Tuning of songs

Question

When I hear a song that immediately follows another one - like a DJ mix, the radio, or even on an album where the gap is very short - would it sound wrong if the 2 songs were slightly out of tune with each other?

I can see two possibilities:

1) Songs are always out of tune with each other and we are just very good at retuning our ears to the new one

• or -

2) Musicians are very good at making sure their recordings are always perfectly tuned to a standard (rather than just to each other) and it would sound very odd indeed if I ever heard a segue that was out of tune.

I genuinely have no idea which of these is the case - if any!

EDIT: In response to a comment.

By tuning I mean the tuning of the instruments used in the recording - and hence the tuning that the vocalist will automatically adjust to.

For example, without using a tuning reference, I can tune a guitar to itself, making all 6 strings sound good together, whilst not necessarily being accurately tuned in a technical sense, where A is 440Hz.

If a bass player joins me, he can tune his bass slightly to match me; neither of us are "right", but no-one would know.

If a pianist joins us, that's different prospect; retuning his instrument is a massive undertaking - so we would retune the guitar and bass to match the piano.

My guess is that more recent music will be more likely to be tuned accurately due to the technology being used, but we still regularly hear music from the 80's and earlier - most of which could have been recorded "out of tune".

Answer 1

Unless you're a rare person with perfect pitch, you'd be unlikely to even notice this, let alone be distressed by this. Most people only have "relative pitch" which means they compare a note solely to the notes around it, and not to any universal standard.

That does mean there will be a moment of disconnection at the transition point --but in actual fact, songs modulate keys all the time. It's not uncommon for a section to be in one key and another section in another (for example, the bridge in "Still Crazy After All These Years," or the constantly modulating key in "Love on Top"). So I would think that your #1 is more likely to be the case.

Would it make a difference if the songs were not just in different keys, but in incompatible tunings (i.e., a different A than 440)? I'm not basing this on much but my own judgement, but I don't think so --not after the first couple of notes. You can test this out for yourself with this video featuring the same song played in different tunings.