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How did they tune instruments back in past? Did they know that A4 is 440Hz back in 1700s? Without pitch measuring instruments, won't the pianos made by two different manufacturers sound different? How did the tune two adjacent keys in a piano to be exactly two semitones apart? Tuning forks has been around for a long time, but they can only provide relative tuning.

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  • There's another open question https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/103502/reference-pitch-before-the-invention-of-the-tuning-fork?noredirect=1#comment177855_103502 asking the same thing – Duston Aug 17 '20 at 13:20
  • There is no answer in that post – User Aug 17 '20 at 16:26
  • Answers here https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/75624/how-did-musicians-do-absolute-tuning-in-the-middle-ages – piiperi Reinstate Monica Aug 17 '20 at 16:53
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    There were no pianos in the middle ages. The piano was invented in 1700 or thereabouts, a couple of centuries after the end of the middle ages. And they didn't know that A was 440 Hz in the 1700s, for two reasons: (1) they couldn't measure time precisely enough to measure sound frequencies, and (2) A wasn't generally 440 Hz in those days; it was usually higher or lower. "How did the tune two adjacent keys in a piano to be exactly two semitones apart?": They did so by tuning them relatively, but there were multiple sizes of semitone, so "exactly two semitones apart" isn't meaningful. – phoog Aug 17 '20 at 23:12

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