Sound Studio Research Articles

The Aural Eye

Human aural experience can be equally considered along spatial and temporal continuums. We hear at all times of the day and night, and within all places and spaces: built, natural, public, private and virtual. The territory – both physical and philosophical – between music composition for interior listening and traditional sound based research within environmental acoustics is gradually being occupied by the listener-centred approach of soundscape studies. Soundscape design is emerging as an interdisciplinary field within design education, and one that not only challenges the ocular-centric nature of most design education, but one that could provide a useful mode through which to investigate the coincidences between different design disciplines. This paper draws on the author’s own practice as a sound designer in a variety of spatial sound projects in built and virtual contexts to discuss ideas of landscape, interiority, space and place as experienced through listening. This will include aspects of Canopies: chimerical acoustic environments for the Southgate soundscape system, Ecstasis: human presence in digital environments for an interactive VR system and stereoscopic projections, and The Occupation of Space: Soundsites project with the Melbourne blind community.2 The ideas and technologies underpinning these projects also form the basis of a new pedagogy of sound and listening housed in the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory’s (SIAL) Sound Studios at RMIT University. The place and role of the Sound Studio’s program in providing an aural perspective that compliments the visual methodologies of co-located design disciplines is discussed.

Navigating in the multiverse: Possibilities and limitations of creative practices in online environments

Currently, and especially since the breakout of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an increase of online concerts, talks and even artist residencies. There has also been a development of webstreaming sound studios and online interactive platforms that accommodate art works. Moreover, museums and galleries offer virtual tours to their exhibitions. All this is part of a promise of widening access to cultural, educational and creative opportunities and a suggestion to escape from the limitations and boundaries of time and physical distance. Nonetheless, creative practitioners, curators and art aficionados are urgently compelled to critically analyse, doubt and challenge this promise of limitless possibilities that the online world is offering. In this era of digital information, what expectations does a virtual artwork raise? What is its utilitarian purpose and social value? How do the disembodiment and technological displacement of human beings shape and affect their cultural and communal bonding? To find some answers or, rather, to extend these questions, I will reflect on my artistic practice and experience of creating works that are available on online platforms and controlled with the use of digital interactive tools. A primary analytical tool will be the phenomenological concept of the lived body as well as socio-anthropological arguments about time and materiality. My aim is not to create a fixed and dogmatic theory but to negotiate what role, if any, artistic practice can have in the virtual world.

Redirecting the Gaze: A Creative Exploration of Glitch in Berberian Sound Studio (2012) and Outer Space (1999)

Redirecting the Gaze: A Creative Exploration of Glitch in Berberian Sound Studio (2012) and Outer Space (1999)

Design and integration of acoustic treatment to the Former Stock Exchange—Cathedral Room

The Gothic Bank Cathedral Room within the Former Stock Exchange located in Melbourne is architecturally significant and largely original displaying ornate features for a historical public business arena. The Cathedral Room was the main trading floor for the Stock Exchange and was designed to represent the interior of a church, highlighted by the vaulted roof, columns, and the stained-glass windows. Through the guidance of Heritage Council Victoria, the Cathedral Room was granted permission to be converted into a commercial dining room. This paper details the methodology adopted to reality capture the interiors of the Cathedral Room by deploying LiDAR laser scanning, to develop a room acoustics model, and to investigate mitigation options. Furthermore, it explores the link between applying appropriate acoustic targets, guiding stakeholders, and delivering the project, which is essential to operate a successful commercial business to meet the expectations of their cliental. Arup developed an Odeon model, which allowed for the placement of speech sources and receivers and with integrated mitigation options. The modeling was presented to stakeholders in Arup’s SoundLab, an ambisonic sound studio, allowing the stakeholders to listen to the untreated space and compare it to various levels of mitigation prior to progressing to detail design phase.

