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

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

71–80 of 93 posts

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

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The study makes no claims about why 432Hz is better, it just reports what they measured. I listened to the examples in the video myself and the 432Hz version really did feel about 1.0185 times as relaxing.

>> "I listened to the examples in the video myself and the 432Hz version really did feel about 1.0185 times as relaxing." I tried to reproduce your result but I came out with 1.0815 times as relaxing. Are you sure you didn't commit a transcription error -- I doubled-checked mine. Also: I had the BASS BOOST turned on my $9 bookshelf speakers while I listened. Did you have BASS BOOST on or off?

[deleted]

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

#72
post #36

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 manda…

Apparently their pitch standard was an Oboe at room temperature (20 degrees) which went up just enough to make up that 4 Hz difference compared to tuned at 15 degrees against that fork. It's a neat little hack.

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

#75

Does anyone know how they got a soundtrack tuned to 432Hz? If it was just an existing soundtrack slowed down a bit, that's not going to sound right. Did the study get an orchestra to record a whole soundtrack at 432Hz?

Slowing down music by that much isn't going to make anything sound noticeably off. You need to go quite a bit further for timbres to start sounding weird. 440 to 432 isn't even half a semitone.

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

#76
post #5

As an avid vaporwave listener, I’d wager that listening to music slowed down / pitched down has a calming psychological effect in general. In other words, 432hz is not some magic number, it’s better because it’s lower.

> As an avid vaporwave listener, I’d wager that listening to music slowed down / pitched down has a calming psychological effect in general. slowing something down from 440 to 432 that's three minutes long will result in less than 1 screen frame of difference time you wouldn't be able to tell the difference

(3 minutes * (440 / 432 - 1)) * 24 FPS = 80 frames

You're not wrong that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference as long as you don't have perfect pitch (it's a fraction of a semitone), but you might want to check your math.

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

#77

Does anyone know how they got a soundtrack tuned to 432Hz? If it was just an existing soundtrack slowed down a bit, that's not going to sound right. Did the study get an orchestra to record a whole soundtrack at 432Hz?

Slowing down music by that much isn't going to make anything sound noticeably off. You need to go quite a bit further for timbres to start sounding weird. 440 to 432 isn't even half a semitone.

Right, but we already know slower music is more soothing, so it’s a confounding effect.

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

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get your pun. Am I missing something?

The joke, intentional or not, is that he has not farmed enough karma to downvote.

My bi-weekly comment has not improved the situation.

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

#79
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dissonant with what? I don't think a tone can be dissonant in and of itself, dissonance is a foul combination of waves that are just slightly misaligned.

Dissonant with any western music that might be playing in the key of C.

B is in the key of C. It's the seventh degree of the scale. It's the seventh of the I chord and the 3rd of the V chord and more. That's not dissonant in any way, shape or form.

Nevermind that obviously music is written in more keys than C anyway.

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

#80
post #3

The fact that music tuned to 432 Hz might sound slightly off to listeners might explain the change in attention, which in turn might explain the change in heart rate. It would have been helpful measure other tuning values like 430 or 445 Hz to determine if it's caused by 432 Hz specifically.

I'm a classically trained pianist with near perfect pitch. I have ABXed myself with half-hour gaps on music re-tuned to 432, and music re-turned to 432, then 440, to control for that it has to sound like it's been retuned. I have Audeze planar magnetics and a relatively quiet apartment. I'm not able to tell the difference, even on music I listen to very frequently. It's all horseshit.

Mic drop comment.

Hard agree. Worked for an instrument builder for a decade, of fixed-pitch esoteric instruments. Client community had a distinct minority who went all in on such things as 432 Hz woo-woo.

Happy to make them, with the footnote that instruments made to this or other custom-request references could not play in concert with most others.

No discernible difference, with one interesting qualifier: for acoustic (or emulated) instruments one is familiar with, there is an audible shift in timbre correlated with tuning to different resonances, most dramatically if you retune a given specific instrument.

This is because you are shifting the fundamentals and overtones of the instrument while keeping the natural resonances of the instrument fixed. This naturally produces a different "signature" of relationships between such frequencies and in the case of the instruments I was close to, in their internal resonance, which was completely defining of their "character."

(Something similar is going on with pitch-shifting algorithms which do "formant correction" to try to keep voices sounding natural within modest shift of pitch... we have deeply internalized expectations wrt the various resonant landmarks in human voices because of the bounded variation in their geometry and the physics of voice production; this is less so but absolutely still true of familiar acoustic instruments.)

One of the similarly anecdotal but significant "tells" of the placebo nature of perceived difference in 432 Hz and 440 Hz is to my memory, very few players were incapable of telling instrument key, let alone pitch referent, based on hearing them alone. (Knowledge of available instrument keys and tunings was commonly deep given the cult following they received.)

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