The great 440 Hz conspiracy, and why all of our music is wrong

[pjcrawford]

An interesting story of how 'A' became 440 Hz and why many people believe it should be 432 Hz. The change really does change how music sounds.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4194106/4...spiracy-music/

[DavidKOS]

This is more of that A440 is Nazi evil BS that has been posted on music forums for some years now.

I have posted on many forums refuting these bogus claims about pitch.

No pitch is cosmically "better" than another and the Nazis had nothing to do with A440.

Do some serious research and you'll see that all these claims about some lower pitch being more spiritual or something are just snake oil.

from my other forum posts

Sorry guys this is well-intended bull****. Pitch has never had any special standard based on any "universal" issues. I've seen this article before, and it is just not true.

Even if you try to rationalize universal vibrations into some pitch reference, there is no one standard pitch to which everything resonates.

Cousto in "The Cosmic Octave" ISBN 0-940795-04-3, 1987, takes all sorts of planetary vibrations and by octave transposition figures out the pitch.

So, according to him, there are several pitches at which one can claim cosmic harmony; A435 is CLOSE to one of them based on the average solar day, 435.92; the sidereal day is A437.11, and so on. The "tone of Venus" is A442.457, while the moon is A445.86.

Plus there is a list of tuning sources from european history, and as many are ABOVE A440 and are below, and there was little standardization.

Don't let that article scare you.

The Ancient Temples Were Designed for 110 Hz Chanting + The Musical Scale Conspiracy (440 Hz Vs. 432, page 1

"It has been recently discovered that the Ancient temples were designed for 110 Hz chanting. The oldest temples examined by experts are about 6,000 years old. "

100...220....440.....so what's the problem - chant away!

Ancient chanting influenced temple designs

"In subsequent OTSF testing, stone rooms in ancient temples in Malta were found to match the same pattern of resonance, registering at the frequency of 110 or 111 hz. This turns out to be a significant level
for the human brain. Whether it was deliberate or not, the people who spent time in such an environment were exposing themselves to vibrations that impacted their minds."

"Findings indicated that at 110 hz the patterns of activity over the prefrontal cortex abruptly shifted, resulting in a relative deactivation of the language center and a temporary switching from left to right-sided dominance related to emotional processing. People regularly exposed to resonant sound in the frequency of 110 or 111 hz would have been "turning on" an area of the brain that bio-behavioral scientists believe relates to mood, empathy and social behavior."​

and so on

[Nevin]

As said above total crap that has been debunked for a long time. You can tune to any pitch you want but if you want to play with other people a standard is useful.

[Bertram Henze]

[T.D.Nydn]

David,,,so if I wanted to turn on my brain,what note on the mandolin is 110 or 111hz?....

[foldedpath]

David,,,so if I wanted to turn on my brain,what note on the mandolin is 110 or 111hz?....

Can't do it on a mandolin, it's too low. The 110 Hz note is A2, the second to lowest open string on a guitar. You could do it on an octave mandolin, second fret on the low G string.

Knock yourself out.

[Mark Gunter]

Western culture and indeed, mankind as a whole in some respects, has already had the centuries of religious, scientific and musicological struggle to get to the point of standardization on 12-TETT, and many of our cultures (not all) have now begun to standardize concert pitch at A440 Hertz.

I find studying the history to be enlightening, but listening to the current conspiracy theories is just boring.

As noted in a few other recent threads about different topics, people will always resist standardization in anything. I think it may be a testament to the fact that each person is unique in his or her thought processes. And I would further tend to believe that a number of folk will not only resist standardization, but irrationally fear it to the point of believing crazy theories that argue against whatever is the current norm.

Maybe they need to find a secluded place to chant a mantra at 110 Hz for awhile, and lighten up. Modern tuners allow you to calibrate the concert pitch to various frequencies, so if you don't like 440, change your tuning and play solo. What a marvelous age we're in.

[DavidKOS]

Modern tuners allow you to calibrate the concert pitch to various frequencies, so if you don't like 440, change your tuning and play solo. What a marvelous age we're in.

Great advice!

A440 is for playing with other musicians!

[DavidKOS]

David,,,so if I wanted to turn on my brain,what note on the mandolin is 110 or 111hz?....

Can't do it on a mandolin, it's too low. The 110 Hz note is A2, the second to lowest open string on a guitar. You could do it on an octave mandolin, second fret on the low G string.

Knock yourself out.

Any A will do on the mandolin, but I assume you have to play it over and over, sort of like the story about Mullah Nasruddin and his robab.
Seriously, I included that part of the response to deal with the "spiritual" aspects.

[Jacob]

Sometimes I fight back against A 440 Hz. I swap in the A 415 Hz tuning slide on my ancient trombone and go for Baroque.

[Mark Gunter]

I like that, sometimes you just gotta go for Baroque

[Bertram Henze]

The change really does change how music sounds.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4194106/4...spiracy-music/

The 2 Coldplay videos shown there for comparison both succeed in making me feel anger and aggression, because the singer practises the same three notes over and over and still never arrives at proper intonation Nothing new or mysterious revealed there.

[farmerjones]

12 post and nobody mentions the brown note. !?!?!?!?

[Bertram Henze]

12 posts trying not to escalate

[OneChordTrick]

12 posts trying not to escalate

Think that went wrong when someone mentioned Coldplay

[foldedpath]

12 post and nobody mentions the brown note. !?!?!?!?