The Life and Legacy of Danijela Kulezic-Wilson

The Life and Legacy of Danijela Kulezic-Wilson

"The Ambiguous Horror of Modern Life": An Interview with Paul Tremblay

"The Ambiguous Horror of Modern Life":An Interview with Paul Tremblay Christina Connor (bio) and Paul Tremblay (bio) Paul Tremblay is the author of The Cabin at the End of the World (2018), the award-winning novel and source material for M. Night Shyamalan's film Knock at the Cabin (2023). I'll admit that Cabin first caught my attention as it was popping up on "Best of??" lists in 2018, but it wasn't until Tremblay's 2020 rabies-zombie pandemic novel, Survivor Song, was released during the height of COVID that I found myself cracking open one of his books. Since then, I have read my way through Tremblay's body of work and have been impressed with his brand of psychological horror and the sheer inventiveness of his textual formatting. And I'm not the only one: Stephen King raves that Tremblay's short story collection, Growing Things and Other Stories (2019), is "[o]ne of the best collections of the 21st century."1 Tremblay has his finger on the pulse of modern horror, and this is visible in his inclusion of conspiracy theories, pandemics, stalkers, and the unknowable just beyond our periphery. "Mr. Ambiguous Horror," as he jokingly refers to himself in the metafictional story "Notes from the Dog Walkers" (2019, collected in Growing Things), graciously consented to an interview. We discussed the horror of ambiguity but also the dangers of information overload in our era of social media, misinformation, and reality TV. A writer known for using interesting and unusual narrative approaches, Tremblay spells out the rules he uses to craft his stories and explains how he gauges the effectiveness of these structures. Of course, we also discussed what it's like for a writer to have his book adapted into film, what it really means to give someone else ownership of your story, and what are the chances of it happening for the rest of us. The following interview was edited for length and form. [End Page 107] Christina Connor: Thanks so much for meeting with me. I'm guessing you're a popular person right now, with the film adaptation of your book about to premiere by [acclaimed director] M. Night Shyamalan.2 It seems like a writer's dream come true. How are you feeling? Paul Tremblay: It's a strange dream! I think most writers at some point daydream about their stories being made into movies. There have been moments where it is like, "Oh my God, this doesn't seem real," such as the couple of days I was visiting the set, but the next day I was [back at work] teaching geometry. I'd wonder, did that really happen? Months would go by with nothing going on, and then something new happens, like a trailer drops, and it all sort of explodes again. Now that we're in the home stretch with just days away from the movie's premiere, I'm definitely feeling excited and anxious—mostly excited. CC: Have you gotten to see the final cut of the film? PT: I have not, but I am going to the premiere with my family. That's really cool. CC: And how's your family taking it? Are they excited? PT: Yeah, they're excited, but I'm still, you know, just the dopey dad. [laughs] CC: Dave Bautista [star of Knock at the Cabin] told me the other day that you came by the set to work with the actors, and he was very complimentary of you. What was it like to work with the artists—the actors, directors, technicians—who are bringing the adaptation to life? PT: The set visit was amazing; it was surreal but without the political aspect of surrealism. I met them at a sound studio outside of Philadelphia where they had built a cabin inside of a warehouse for the interior shots. When I first walked in, I was like, whoa, look at all this stuff: all these people, all this equipment, all these lights, all these [End Page 108] things that they need to make a movie. It didn't look like much from the outside, but the inside was beautiful, with...

Wearable Neck Surface Accelerometers for Occupational Vocal Health Monitoring: Instrument and Analysis Validation Study.

