Anyone into the 432 Hz Thing?

[Anderton]

Saw some activity around it, so I checked it out. Some people claim it's better, the earth resonates at that frequency, etc. etc. I'll leave that discussion to the new age folks, but what I found out seemed even more interesting. 

 

Apparently, a lot of pitch standards have been used over the years. Before tuning was standardized at A = 440 so Yamaha could sell DX7s (kidding!), standard tuning for A varied from 400 to 460 Hz. For example, a tuning fork from the leading piano maker in Vienna around Mozart's time used A = 421.6. Handel's personal tuning fork was A = 422.5 Hz. Baroque pitch is widely believed to have been 415 Hz. The French standard in the 1860s was 435 Hz. So, the idea that 432 is a traditionally universal tuning that was abandoned in favor of 440 Hz simply isn't true. (Of course, all the Baroque metal bands tuned down a semitone.)

 

Some of the 432 fans claim that Verdi used it. That's true, BUT it was because Verdi was concerned about "pitch inflation," the ongoing raising of pitch to give higher, brighter sounds. I guess they didn't have varispeed back then. He felt that it was cruel to force opera singers to sing that high, so for Requiem, he insisted on a tuning of A = 435 to give the singers a break, and later decided 432 would have been even better. But it wasn't about the music of the spheres or solar vibrations. It was about not straining the performers' voices.

 

Based on how Verdi felt, it almost seems like striving for an ever-higher pitch standard was the precursor to the "loudness wars" - the "brightness wars." 

 

I'm so glad we have varispeed now.

 

 

 

 

[KuruPrionz]

I read all sorts of books about European music and the subject of lower pitches for the notes came up fairly often. 

It's not something I consider but I do have a Peterson digital strobe tuner from about 2003 that can be adjusted to a variety of pitches. I've left it at 440, if I need to I can play in Ab or any other key so I don't care. Maybe that's why God created capoes? 😇

 

Some people sing way too high anyway, can't really stop them. If you lower the pitch, they'll just sing in Bb, no?

[Anderton]

11 minutes ago, KuruPrionz said:

Some people sing way too high anyway, can't really stop them. If you lower the pitch, they'll just sing in Bb, no?

 

Well, not if they're singing to an orchestra   Then again, you have musical genres like classical Indian music where the standard is basically "tune to the vocalist."  

[KuruPrionz]

Just now, Anderton said:

 

Well, not if they're singing to an orchestra   Then again, you have musical genres like classical Indian music where the standard is basically "tune to the vocalist."  

True, but I would assume that somebody who is singing to an orchestra is fully prepared to tackle the music as presented. 

I'm certain that sometimes things don't work out as planned, that's part of the fun of being human. 😊

 

 

[RABid]

7 hours ago, Anderton said:

Based on how Verdi felt, it almost seems like striving for an ever-higher pitch standard was the precursor to the "loudness wars"

Most singers I have worked with are the opposite. Several have wanted lower tunings. I do remember one night when the singer pissed off all of the musicians in the band. We got together during the first break and tuned everything up a full step. Oh how he struggled.

[Daniel Liston Keller]

I once interviewed the bassist for a very well-known singer/songwriter. They revealed (strictly off-the-record, hence no names here) that one of their two main basses is tuned to Eb, because the artist drops the tuning of their (digital) piano a half-step for certain songs containing high notes they can no longer reach.

 

[JohnG11]

Actually Craig, Händel's tuning fork was at C5=512Hz from which A4=422.5 can be derived (assuming E.T., I think).

 

If you think about it the 432 people use Hz as a reference point. But why do we have 24 hours ina day? Or 60 minutes and 60 seconds to the hour and minute respectively?

What if we had ten hours in a day (or 20, 10 a.m., 10 p.m.)? And 100 minutes and 100 seconds?

 

The whole thing is crazy ... IMHO I'd better add.

[Anderton]

5 hours ago, RABid said:

Most singers I have worked with are the opposite. Several have wanted lower tunings. I do remember one night when the singer pissed off all of the musicians in the band. We got together during the first break and tuned everything up a full step. Oh how he struggled.

 

Sorry I wasn't clear, Verdi wanted the lower tuning specifically to make life easier for vocalists. I was comparing the 440 Hz to the loudness wars because it seems like the move to a higher tuning standard was about making a brighter sound. 

[Anderton]

56 minutes ago, JohnG11 said:

But why do we have 24 hours ina day? Or 60 minutes and 60 seconds to the hour and minute respectively?

What if we had ten hours in a day (or 20, 10 a.m., 10 p.m.)? And 100 minutes and 100 seconds?

 

I'm with you, many standards seem arbitrary. Just because Augustus had an ego problem is a weird reason for a month to have 31 days. At least the meter was based on something reasonable. 

 

I've always thought we should have 13 months of 28 days. That's 364 days. The leftover day would be Universal Vacation and Have Fun Day . I'd also wish the entire world would just adopt GMT instead of having time zones. I started a thread about this a while ago then the whole Daylight Savings Time thing was being debated. 

[Stokely]

I'm in a band with four singers, and all of us trend toward the lower ranges (female contralto if I have that right, basically a female version of baritone which the rest of us are).

We tune down a half step.  Helps a lot over the course of four hours.  Our guitarist sometimes does a solo gig, singing and playing *another* four hours on the same day as a band gig, so you do what you can to make it easier on yourself.

I love it because I'm a "closet tenor" who always wanted to be Brad Delp, Steve Perry and especially Steve Walsh.    Twasn't to be sadly, even a half step down!  (I do have a pretty good head voice and falsetto which comes in very handy for harmonies on Eagles etc!)

Please, take away daylight savings already.  Or make it permanent, I don't care.  Just stop switching.

[analogika]

I have yet to read a single “explanation” for the 432 Hz thing that didn’t turn out to be complete hogwash upon even the most superficial examination. 
 

I mean, go right ahead and experiment with different tunings, but please don’t pretend there’s any scientific or historical basis to it. It’s just as arbitrary as any other tuning reference. 

[Anderton]

5 hours ago, analogika said:

I have yet to read a single “explanation” for the 432 Hz thing that didn’t turn out to be complete hogwash upon even the most superficial examination. 

 

Clearly, you don't understand that the mean value of the distance from Teotihuacan to Mars, when mulltiplied by the sine derivative of 432 and the hypotenuse of the distance between Atlantis and Venus in cubits divided by the twelfth root of two, is exactly the same number as the height of the pyramid of Cheops in millimeters divided by 432!

 

Coincidence? You decide.

[Mighty Motif Max]

Just hopping in briefly to say that I have a late-1800s reed organ that is tuned to 452 hz. Apparently that was not uncommon at the time. It sounds great. However, it does present issues if I want to actually record it and use it in a 440 mix lol.

[KuruPrionz]

8 hours ago, Mighty Motif Max said:

Just hopping in briefly to say that I have a late-1800s reed organ that is tuned to 452 hz. Apparently that was not uncommon at the time. It sounds great. However, it does present issues if I want to actually record it and use it in a 440 mix lol.

Start with the organ and then pitch shift it down?

[Mighty Motif Max]

1 minute ago, KuruPrionz said:

Start with the organ and then pitch shift it down?

Tried that. It doesn't sound great. Maybe if I was going for a glitchy pad sound or something, but if I actually want it to sound like a reed organ, it doesn't sound quite right unfortunately.

[KuruPrionz]

Just now, Mighty Motif Max said:

Tried that. It doesn't sound great. Maybe if I was going for a glitchy pad sound or something, but if I actually want it to sound like a reed organ, it doesn't sound quite right unfortunately.

Gotcha, some pitch shift devices are better than others, certainly that is true. My Apple New Pitch AU has glitchy attack as well. I haven't tried running Eventide Physion or Split EQ after it to clean up the transients but that might work. I only have Eventide Micro Pitch which probably isn't enough but my impression is that they make much cleaner pitch shifting plugins than Apple did. They also have 30 day free demos so that might be a way to use an Eventide pitch shifter long enough to get the job done. Just be sure to "print" your results so when the plugin goes away you don't need it. 

 

Something that I know will work but will be tedious since you will be dealing with tempo as well as pitch: Stretch the sound clips!!!

If you play a part, copy and paste it into an adjacent track and stretch that track until the pitch is correct, that should give you an idea of how much faster you'd need to play the reed organ so you can work it into a song. Huge PITA, I realize! But a relatively small stretch should still sound just like the recording so there's that. 😇

[Stokely]

I did a couple different remixes of a song my old band did and tried two different things in Logic:

- changing the tempo of vocals and original guitar tracks

- changing the pitch to bring it down

I had way more success changing the tempo.  The flex tempo (or whatever it was called) worked like a champ.   I don't think it would be possible to tell that the BPM changed, and it wasn't a small change.   Not nearly the success with changing the pitch; the guitar had so many artifacts that it wasn't usable.

[Anderton]

Varispeed was a staple back in the day. Some of the pitch changes were sizable and like you said, it wasn't always obvious.

 

I use varispeed-type stretching as much as possible as opposed to stretching algoritms. However, I do find that stretching can work with very small changes, like the ones I apply to mixed 2-track masters to introduce subliminal tempo changes. Sometimes if there's a glitch, just moving the node that creates a tempo change a little earlier or later solves the problem.

[Daniel Liston Keller]

Yes, varispeed was a staple. I've always been fascinated by the subtle changes it can introduce in timbre and overtones. McCartney's voice, for example...between varispeed and EQ settings, there are so many different tonal colors on different tracks. It's a great tool that has fallen to a bit of disuse in the digital age. 

 

[Anderton]

7 minutes ago, Daniel Liston Keller said:

 It's a great tool that has fallen to a bit of disuse in the digital age. 

 

Not in my studio

[analogika]

On 12/2/2022 at 8:11 AM, Anderton said:

 

Clearly, you don't understand that the mean value of the distance from Teotihuacan to Mars, when mulltiplied by the sine derivative of 432 and the hypotenuse of the distance between Atlantis and Venus in cubits divided by the twelfth root of two, is exactly the same number as the height of the pyramid of Cheops in millimeters divided by 432!

 

Coincidence? You decide.

 

My favourite one is where they link it to the Schumann resonances, which a) don't actually multiply to 432 Hz, and which b) are electromagnetic, and not physical vibration. 

It's an explanation that, even if you buy the ridiculous premise, fails at a ten-second check at third-grade maths level. 

 

The other, more obvious point, of course, being that a cosmic tuning frequency for a single one of 12 tones means that, even when tuned to perfect multiples of A, literally only four notes out of twelve are going to be even remotely in tune with the Cosmos, with all of the others being completely out. 

 

But that's a slightly more, er, esoteric point, that doesn't usually resonate well with the target audience's cranial cavity.