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

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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

#31

Post by mandmandam »

tripa wrote: post #19
acadapter wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, 432 is much easier to work with when you're factoring - as music demands. As well though, many musicians can certainly hear the difference, as pointed out.

Incidentally, there are 432,000 seconds in 12 hours.

Also fun - while continuing to acknowledge the somewhat arbitrary nature of human units - the diameter of the moon is 2159.1 miles - remarkably close to half of 4,320. The Sun's diameter is 865,370 miles - very close to twice 432,000. That they look the same size from Earth is wild to me, and suggests that Pythagoras may have been onto something with the music of the spheres bit.

Also, just because our units could be otherwise, doesn't mean they are entirely arbitrary. I believe that things like that have a sort of wisdom of the crowds, evolution over time thing going on. Like other aspects of language, there is more to its development than is immediately obvious.

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

#34

Post by insickness »

cannam wrote: post #16
rob74 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

You can transparently slow music without changing the pitch or pitch music without changing the tempo far more than 2%, which was what was done here. This technology has been in use by DJs spinning CDs since the 90s and is also used in music production. Depending on the source material, you can actually double the pitch or tempo with no artifacts.

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

#36

Post by stfwn »

jacquesm wrote: post #14

Don't go breaking the Treaty of Versailles now! https://net.lib.byu.edu/~rdh7/wwi/versa/versa9.html art. 282 (22) Convention of November 16 and 19, 1885, regarding the establishment of a concert pitch.

That's such a cool nugget of information. The Versailles one is apparently A = 435 Hz, the 'diapason normal'. Nowadays we mostly use concert pitch at A = 440 Hz. The 99% Invisible podcast has a mini-story on it:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/mini-stories-volume-8...

They say that after Versailles:

> London’s Royal Philharmonic Society would still tune higher to about 439 Hz though. This was because the mandate specified that Concert A should be 435 Hz according to a tuning fork of a specific weight at 15 degrees Celsius. The temperature was specified so that the metal tuning fork could be accurately reproduced, but British orchestras reasoned that their concert halls were warmer than that, and so to compensate they would tune higher.

I wonder if they tested their assumption with a conformant tuning fork.

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

#37

Post by cannam »

insickness wrote: post #34
cannam wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

You can transparently slow music without changing the pitch or pitch music without changing the tempo far more than 2%, which was what was done here. This technology has been in use by DJs spinning CDs since the 90s and is also used in music production. Depending on the source material, you can actually double the pitch or tempo with no artifacts.

I agree with you that you can often do this in a way that is still pleasant to listen to. But timestretching/pitch shifting is very far from being transparent in the way that a decent resampler is.

Even a small shift will introduce some audible artifacts in most music. Will they be more or less apparent to the listener than the difference between recordings tuned to A=440 or 432 would be? I don't know. Depends on the music and the listener, I imagine. That would (be one of the many, many unstated things that would) matter to a paper like this.

(For what it's worth, I wrote and maintain a widely-used timestretcher library. Possibly this means I am more aware of the limitations than the strengths of such technology)

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

#38

Post by bl0b »

insickness wrote: post #30
nixpulvis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wager your talking more about BPM than the pitch of each note. Perhaps there's some argument that lower tuning naturally gives rise to lower BPM when composing a song, but I'm skeptical of that. If you take a song and transpose it or detune it a bit, you don't mess with the rhythem do you? So if we ignore the tempo; What makes the flattening of a note "calming"? If anything I might become a bit excited or agitated…

It's not just the BPM. When music is pitched down, it loses some of it's shrillness. The lack of higher pitches can have a calming effect because that's where the ears get most fatigued and feel the most "pain" from listening. There's a whole genre of music called Slowed and Reverbed that slows all kinds of music down. Here's an example of a slowed song and a it's original: Cigarettes After Sex - Slowed https://youtu…

Don't forget DJ Screw with chopped and screwed! Nowadays when people copy that style it is referred to as 'slowed and throwed'
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