BackgroundNeck surface accelerometer (NSA) wearable devices have been developed for voice and upper airway health monitoring. As opposed to acoustic sounds, NSA senses mechanical vibrations propagated from the vocal tract to neck skin, which are indicative of a person’s voice and airway conditions. NSA signals do not carry identifiable speech information and a speaker’s privacy is thus protected, which is important and necessary for continuous wearable monitoring. Our device was already tested for its durable endurance and signal processing algorithms in controlled laboratory conditions.ObjectiveThis study aims to further evaluate both instrument and analysis validity in a group of occupational vocal users, namely, voice actors, who use their voices extensively at work in an ecologically valid setting.MethodsA total of 16 professional voice actors (age range 21-50 years; 11 females and 5 males) participated in this study. All participants were mounted with an NSA on their sternal notches during the voice acting and voice assessment sessions. The voice acting session was 4-hour long, directed by a voice director in a professional sound studio. Voice assessment sessions were conducted before, during, and 48 hours after the acting session. The assessment included phonation tasks of passage reading, sustained vowels, maximum vowel phonation, and pitch glides. Clinical acoustic metrics (eg, fundamental frequency, cepstral measures) and a vocal dose measure (ie, accumulated distance dose from acting) were computed from NSA signals. A commonly used online questionnaire (Self-Administered Voice Rating questionnaire) was also implemented to track participants’ perception of vocal fatigue.ResultsThe NSA wearables stayed in place for all participants despite active body movements during the acting. The ensued body noise did not interfere with the NSA signal quality. All planned acoustic metrics were successfully derived from NSA signals and their numerical values were comparable with literature data. For a 4-hour long voice acting, the averaged distance dose was about 8354 m with no gender differences. Participants perceived vocal fatigue as early as 2 hours after the start of voice acting, with recovery 24-48 hours after the acting session. Among all acoustic metrics across phonation tasks, cepstral peak prominence and spectral tilt from the passage reading most closely mirrored trends in perceived fatigue.ConclusionsThe ecological validity of an in-house NSA wearable was vetted in a workplace setting. One key application of this wearable is to prompt occupational voice users when their vocal safety limits are reached for duly protection. Signal processing algorithms can thus be further developed for near real-time estimation of clinically relevant metrics, such as accumulated distance dose, cepstral peak prominence, and spectral tilt. This functionality will enable continuous self-awareness of vocal behavior and protection of vocal safety in occupational voice users.

Beyond sonic realism: a cinematic sound approach in documentary 360° film

ABSTRACT Sound is often recognised as critical to the success of 360° film, but in a new medium fraught with technological challenges and time constraints, there is little research to guide sound designers in their creative practice. As practitioners engage with this new 360° format, the wisdom and techniques developed from decades of documentary sound practice promise more compelling viewing experiences; however, there are many differences between cinematic documentary and non-fiction 360° film. This article contributes towards a new language of sound for this medium by exploring the sound design approaches of four non-fiction 360° films that experiment with cinematic sound practices. The findings discussed were gained from interviews conducted with leading sound designers Tom Myers from Skywalker Sound (Collisions, 2016); Joel Douek (Under the Canopy, 2017); Roland Heap (My Africa, 2018); and Mike Lange, Michael Thomas and Heath Plumb (Inside Manus, 2017). The findings detail the benefits of including sound designers from the beginning of pre-production, the implications for sound recording, and the post-production considerations in the sound studio. The practice-centred guidelines presented in this paper can be used by sound designers, directors and screen educators in the creative design and development of 360° film soundscapes.

Cybernetics, Listening, and Sound-Studio Phenomenotechnique in Abraham Moles’s Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique (1958)

In his Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique (1958), the sociologist of culture Abraham Moles (1920–92) set out to demonstrate the applicability of information theory—a mathematical linchpin of cybernetics—to the arts more generally. Moles drew on classical psychophysics, Gestalt psychology, more modern behavioral psychology, and contemporary psychoacoustic research to advocate a cybernetic model of the perception and creation of art. Moles repeatedly returned to musical examples therein to make his case, leveraging his dual expertise in philosophy and electroacoustics, drawing on formative experiences with Pierre Schaeffer in Paris and Hermann Scherchen at his Gravesano studio. Moles’s interdisciplinary text found many attentive readers across Europe and, following an English translation by the precocious Joel E. Cohen (1966), the Anglophone academic world, but it was valued more as an inspiration for the burgeoning area of “information aesthetics” than as a source of hard scientific evidence. Drawing lightly on positions in the history and philosophy of science articulated by Gaston Bachelard (who supervised Moles’s second PhD, in philosophy) and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger suggests a change of emphasis away from its apparent scientific infelicities and toward Moles’s use of sound-studio technique, which is described with reference to the technologies available to Moles in the years leading up to the publication of the Théorie. Moles manipulated and processed sound recordings—filtering, clipping, and reversing them—in his attempts to empirically estimate the relative proportions of semantic and aesthetic information in speech and music. Moles’s text, when understood in tandem with the traces of his practical experiments in the sound studio, appears as an influential and occasionally prescient exposition of the many possible applications of the principles of information theory to the production, perception, and consumption of sound culture that makes ready use of the latest technical innovations in the media environment of its time.

