Grove Music Online

Wolf
Guy Oldham and Mark Lindley

https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.30489
Published in print: 20 January 2001
Published online: 2001

The name given to two undesirable and unpleasant sound effects

which may occur in musical performance, one having to do with
temperament and tuning, the other with a structural peculiarity in
an instrument that sometimes gives rise to intonation difficulties.

On keyboard instruments with tuning systems that do not provide a

note intended for use as A♭, playing G♯ instead, with E♭ in the same
chord, produces an unpleasant effect, supposed to resemble the
howling of a wolf. In Pythagorean intonation the wolf 5th is smaller
than pure by 23½ cents, a quantity known as the Pythagorean
comma. But the wolf 5th in any regular mean-tone temperament
(where the ‘good’ 5ths are tempered two or three times as much as
in equal temperament) is considerably larger than pure (see Mean-
tone). The tuner who follows a scheme containing a wolf 5th might
choose some other location for it than G♯–E♭. C♯–A♭ was occasionally
used in the 15th century and D♯–B♭ in the 17th for mean-tone
temperament; B–F♯ was favoured, or rather disfavoured, by many
15th-century practitioners of Pythagorean intonation. On normal
keyboard instruments, Just intonation is virtually bound to involve
more than one wolf 5th, including one among the diatonic notes, for
instance D–A or G–D.

Apart from the context of tuning systems, the term ‘wolf’ is used to
refer to certain individual notes which, owing to the structure of an
instrument, are too loud or too soft or difficult to play quite in tune,
compared with other notes. This kind of wolf is due to an irregularity
in the resonance of the instrument which either enhances or absorbs
(damps) one particular note, or to a strong and sharply defined
resonance frequency that happens to be slightly sharper or flatter
than some note of the scale. The latter situation is often found at the
major 6th or perhaps 7th above the open G-string of the cello, and is
sometimes rectified by squeezing the body of the instrument with
the knees or by attaching a ‘wolf mute’ to the G-string behind the
bridge (see W. Güth: ‘The Wolf Note in the Cello’, The Strad, xc,
1979, pp.355–7, 434–5); in violins of poor craftsmanship a wolf is
often found an octave above the open G-string. On the old French
(and also English) bassoon, the a was characteristically weak and
unstable because its hole was particularly small and high up on the
butt joint. Another classic example occurred on the old valved french
horn in F, where frequently either the b♭′ or b′ (notated f″ or f♯″)
would be weaker than adjacent semitones, and a strong lip was
needed to avoid ‘cracking’ the note. When a pipe organ is placed in a

Page 1 of 2
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).
 resonant building, some notes are liable to be emphasized by this
resonance, and these are softened during regulation by slightly
closing the foot-holes.

Page 2 of 2
PRINTED FROM Oxford Music Online. © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an
individual user may print out a PDF of a single article in Oxford Music Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy).