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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

#81

Post by School-Cotton »

Interestingly, his argument for dismissing the conspiracy theory basically boils down to type theory.

It's not legal to "convert" Hertz to other units willy-nilly, especially because Hertz is tagged with an attribute that says "this relies on arbitrary constants", meaning you would have to multiply 432 by some conversion factor before you can compare it to pure numbers.

Thinking about things in terms of types (in a fuzzy, intuitive way) like this is a very powerful mental shortcut that is useful surprisingly often.

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

#82

Post by tetraodonpuffer »

haberman wrote: post #43

> orchestras specializing in older music may sometimes tune in the tuning close to the one for which the piece was originally written, which may range from 415 Hz to 470 Hz). I can say as someone who performs a lot of Baroque music (c. 1600 - 1750) that there is a relatively common standard of A=415 for music of this period. A=415 is often referred to as "Baroque pitch." This mainly applies to ensembles that speciali…

it also depends if you are performing in ensembles together with historical instruments that can't change their pitch, or on those instruments on their own, for example for organs you can find examples up to A=465

This said I think it's more fun to talk about temperaments than absolute pitch, after all unless you have absolute pitch I don't think you can hear much of a difference between something played at 432 or 440, but going from equal temperament to something else is a lot more noticeable and makes a lot more impact to the music if it's written taking that into account.

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

#83

Post by costcopizza »

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…

Eh-- pick your battles.

If family members get a positive placebo effect from listening to "5 Hours High Quality BEST 432hz Meditation Healing Chakra" on YouTube...Who cares?

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

#86

Post by anigbrowl »

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…

She's right to get angry. There's nothing special about 432Hz (see my comment above on it's absolutely arbitrary nature), BUT the numerology that falls out of musical harmony is is indeed special and makes most of human race happy because of the aesthetic satisfaction that Pythagorean harmony (or even it's equal-tempered cousin) delivers to people.

Science is very good at describing things and why they're interesting, but science can't tell you what's beautiful or how to live. I understand your desire to point out the meaningless nature of setting up 432hz as some gold standard and agree with you that it's nonsense, but a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down' you could invest more time in exclaiming over the beauty and meaning of the relative pitch relationships in music, the most popular of which happen to nicely (albeit slightly inaccurately) mirror the ratios of planetary orbital periods. Your sister has the right idea in the wrong context, and you're missing out on some aesthetic insights by overlooking this.

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

#87

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#88

Post by gugagore »

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…

You raise a good point. a second is an arbitrary length, so nothing universally significant about 439 Hz or 432 Hz or etc.

However, when you are trying to build a device that oscillates at x Hz, there are engineering-ly sigificant values. For example (as already mentioned) a 1kHz oscillator might be easier to come by. As an additional example, the AC power in the UK is at 50 Hz, a factor of 440 Hz. So there is a free 50 Hz reference available everywhere, that can be multiplied (with a PLL, which is more robust to, say, temperature differences, than say, building a 50 Hz or 440 Hz reference yourself).

(50 Hz is just an example. AC line frequency probably is not stable enough in the short term to be a useful pitch reference)

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

#89

Post by anigbrowl »

dragonshine wrote: post #51

I have met some very competent musicians who have found 432 tuning to be powerfully effective. When I dug into this, I discovered they were tuning the other notes in the scal to frequencies in whole numbered cycles per second, using tables being passed around. So the real change was in the qualities of intervals ; many of these became far more resonant than the compromised resonant qualities we get with equal tempere…

Just intonation is a system of getting beautiful pythagorean intervals for rich harmonies as the expense of modulation from one key into another (a staple of the western musical tradition for several centuries). It's what makes barbershop quartets enjoyable to listen to. High end electronic instruments let you switch between equal-tempered or other tuning schemas.

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

#90

Post by detaro »

ssttoo wrote: post #60
VeejayRampay wrote: post #5

As a Frenchman, I chuckled at "In Britain, however, the French standard was interpreted in an erroneous way, due to which British orchestras commonly tuned to A = 439 Hz." NOTE: I hope the word chuckle isn't interpreted as condescending, I only meant that this story is almost a perfect parable for our relationship with Great Britain throughout history, one of mutual defiance and refusal to acknowledge the other party…

It's not just French/Britain. The book "How music works" describes how each country and, hell, cities, had different tunings, so an Italian singer with a perfect pitch visiting Germany cannot really perform. Maybe just the local organ builder had a different tuning fork when building the church and everyone tuned from there :) Similar to how people didn't have standard time until relatively recently and the one clock…

But from what I've read the British actually tried to adopt the French standard and made some conversion error, they didn't come up with their own thing independently.
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