ELECTROACOUSTIC MUSIC AND THE SLOVAK MUSICAL AVANT-GARDE IN THE 1960S

In the 1960s, the development of music in Slovakia was marked by prominent generational and stylistic confrontations of the compositional poetries of the previous generations of composers and the just emerging one. In the composers’ community, an initiative was gaining a foothold that reassessed the practices, norms, and achievements of the previous developmental stages of Slovak music and looked for new points of departure. In certain stages of the given period, the first graduates of the Academy of Performing Arts (Ilja Zeljenka, Juraj Pospíšil, Pavol Šimai, Ladislav Kupkovič, Peter Kolman, Roman Berger, Jozef Malovec, Miroslav Bázlik, Ivan Parík, Tadeáš Salva, and others) entered the musical scene. The genesis and the formation of the Slovak musical avant-garde in the 1960s was determined by their quest for the novel possibilities of expression and the compositional techniques of the so-called New Music of Western Europe. They included experimenting with previously unknown electrogenic compositional materials and techniques of electroacoustic music. Slovak electroacoustic music, which achieved success in Slovakia and abroad already in the 1960s, emerged first on a private basis, later in the Sound Studio of the Czechoslovak Television, and, primarily, in the Experimental Studio of the Czechoslovak Radio.

Place As An Extended Technique

In this piece, Ben Zucker profiles Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio and its decision to move online with a series of livestreamed performances known as The Quarantine Concerts (TQC). He examines the meaning of “place” for virtual gatherings such as TQC, and discusses how musicians have had to rethink what liveness means and how it is practiced under the new constraints.

Preferred dimension ratios of small rectangular rooms.

Rooms for music rehearsal, sound studios, control rooms, etc., need a smooth frequency response. For that reason, the frequencies of the room modes should be spread as well as possible, and this is controlled by the aspect ratios of the dimensions. The relative variance of the frequency spreading of the lowest 25 room modes is applied as a quality criterion. The results have revealed that the length-width ratio is much more important than the width-height ratio. The length-width ratio should be within 1.15-1.45. The height can be chosen more freely without compromising the acoustical quality.

Giallo Nostalgia: Appropriations of Giallo Aesthetics in Contemporary Cinema

This article aims to engage with the ways in which contemporary global cinema looks back at the Italian giallo production of the 1970s through a series of remakes, homages and pastiches. What we define as retrogiallo differs from other examples of “retroexploitation,” where films such as Grindhouse (Rodriguez and Tarantino, 2007) and Hobo with a Shotgun (Eisener, 2011) address nostalgia for a specific kind of spectatorship, the grindhouse circuit, through conscious visual archaisms. Retrogialli present a more complex approach: instead of mimicking the imperfections of analogue indexicality, they fetishize the artisanal quality of filmmaking, displacing the stylistic features of the giallo in a highbrow context. Films such as Amer (Cattet and Forzani, 2009), The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears (Cattet and Forzani, 2013) and Berberian Sound Studio (Strickland, 2012) ultimately present a new opportunity to address the critical understanding of the giallo.

