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The “432 Hz vs. 440 Hz” conspiracy theory

jakubmarian.com

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Re: The “432 Hz vs. 440 Hz” conspiracy theory

#101

Post by LandoCalrissian »

mmkk wrote: post #75
dmix wrote: post #46

Decided to try searching this and found this lovely site: > A=432 Hz, known as Verdi’s ‘A’ is an alternative tuning that is mathematically consistent with the universe. Music based on 432Hz transmits beneficial healing energy, because it is a pure tone of math fundamental to nature https://attunedvibrations.com/432hz/ Oh new age pseudo science. My mom loves this stuff and I never fully understood why. My sister gets…

Star Wars is nonsense too but it makes people happy. Nonsense spreads not just because of apathy.

You leave my space wizards out of this!

Re: The “432 Hz vs. 440 Hz” conspiracy theory

#102

Post by Normal_gaussian »

fl0wenol wrote: post #96
na85 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it work the other way? I'm Canadian and a huge part of our culture is defined by the ways we are unlike Americans. Can't imagine Anglo-French culture works quite like that.

And as an American, I don't know anyone who doesn't like Canada or Canadians, while simultaneously not understanding what makes it different other than basically superficial stuff (i.e. french language, metric, being polite, etc.) So I don't think we have that England/France relationship at all either. It seems pretty special on the world stage. From anyone familiar with it, is New Zealand and Australia's relationshi…

NZ/Aus is pretty special. Most analogous to USA/Canada

The original point was that Britain/France have the superficial differences that let us be friends (USA/Canada) yet we have some deeper differences and historical differences that let us be enemies (USA/Russia).

The nice part of it is that we can carrot and stick ourselves with one neighbour, instead of making our enemy the devil incarnate.

Re: The “432 Hz vs. 440 Hz” conspiracy theory

#103

Post by mike_hock »

anigbrowl wrote: post #76

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 dura…

> However this falls flat

Pun intended?

Re: The “432 Hz vs. 440 Hz” conspiracy theory

#104

Post by rdiddly »

a3n wrote: post #19

> the BBC required their orchestras to tune to 440 Hz instead of 439 Hz because 439 is a prime number, and the corresponding frequency is hard to generate electronically. I followed, until this. Earlier he debunks the significance of 432 per second (including that it's a sum of four consecutive primes), because a second is an arbitrary length of time. But now he says that 439 per second is difficult to generate elect…

Sibling comments have the explanation, but good catch. It so happens 439 Hertz = 1000 Diddly (a just-now-invented unit defined as "cycles per 2.277904328 seconds")

Re: The “432 Hz vs. 440 Hz” conspiracy theory

#105

Post by siglesias »

cageek wrote: post #99

[Posted on my blog]( http://www.krisconstable.com/432-hz-vs-440-hz-conspiracy-the... ) While I appreciate Jakub’s breakdown for the reader to get to explaining why the 432 number itself is effectively fabricated for convenience, he eventually states: “_The 432 Hz tuning, the divine tuning of nature itself, is ultimately defined as one vibration per 21279240.2083 periods of radiation of an uncommon chemical element_”…

This can be difficult because everybody has been overexposed to 440, which is nearly impossible to control for. Even if you log an effect it can be argued that the effect is not of 432 but of a certain deviation from a norm.

Re: The “432 Hz vs. 440 Hz” conspiracy theory

#106

Post by robbyt »

anigbrowl wrote: post #76

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 dura…

A friend of mine is a professional mix engineer in NYC. He's worked with several large artists, you've probably heard of. He strongly believes in setting numerically interesting values for things like eq, gain reduction, song length, delay time in ms, etc.

Re: The “432 Hz vs. 440 Hz” conspiracy theory

#107

Post by zokier »

bravo22 wrote: post #23
a3n wrote: post #19

> the BBC required their orchestras to tune to 440 Hz instead of 439 Hz because 439 is a prime number, and the corresponding frequency is hard to generate electronically. I followed, until this. Earlier he debunks the significance of 432 per second (including that it's a sum of four consecutive primes), because a second is an arbitrary length of time. But now he says that 439 per second is difficult to generate elect…

439 being a prime would be an issue if you were up multiplying a lower frequency to generate it, for example using a PLL. However it is such a slow signal that it would be generated by dividing down a higher frequency. For example you can divide it down from an 18 MHz clock. So, nope his claim doesn't make sense.

439 from 18M requires a divisor of 41, which does sound trivial. Meanwhile 440 from 1M requires only dividing by 5 and 2 when first multiplied by 11, which might have been significantly simpler than dividing by 41.

I wonder if there is some easy way of figuring out the simplest base number-multiplier-divisor chains for getting certain numbers?

Re: The “432 Hz vs. 440 Hz” conspiracy theory

#108

Post by mrb »

anigbrowl wrote: post #76

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 dura…

"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."

Yup. Another example: in most of the world (where the television system is PAL or SECAM) movies are played on TV or released on DVD at 25 frame per second. But to achieve this frame rate, they take the theatrical film release at 24 fps and speed the video and audio up by 25/24th (4.17%). Of course almost nobody knows this because nobody notices it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/576i#PAL_speed-up

For NTSC, the film release is sped down by a much smaller amount (0.1%) during the 3:2 pulldown to adjust from 30 to the exact 29.97 fps that NTSC needs.

Re: The “432 Hz vs. 440 Hz” conspiracy theory

#109

Post by seandougall »

robbyt wrote: post #106
anigbrowl wrote: post #76

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 dura…

A friend of mine is a professional mix engineer in NYC. He's worked with several large artists, you've probably heard of. He strongly believes in setting numerically interesting values for things like eq, gain reduction, song length, delay time in ms, etc.

A not-insubstantial part of the engineer's job is to impress the artists. Mastering engineers even more so.

Re: The “432 Hz vs. 440 Hz” conspiracy theory

#110

Post by acqq »

If you lived in Europe, most of the films you've watched on TV were in the (when insisting on the exactness) "wrong" pitch: recorded with A = 440 Hz, but played at A = 458.3 Hz. Have you ever noticed?

http://www.michaeldvd.com/Articles/PALSpeedUp/PALSpeedUp.asp

And the 432 Hz tone became exactly 450 Hz using the same transfer.

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