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DELIGHTFUL nonsense – that was Henry Shipley's verdict on the conspiracy concept that orchestras tune the note A to 440 hertz because of a Nazi plot (18 January). He observes that the subject could introduce a strange unit: the foot as a unit of pitch. Or not so strange: the speed of sound in air means that the note middle C is produced by an organ pipe about 2 feet (0.6 metres) long, while a 1-foot pipe produces the C an octave above this.
And in this connection, David Fletcher points to an as yet under-appreciated consequence of carbon dioxide emissions: global flattening. Back in 1998, he wrote that calculations published in the Journal of Theoretical and Applied Acoustics – which we have not tracked down – dealt with the increase in density ...
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