Florence, Alabama and the Muscle Shoals Region

Florence, Alabama and the Muscle Shoals Region Michael Pretes Florence, Alabama welcomes you to the 75th annual meeting of the Southeastern Division of the American Association of Geographers (SEDAAG)! The conference will take place from November 22–23, 20201 at the Marriott Shoals Hotel and Spa (which you can see, with its distinctive Renaissance Tower, on the left of the cover photo), and will be hosted by the Department of Geography at the University of North Alabama. Florence is located on the Tennessee River in the far northwest corner of Alabama, and together with the three neighboring cities of Tuscumbia, Sheffield, and Muscle Shoals, it comprises the Shoals Region, also known as the Muscle Shoals Region or the Quad Cities. The combined population of these four cities is about 80,000. Muscle Shoals has a small airport with commercial propeller plane service from Atlanta, but most locals fly in and out of Huntsville, which is about one hour away. Nashville and Birmingham airports are both about two hours away. Evidence of Native American inhabitation of the region goes back to at least 500 BCE, when the Florence Indian Mound, also known as Wawamanona, was constructed (Steen n.d.). The mound is still standing and can be visited along with the Florence Indian Mound Museum. Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Yuchi were among the Indigenous Peoples of the region. Many were removed to Oklahoma during the Trail of Tears from 1830–50, but many remained, and some have returned. The Wall, built by Tom Hendrix as a memorial to his Yuchi great-great grandmother, Te-lah-ney, commemorates her harrowing and arduous return home from exile. A hand-built rock wall, it is the largest monument to a Native American woman, and can be visited on a short trip outside Florence. The city of Florence was founded in 1818 and served as the transshipment point for traffic between the upper and lower parts of the Tennessee River. The Muscle Shoals were an obstacle to river traffic, a problem ultimately solved in the early twentieth century by the construction of Wilson Dam (1918–24), which raised the water level and replaced an earlier, less successful canal detour (Davidson 1946). Wilson Dam (which you can see on the right of the cover photo), the first of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) dams, also provides hydropower and attracted the aluminum processing industry to the area. Today Lauderdale County, where Florence is located, and neighboring Colbert County, have both an agricultural (corn, cotton, soybeans, chickens) base as well as an industrial one. During and preceding the Civil War, Florence was a temporary home to Dred Scott, Nathan Bedford Forrest, John Bell Hood, and William T. Sherman, who used the current Geography building, Wesleyan Hall (built in 1855, Figure 1), as his headquarters, and his journals written there contain the famous phrase “War is hell” (McDonald 1991). [End Page 193] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Wesleyan Hall, Geography building. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. FAME (Florence Alabama Music Enterprises) Recording Studios. Florence’s fame today largely rests on its outstanding music heritage. W.C. Handy, the “Father of the Blues,” was born and raised in Florence, and his house is now a museum. Several recording studios opened in the Shoals Region beginning with FAME (Florence Alabama Music Enterprises) Recording Studios (Figure 2) in 1959 (Ells 2015). Within the next two decades other studios opened, including Muscle Shoals Sound Studio and [End Page 194] Cypress Moon Studios (Whitley 2014). Artists who recorded at these studios include Percy Sledge, Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Little Richard, Cher, Jimmy Buffett, Bob Seger, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Wilson Pickett, Etta James, The Commodores, George Jones, the Oak Ridge Boys, Duane Allman, and many others. These studios are still very much in business and can be visited on guided tours. The music empresario Sam Phillips—who discovered and produced Elvis Presley, Howlin’ Wolf, and Johnny Cash—was born in Florence and had a close connection to the city. The region’s musical tradition is continued by Jason Isbell/Drive By Truckers, John Paul White/The Civil Wars, the Alabama Shakes, and...

Listening with the body and an analogue sensibility: the Villa Arson’s “sound art” school in the digital age

In recent years, the re-emergence of interest in Lars Fredrikson, a pioneer in experimental sound practices, has raised a number of issues related to the question of sound in art and the pedagogy of listening in schools. Carrying out a plastic and bodily conception of listening, the teaching of Lars Fredrikson at Villa Arson between 1970 and 1991 - where he created the first sound studio in an art school in France - makes it possible to observe the transmission with a generation of artists of sound practices lastingly marked by a rejection of the musical approach and an understanding of sound as "living matter". This shift in the characteristics of sculpture, and more generally of the visual arts, towards the vibrational domain, is accompanied by the persistence of a taste for an "analog aesthetic", which appears on several scales in creation among these artists.

Southern Sounds, Northern Voices

Wilf Carter (Montana Slim) crossed the Canadian-U.S. border in 1935 to further his career as a country musician. Hank Snow moved to Nashville in 1945, reaching the stage of the Grand Ole Opry in 1950. Twenty-one years later Neil Young settled into Nashville’s Quadraphonic Sound Studio to record songs that would be featured on the album Harvest. Today, Nashville’s New West Records represents country-inspired Canadian musicians Daniel Romano and Corb Lund. These artists make up part of a notable history of northerners blending North American identities through country music. A significant and overlooked part of this history came to light in 2014 with the release of the Native North America (Vol. 1): Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Country 1966-1985 compilation from Light In The Attic Records. NNA (Vol. 1) is a collection of limited releases from Indigenous musicians from across Canada and Alaska. It is significant because it makes audible that Indigenous musicians performed—and continue to perform—country, folk, and rock music, challenging the borders and identities forced on them through settler-colonialism. These artists bring together southern sounds and northern voices—often using northern Indigenous languages—to articulate different experiences under North American colonization. This paper begins to explore how artists such as Willie Dunn, John Angaiak, and William Tagoona unsettle North American boundaries and identities through country music. This paper also begins to explore the opportunities and challenges this compilation presents to white settler listeners.

