge Just, editorial director of the Grey Area, and close personal friend of your host, Sean Elling. Sean sent me here with a mission to introduce you to another show that I work on. Unexplainable. It's a show about all the things we don't yet know, and about the people who are trying to figure it all out. Unexplainable in the Grey Area have a lot in common. They both take open-hearted, open-minded approaches to new ideas, hard questions, and the mysteries of life. They just do it in different ways, but it's the same project, honestly. And the episode I'm about to play for you is a perfect example. It asks the question, "What is a musical note?" Seriously, in this case, the note A. The note that orchestras around the world tune to before they play. How did we all, all of us, collectively decide that that very particular number of vibrations per second, would be the thing that we call A. Turns out, it's not easy to standardize a sound, especially a sound that's central to the making of Western music, a sound upon which we hang so much emotion, so much memory, so much feeling. It's not easy, but we didn't. But did we? I mean, even now, there's a lot of people who are not on board. It feels like nothing in this universe is universal. Here's what's A, from Unexplainable. Enjoy. 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. 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. This is Fanny Grubensky, a music historian, and this note is an A note. 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 valines, then there's string instruments, and then wind instruments. And then you get this sort of kick off of this attempt to get in tune with one another. It's become so usual that we don't even pay attention to it. We often think of musical notes as just existing, like an A note as 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. Turns out that's really hard to do. This is unexplainable. I'm Emily Sinner. 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. It's today explained President Trump has not made a coherent case for his war in Iran, and last night he said he's not ending it yet. We're going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We're going to bring them back to the stone ages where they belong. His ally Tucker Carlson has been making a very coherent case against the war. Because it doesn't serve American interests in any conceivable way. And let me just say that if it does in some way serve the interests of the United States, I'd love to hear it. I haven't heard. On Tuesday, we asked Carlson about his break with Trump and about how the Trump coalition is splintering as some young conservatives abandoned the president and embrace something darker. It becomes like all of a sudden like, hey you kids, why are you listening to Elvis Presley? And that rock music is bad. Like all of a sudden, Fuentes controls the conversation and becomes the cool kid. And the net effect is to make the Holocaust a joke. Today, explain every weekday wherever you get your podcasts. For the last 10 years, everything in American politics has basically revolved around one man. And as a political journalist who came of age during Donald Trump's rise in 2016, I've had a front row seat. I am officially running for president of the United States. It's going to be only America first America first. Thousands of supporters of President Trump stormed the US Capitol building. But is it possible to talk about politics without talking about Donald Trump? That's the question I'm going to ask in our new show from Box. The idea of like a post Trump or not exactly Trump focus show can exist because he's not really driving any agenda items. It really does feel so reactive. You know, I think a ran thing is also going to cause a big split in the GOP. So far it doesn't among like people who say their MAGA voters are still with Trump. But like for the first time you see on a major issue, open opposition from the start of this war. I'm a Steadharned in and welcome to America, actually. Hi, I'm Bernabé Brown and I'm Adam Grant. And we're here to invite you to the Curiosity Shop. A podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling and questioning. It's going to be fun. We rarely agree. But we almost never disagree and we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday. You've got your dough, your ray, your me, your fa, and so on. 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 are 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. 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. Plus, the organ's pitch that day would depend on whether it rained or whether it was hot or cold. Which means the pitch is 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 hertz. For comparison, 440 hertz 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, God damn it. So why couldn't it create a rational standard for things that had previously been haphazard? 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 pitch and indeed one of the first voices to really articulate the idea that the nation should have something similar to the leader for music.
is a scientist who explicitly references the metric system. Fanny says it was the first time that the conversation about pitch standards really took off, and people were very anxious about it. The moment when people have to decide, what is our common, what is our shared 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 the starting points? 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 wind instrument ring out a little more. Like, oppressing girls will complain that makers of breast instruments, for instance, are trying to raise the pitch because it makes their instruments sound better. And even without even discussing what the frequency should be, but what is the sort of philosophy that should guide this decision? This is incredibly controversial. 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 know, mutts are t-bach bethavan. 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. 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, you know, 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 their time. 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. So one sort of interesting example in that regard is a very famous aria in the history of classical music is the queen of the night's aria in the magic foods. [MUSIC PLAYING] I can't really sing it, but maybe you can play it on the pop, guys, but I was going to ask you to sing it. So thank you for clarifying me. You don't want to. [LAUGHTER] [MUSIC PLAYING] And so people were quoting that as an example, as saying, these are the extreme, you know, the most extremely high pitches that a human voice can produce. And if the pitch rises, we will never be able to perform this aria again. What are we going to do if our standards of performance do no longer accommodate music from the past that have become increasingly valuable? I mean, was this anxiety true? Like, 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? Well, the sort of surprising thing in this debate is the idea that pitch was this sort of autonomous phenomenon that was rising on its own. Like, 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. 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 anote, they set it at 435 Hertz. It was lower than what many places in Paris had been doing, but all the better to sing the classics. [MUSIC - "French Standard A435"] 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? Well, I think it's not clear to me that it's always something that people could actually experience. That because it was talked about, that 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 people started to cultivate this idea that pitch is something that is very important and defining for musical aesthetics, whether they really hear it or not. 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. Exactly. 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. When a star-position process succeeds, it pretty much means that we forget about it. There is no question it's an accepted social item, right? 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 kind of on your own. You buy a clock, it has 12 numbers on it. 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. With music, you always need the collaboration of musicians, right? Like music is not something that spends out there ready to be grabbed at any point. It's something that only exists in its performance. And so maybe it's not 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 435 Hertz, 439, and 440. If you're not really paying attention, you don't even hear it. [PHONE RINGING] So how does that happen? How do you supersede a standard with something that's almost but not exactly the same? 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. 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, Vodville, jazz, scoring for movies like 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 marimba's, all of which produce a pitch. And they're also harder to tune than 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 is an entirely sure why he was obsessed with 440 Hertz. 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, Deegan was a businessman who sold instruments tuned to a certain pitch. 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, he's own standard. Then he was also way of closing the market to his competitors, right? And he did. Deegan convinced the American Federation of Musicians to adopt this new standard. So did the Piano Manufacturers Association, the American Guild of Organists, the Music Teachers National Association, like an orchestra tuning against
in Obo, 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. All the way back in the year 2000, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos had this big idea that maybe the future wasn't typing, it was talking to your computer with your voice. Jeff Bezos didn't invent this idea, but he did push his team to invent what would become Alexa and the Amazon Echo. Two things that brought voice computing into millions of homes around the world. This week on version history, our chat show about the best and worst and most interesting products in tech history were telling the whole story of the Echo and how Amazon managed to get it right and still kind of missed the future. That's version history on YouTube and wherever you get podcasts. This week is the 50th anniversary of Apple. And so this week on the Vergecast, we're taking stock of where Apple is five decades into its existence. How's the company doing? And we also decided to do something slightly ridiculous, which is identify and rank the 50 best Apple products of all time. After a lot of hours of debating, I think we finally got there. That's on the Vergecast this week, along with the state of OpenAI as it raises a ton of money, tries to go public and tries to convince you that you also love AI. All that on the Vergecast, wherever you get podcasts. What are you listening to? I'm locking in my starting note. You really can't talk about the history of pitch standards without talking about of all things World War II. May 1939, right before the world is falling into this major conflict, you see all of these representatives from Germany, England, France, Netherlands, Italy. All these European countries come together for a conference about pitch standardization, because the US was full steam ahead on A440. Should they do it too? 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, you know, radio engineers from various European countries who are actually trying to get into and with the United States. 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. Right. Why do you think they did it? 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, you know, in an age of discord, at a time of, you know, political tension, the work of broadcasters who are trying to unite essentially like European soundscapes is very important and very key in trying to prevent what, you know, people are increasingly aware that is going to happen. There is this idea that, you know, 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, you know, they failed, obviously. Yeah. I mean, that's so sweet. It's so like lovely to think about. But also, part of me is like, who made these guys the king of music? Like, why do they get to decide what everyone in the Western world experiences? It's a really good question. And I think the answer is, you know, technological power, if you want. I mean, these are the people who know about, you know, controlling wavelengths, who have the sort of infrastructure to govern frequencies. And it's 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 into the benefit of, you know, engineers and this side of the industry. It's like they were the tech bros of. Right. 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. 440 Hertz was now the standard. And yet, let's tune my violin down to 432, see if you notice, see how I feel, see how you feel. We actually believe that 440 Hertz is just not in sync with our bodies. And modern music is tuned to a 440 Hertz distortion frequency that is meant to scramble coherence. 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. 440 Hertz. 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 A440 and repitches it so that it's easier to play along with it home. [Music] 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. A440 might be this, you know, not just standard. 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. The standard that, you know, is harmful is something that has been created to, you know, manipulate the bodies of audiences or to harm the bodies of listeners. People reported an increase of negative mood after listening to music tune to 440 Hertz. One particularly confusing theory I saw online blamed the Rothschilds, the Jewish banking family, which is a notorious anti-Semitic trope. And also says that the Rothschilds were funding Nazi officials in promoting 440 Hertz, 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 loved 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 caches 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. >> Standards are created for people to mess around with them, essentially. There's no standard that is strictly adopted and first as is. >> 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 Juliola Goria, mixing and sound design from Erica Wang and Christian Aella, music from Noam Hasenfeld and from Erica Wang, and fact checking from Melissa Hirsch. Meredith Hadnott runs the show. Juliola Goria 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.
[MUSIC] 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 at
[email protected]. 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. You can go to vox.com/members 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. [MUSIC]
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