I understand there’s a specific sound musicians needs. How was that note determined and set?
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The musical notes are all based on ratios. If you take say middle C and then go to C one octave up you should have doubled the frequency for example. A given instrument is tuned to a specific set of notes, in order to be able to play pieces of music designed for those notes. The various scales are sets of ratios that sound good to the human ear, and the notes of a given instrument are chosen to allow the instrument to play one or more scales.
In general it is not necessary to tune to specific frequencies, rather you can pick one of the notes your instrument can make, for example a single string of your guitar. Then you adjust the frequencies of the other notes (strings) to be the correct ratio with respect to that first note.
In an orchestra you have multiple instruments and they do need to match. You can’t really tune a piano in real time, so the other instruments are adjusted to match a particular note on the piano.
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