Fire and Failure: Studio Technology, Environmental Control, and the Politics of Progress

This article examines studio architecture and the new light and sound infrastructure that shaped the American film industry's transition to sound in the 1920s. The shift to darkened sound studios intensified studio designers' ongoing efforts to achieve complete environmental control, previously by simulating natural phenomena like sunlight, and now also by managing the studio soundscape. With this control, however, came undesirable by-products, especially the risk of fire. Although long overshadowed by fires in film theaters, studio fires plagued the industry into the early years of sound. This article focuses on a 1929 fire that took ten lives during a Pathé production in Manhattan. Using a mix of Rick Altman's "crisis historiography" and what Paul Virilio terms "techno-analysis," it calls for greater attention to the ecological, labor, and gender politics of cinema's technological history and its persistent and uncontainable failures.

Kenneth Bilby, Words of our Mouth, Meditations of our Heart: Pioneering Musicians of Ska, Rocksteady, Reggae, and Dancehall

Despite the abundance of publications on Jamaican music in the last twenty years, few books have focused on the hard work, creativity, and life experiences of the Jamaican musicians who toiled, often in obscurity, in Jamaican sound studios. Kenneth Bilby’s Words of Our Mouth, Meditations of Our Heart fills that gap with colorful portraits of the unsung heroes of Jamaican ska, rocksteady, reggae, and dancehall. Bilby also documents the contributions of musicians of non-commercial music such as...

‘I didn't think I'd be working on this type of film’:Berberian Sound Studioand British Art Film as Alternative Film History

It could be said that the films of the director Peter Strickland are in many ways exemplars of a rich strain of twenty-first-century British art cinema. Like work by Andrea Arnold, Steve McQueen, Jonathan Glazer, Lynne Ramsay, Ben Wheatley and Sam Taylor-Wood, among others, Strickland's three feature-length films to date are thought-provoking, well-crafted, prestigious, quality productions. But in this article I show that while Strickland's second feature-length film, Berberian Sound Studio, conforms to some of the commonly held understandings of the key traits of British art cinema – especially through its specific history of production and exhibition, its characterisation, its narrative structure, and its evidencing of the vision of an auteur – ultimately it does not sit comfortably within most extant histories of British national cinema or film genre, including art cinema. More than this, though, I argue that in its challenge to such extant critical traditions, Berberian Sound Studio effectively operates as ‘art film as alternative film history’. I demonstrate that it does this through the foregrounding of Strickland's cine-literacy, which notices and in turn foregrounds the historically transnational nature of cinema, and, at the same time, playfully and knowingly disrupts well-established cultural categories and coherent, homogenous histories of cinema.

Tuning Features of Chinese Folk Song Singing: A Case Study of Hua'er Music

The learning and teaching of different singing styles, such as operatic and Chinese folk singing, was often found to be very challenging in professional music education because of the complexity of varied musical properties and vocalizations. By studying the acoustical and musical parameters of the singing voice, this study identified distinctive tuning characteristics of a particular folk music in China-Hua'er music-to inform the ineffective folk singing practices, which were hampered by the neglect of inherent tuning issues in music. Thirteen unaccompanied folk song examples from four folk singers were digitally audio recorded in a sound studio. Using an analyzing toolkit consisting of Praat, PeakFit, and MS Excel, the fundamental frequencies (F0) of these song examples were extracted into sets of "anchor pitches" mostly used, which were further divided into 253 F0 clusters. The interval structures of anchor pitches within each song were analyzed and then compared across 13 examples providing parameters that indicate the tuning preference of this particular singing style. The data analyses demonstrated that all singers used a tuning pattern consisting of five major anchor pitches suggesting a nonequal-tempered bias in singing. This partly verified the pentatonic scale proposed in previous empirical research but also argued a potential misunderstanding of the studied folk music scale that failed to take intrinsic tuning issues into consideration. This study suggests that, in professional music training, any tuning strategy should be considered in terms of the reference pitch and likely tuning systems. Any accompanying instruments would need to be tuned to match the underlying tuning bias.