The “432 Hz vs. 440 Hz” conspiracy theory

> given an A they can identify the C

this is relative pitch

> what does it mean when one claims that they have 'perfect pitch'

someone starting before 6 years old (better chance of things sticking) and being sung "bah-bah-black sheep" with a piano at the correct pitch. So they manage to remember the starting pitch as well as the relative up/down of the melody.

Interestingly, more common in "tonal" language speakers, e.g. Mandarin, where the pitch can make a difference in the meaning of the same word. Apparently "ma" can mean mom, horse, lazy... depending on the pitch and its direction.

Perfect pitch is mostly a curse than a blessing as many notes in the world are off, e.g. a school bell, and hurt the person with the perfect pitch. I hear :)

Neat! I can understand. Also like how some guitarists who sing prefer to tune to Eb. I think it's more of a sonic fit for some registers.

I've always wanted to play heavy strings, so I also explored tuning down. Imagine my surprise seeing what Dimebag Darrell was tuning to for "Floods" on 'Great Southern Trendkill' - C# F# B E G# C. I had trouble getting intonation that worked well for me, so I went ahead and got a Les Paul style Baritone. Definitely a workout, and the opposite of going lighter, but I really dig the tone it puts out. Worth the hand cramps to practice on the 27" scale.

I have been following this for years, being both a sound engineer and a bit of a hippie who knows a lot of other hippies. The basic issue is that 432 is a numerologically interesting number compared to 440. So if it's more interesting it should be better for artistic purposes, goes the argument. However this falls flat as soon as you consider that the 432 is only interesting relative to the completely arbirtrary duration of a second. There is nothing special about the second from a human psychoacoustic point of view. We could have standardized on a longer or shorter time interval, but since we'd been using the Babylonian-originated divisions for centuries in the west the second is what we ended up with.

But unless the music also contains some 1Hz modulation (or a power-of-two multiple thereof) then the 432 base frequency isn't related to anything fundamental in musical terms. Speaking as a DJ, if you take a track and play it a little bit faster or slower it still sounds great or awful as at the default speed in most cases. 432Hz vs 440Hz is a ~2% difference, while DJ equipment commonly allows for +/-10% pitch variation so you can match the pace of different tracks smoothly while people are dancing. Only the very tiny number of people with perfect pitch find this disorienting to listen to. If there were really something special about the duration of the second and the base pitch relative to that, you'd have expected it to emerge from dancefloors years ago. In reality 432Hz is basically cargo cult numerology, something fun to think about when you are not having any success coming up with a kickass tune. And kickass tunes derive their quality from the relative rations of the note pitches, not from some absolute Magic Frequency.

Trust me on this. I really love numerology, sacred geometry and so on, and I try to integrate this into my artistic work regardless of medium. I would love for there to be some special key that would unlock the gate to cosmic/ biological/ quantum harmony and allow my artistic work to automatically echo the heartbeat of the universe. I'm a mystic by temperament and have been looking for such things my whole life. I would go so far as to say I have some religious faith in the significance of such things. But this ain't it.

A guy I met at a party this weekend was explaining this to me (as something he believed) and I was trying to keep the "WTF" off my face. Thanks for posting this.