Mandolin doesn't go low enough for that one either. Hard to pull off on a purely acoustic instrument too, although maybe you could hit it on a sub-contrabass flute:

[sblock]

Interested parties should read the Wikipedia article on how we converged on the A = 440 Hz (ISO 16) standard, found by clicking here. See also this, to learn more.

The whole 432 Hz thing is a whack-a-mole conspiracy theory, for folks with the tinfoil hats. This has about as much credibility as the flat earth theory. No, it does not impart healing benefits. No, it does not have cosmic resonance or universal harmony (whatever that means). No, the Nazis are not responsible for our use of A = 440Hz. No, it does not relate in any way to the Golden Ratio (which happens to be an irrational number, whereas 432Hz is an integer frequency). No, it is not some integral multiple of the Schummann resonances (lightning-induced earth resonances), which have too broad a frequency spectrum to be meaningful (moreover, even the central Schumann frequency of 7.83Hz, multiplied up, gives 430.6 Hz, not 432). No, not all ancient instruments (or more modern Tibetan bowls) are tuned to some multiple of 432 Hz -- just some cherry-picked examples that happen to be close. Most aren't. And no, no theory of music favors it at all: music theory is based on pitch RELATIONS (that is, relative pitches, or frequency ratios), not on absolute pitches. No, Mozart did not use a personal tuning of 432 Hz for his music (In fact, Mozart's piano, likely tuned by Stein in Vienna, was based on a fork from 1780 with the pitch A = 421.6 Hz). Neither did Verdi or Hayden use 432 Hz -- all bogus "facts."

A = 432 Hz has no more, or less, significance than A = 440 Hz. Furthermore, there is no particular reason to pick the "A" note to standardize upon, in the first place! We could have collectively chosen a middle C note to standardize upon, or any other note we chose, as a basis. In fact "scientific pitch," a.k.a. Sauveur pitch or philosophical pitch, sets C=256Hz, as a convenient power of two. This standard would give A = 430.5Hz, and it dates back to 1713. A lot of physics class demonstration tuning forks have C=256 Hz, by the way.

Please don't believe all the BS you read on the internet.

[Jairo Ramos]

Mandolin doesn't go low enough for that one either. Hard to pull off on a purely acoustic instrument too, although maybe you could hit it on a sub-contrabass flute:

The Brown Note instrument development is top secret in The Pentagon...

[SincereCorgi]

Furthermore, there is no particular reason to pick the "A" note to standardize upon, in the first place! We could have collectively chosen a middle C note to standardize upon, or any other note we chose, as a basis.

Well, at least it's the first note of the alphabet. What kind of weirdo system chooses an A natural minor scale as its easiest-to-write scale and then has everybody start with the third mode of it?

[DavidKOS]

Well, at least it's the first note of the alphabet. What kind of weirdo system chooses an A natural minor scale as its easiest-to-write scale and then has everybody start with the third mode of it?

Because it is the white keys on a piano.

[sblock]

Because it is the white keys on a piano.

Yup. White keys. But we could have started with middle C and also used just the white keys. Or with any other letter of the alphabet from A to G, and used whatever the piano gave starting with that. Don't forget that the A reference pitch is just a single tone! It's not being used to define any scale or mode, when used in this context (i.e., it is not suggesting anything like "A natural minor"). So it's not "weirdo" in that sense. But it is musically arbitrary, and chosen for convenience as a standard.

[Tom Haywood]

. In fact "scientific pitch," a.k.a. Sauveur pitch or philosophical pitch, sets C=256Hz, as a convenient power of two. This standard would give A = 430.5Hz, and it dates back to 1713. A lot of physics class demonstration tuning forks have C=256 Hz, by the way.

A=430.5 Hz. That's mighty close to the Schumann Resonance frequency multiplied up to 430.6 Hz. Science, philosophy, physics, math, 430.5 or 6, converging... Dang, I'm starting to see mystical connections...

[SincereCorgi]

Don't forget that the A reference pitch is just a single tone! It's not being used to define any scale or mode, when used in this context (i.e., it is not suggesting anything like "A natural minor"). So it's not "weirdo" in that sense.

I still think it's a "weirdo" fluke of history that the pitch we use for reference isn't the Do (C) at the center of Western harmony, regardless of Hz. I assume countries that use the Roman letter system had a big influence on this, or maybe the second string of the violin?

[foldedpath]

I still think it's a "weirdo" fluke of history that the pitch we use for reference isn't the Do (C) at the center of Western harmony, regardless of Hz. I assume countries that use the Roman letter system had a big influence on this, or maybe the second string of the violin?

It's also an open string on the viola and cello. There are C strings on viola and cello, but the A string is common across all three instruments.

Also, an orchestra tunes to an "A" from the oboe, because (Wiki source) "According to the League of American Orchestras, this is done because the pitch is secure and its penetrating sound makes it ideal for tuning." I'm not sure what "secure" means in that context. It might just mean it's more stable than the C note near the bottom of the range for oboe. The notes at the bottom end of the natural range for wind instruments are often a bit wonky, compared to the middle of the range.

[DavidKOS]

Yup. White keys. But we could have started with middle C and also used just the white keys.

The terminology is sort of arbitrary.

But when you do start with middle C as the MAJOR scale, and those are the white keys on a keyboard, then the natural minor scale has to be from A.

That's how the diatonic "church" modes work.

The patterns are the same in any tonal center.

- - - Updated - - -

I still think it's a "weirdo" fluke of history that the pitch we use for reference isn't the Do (C) at the center of Western harmony, regardless of Hz. I assume countries that use the Roman letter system had a big influence on this, or maybe the second string of the violin?

DO was moveable - it could be sung at any pitch.