The “432 Hz vs. 440 Hz” conspiracy theory • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by criley2 » Mon, Oct 24, 2016, 7:41 PM UTC

mrb wrote: post #108

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%…

Another example is the kind of dastardly television trick of increasing the speed of a television program to shorten it and thus increase the amount of advertising space that can be run alongside the program.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6i1VVikRu0

This video claims that TBS is currently increasing the speed of Seinfeld episodes a whopping 9%, reducing a 25 minute episode to some 22.5 minutes.

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

#132

Post by gh02t » Mon, Oct 24, 2016, 7:44 PM UTC

nonbel wrote: post #95

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…

I wouldn't be so sure there is nothing special about the duration of a second. It comes from dividing a day into two sets of 12, then those 12 into five sets of 12 (12x5=60), then those 60s into 60 each. We know our bodies do follow circadian rhythms, so you have the initial link to length of day. Then everything else is split into sets of 12, a number with exceptional properties that natural selection may optimize t…

> I wouldn't be so sure there is nothing special about the duration of a second. It comes from dividing a day into two sets of 12, then those 12 into five sets of 12 (12x5=60), then those 60s into 60 each.

That's exactly why, actually. This is what the second was once defined as, but the problem is that the length of a day varies slightly - up to ~8s depending on the time of year and other seconds. As the article mentions, the amount of time that is defined as one second is now taken as an arbitrary fraction of the decay time for Cs-137 that is close the mean value of the length of the second defined relative to the time it takes the planet to rotate.

In terms of keeping time in our common lives it's not really a problem for there to be a little bit of ambiguity in how long a day/minute/second is, but this is important for things that rely on precision timing - like tuning in music. It'd also be crazy hard to keep track of how long a second is at any given moment, since some of the variation is random from tidal forces.

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

#133

Post by syntheticnature » Mon, Oct 24, 2016, 7:46 PM UTC

nonbel wrote: post #95

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…

I wouldn't be so sure there is nothing special about the duration of a second. It comes from dividing a day into two sets of 12, then those 12 into five sets of 12 (12x5=60), then those 60s into 60 each. We know our bodies do follow circadian rhythms, so you have the initial link to length of day. Then everything else is split into sets of 12, a number with exceptional properties that natural selection may optimize t…

Except that our day length is also changing -- very slowly, but changing it is. Further, given that the human clock, disconnected from day/night feedback, apparently treats 24.2 hours as a day.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_clock

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

#134

Post by dspig » Mon, Oct 24, 2016, 7:46 PM UTC

fibo wrote: post #128

Mathematician Here: Pitagora, who discovered music, studied that the lower sound we can Here clear is 27hz, and 432 is a multiple of 27. 27hz is A, and so it is 432hz. 432hz makes a lot of sense, other than that it is up to the director if the orchestra tune on 432 or 440, but since the vibration is so powerful, especially the resonance, it makes sense to use 432 to keep harmony, in my opinion.

Hmm, it's not as if Pythagoras could measure exactly 27 Hz, or that we all hear down to exactly 27.00, or that it's easy to generate a pure tone that low without clearly audible harmonics. So I guess I'm not convinced.

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

#135

Post by masklinn » Mon, Oct 24, 2016, 7:49 PM UTC

dhimes wrote: post #116

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…

The second is defined as the time it takes for two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the 133 Ce atom to make 9,192,631,770 transitions. How is that not special?

It's less special and more pretty much arbitrary. It's a slightly fudged mean[0] of the number of transitions matching the ephemeral second according to Markowitz, Hall, Essen and Parry ("Frequency of Cesium in terms of ephemeris time", 1957), with the original paper adopting "a probable error of ±20".

[0] of 4 measurements (761, 767, 771, 780) — the exact mean being 769.75

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

#136

Post by todd8 » Mon, Oct 24, 2016, 7:51 PM UTC

The article mentions pitch inflation and it reminds me of something I learned about symphony orchestras.

I dated an symphony oboe player for a few years. Oboes players play the note used to tune the orchestra before performances because the oboe has a penetrating sound and has very limited tuning capability (due to their construction) so other instruments are tuned to the oboe.

She said that the string players often wanted a higher "brighter" pitch than the true pitch for middle C. She had to carry an electronic tuner (about the size of a smart phone) to verify her pitch and resolve disputes with the some of the string players.

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

#137

Post by woliveirajr » Mon, Oct 24, 2016, 7:58 PM UTC

dhimes wrote: post #116

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…

The second is defined as the time it takes for two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the 133 Ce atom to make 9,192,631,770 transitions. How is that not special?

It's not a power of 2 or 10 :-)

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

#138

Post by johncolanduoni » Mon, Oct 24, 2016, 7:58 PM UTC

dhimes wrote: post #116

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…

The second is defined as the time it takes for two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the 133 Ce atom to make 9,192,631,770 transitions. How is that not special?

Because that definition was grandfathered in such that it matched the previous definition of a second up to the previously specified precision. You've just moved the arbitrary part to the number 9,192,631,770. The same thing was done for the meter (defined such that the speed of light is precisely 299,792,458 m/s), ampere (current which produces 2 × 10−7 N/m of force between two parallel conductors). There's plans to do the same thing for the kilogram using Plank's constant, but for now we're stuck with the prototype kilogram whose mass unfortunately changes more than we'd like.

I could see making a case that Planck time is special enough for 440 vs 432 to matter, but it is so far off the scale of human hearing that its even integer points would form an effectively continuous scale when it comes to audio.

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

#139

Post by jackhack » Mon, Oct 24, 2016, 8:04 PM UTC

hammock wrote: post #50

For those wondering, 432 Hz is about 32 cents below 440 Hz, or nearly a quartertone flat.

There has been a "hertz" war in the bagpipe world for the past 200 years with the pitch raising steadily higher over the decades. Ancient pipes' "A" were historically tuned at 440hz, but modern pipes are tuned around 476-480hz!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Highland_Bagpipe

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

#140

Post by mikey_p » Mon, Oct 24, 2016, 8:04 PM UTC

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 lot of those are significant though, EQ maintains relationship to pitch and tone, delay is directly related to rhythm, etc. The main issue is that most of these are relative to inputs, etc, with a few exceptions.

Edit: An exception would be trying to 'fatten' the sound of an acoustic guitar and using a 25-35ms delay, which puts it close enough that it's not perceivable as a delay, but will provide a noticeable effect on the tone of the guitar.