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Music Tuned to 440 Hz versus 432 Hz and Health Effects (2019)

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

11–20 of 93 posts

Re: Music Tuned to 440 Hz versus 432 Hz and Health Effects (2019)

#11
post #2

This has been discussed before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29849033 It's a very, very bad study. If you want to know how bad: it would lend equal support to the hypothesis "everyone's heart rate drops 4.8bpm in one day".

I agree, there are too many confounders to draw a conclusion from this, a lot of the things in this study could be just down to random chance.

Re: Music Tuned to 440 Hz versus 432 Hz and Health Effects (2019)

#12
post #10

How did they transform the original music to A=432Hz? If they did it in the naïve way, it would result in a decrease in tempo by almost 2%.

i'm also guessing they didn't test different temperament tunings either, which is a shame given that the whole argument for 432Hz has to do with mathematical symmetry

Nice to see this argument referred to on here.

A 432 A makes the math behind music so much nicer to work with (ignoring legacy baggage).

Re: Music Tuned to 440 Hz versus 432 Hz and Health Effects (2019)

#13
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i'm also guessing they didn't test different temperament tunings either, which is a shame given that the whole argument for 432Hz has to do with mathematical symmetry

Nice to see this argument referred to on here. A 432 A makes the math behind music so much nicer to work with (ignoring legacy baggage).

Why? The length of the second is arbitrary.

Re: Music Tuned to 440 Hz versus 432 Hz and Health Effects (2019)

#16
post #9

How did they transform the original music to A=432Hz? If they did it in the naïve way, it would result in a decrease in tempo by almost 2%.

Good question, but nowadays all video players and platforms are able to increase/decrease the speed of a video without affecting the audio's pitch, so I guess the reverse is also widespread...

It is, but I'm sure the audible artifacts introduced by a pitch shifter would outweigh any perceptual effects due to the change in tuning. It has to be one of the two - either the lower-frequency music is fractionally slower or it has been modified in a non-transparent way - I don't think the article tells us which.

There seem to be other things the article doesn't tell us, such as how the authors verified that the music they used had been tuned to A=440 in the first place (since it's far from universal) or why, given an infinite number of possible tuning frequencies, a great many of which have been chosen by musicians at some point, and given no obvious physical basis for this specific choice, they went for A=432 instead of any other value below 440.

[edit: removed warranted but uncivil snark]

Re: Music Tuned to 440 Hz versus 432 Hz and Health Effects (2019)

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice to see this argument referred to on here. A 432 A makes the math behind music so much nicer to work with (ignoring legacy baggage).

Why? The length of the second is arbitrary.

The length of the second is irrelevant. 432 makes the math easier by virtue of being more easily factorable, with no incidence as to what's heard.

Re: Music Tuned to 440 Hz versus 432 Hz and Health Effects (2019)

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice to see this argument referred to on here. A 432 A makes the math behind music so much nicer to work with (ignoring legacy baggage).

Why? The length of the second is arbitrary.

That's exactly where this 'symmetry' or 'mathematical' argument falls apart. A second is pretty much arbitrary - it's 1/60 of 1/60th of 1/24th of a day, but how long is a day?. And the scientific description ("the time duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the fundamental unperturbed ground-state of the caesium-133 atom.") has no 'magic resonance' with anything either.
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