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The “432 Hz vs. 440 Hz” conspiracy theory

Would you believe that there is a conspiracy theory about the way we tune musical instruments? And that this theory even involves the Nazis, chakras, and whatnot? No? Then sit down and enjoy perhaps

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The “432 Hz vs. 440 Hz” conspiracy theory Language learning, science art EN DE CZ IT about | contact Jakub Marian | Language learning | Science | Art | Books Index | English German French FrenchSpanish Italian Esperanto | Mathematics Physics Economics | Maps Music Visual arts | Books The “432 Hz vs. 440 Hz” conspiracy theoryby Jakub Marian Tip: See my list of the Most Com­mon Mis­takes in Eng­lish. It will teach you how to avoid mis­takes with com­mas, pre­pos­i­tions, ir­reg­u­lar verbs, and much more. Would you be­lieve that there is a con­spir­acy the­ory about the way we tune mu­si­cal in­stru­ments? And that this the­ory even in­volves the Nazis, chakras, and what­not? No? Then sit down and enjoy per­haps the most ridicu­lous con­spir­acy the­ory of all times. To un­der­stand what all the fuss is about, we need a lit­tle bit of his­tor­i­cal back­ground. As you prob­a­bly know, mu­si­cal in­stru­ments need to be tuned. When you turn a tun­ing peg on a string in­stru­ment or ad­just the length of the tube of a wind in­stru­ment, it makes it sound a lit­tle bit higher or lower. For dif­fer­ent in­stru­ments (and even dif­fer­ent strings of one in­stru­ment) to sound good to­gether, they all have to pro­duce the same tone (same pitch) when they play the same mu­si­cal note (e.g. A). The usual way to spec­ify a tun­ing is to give the fre­quency of the note A4. The mod­ern stan­dard is A = 440 Hz, where Hz is a unit mean­ing “per sec­ond”, so “440 Hz” refers to 440 vi­bra­tions per sec­ond (such as those of a string). To tune to this fre­quency, a mu­si­cian would ei­ther lis­ten to a tone played by some tun­ing de­vice and tune by ear or use an elec­tronic tuner. The 432 Hz conspiracy If you Google “432 Hz”, you will find a tremen­dous num­ber of ar­ti­cles and YouTube videos about the tun­ing A = 432 Hz and its pre­sumed heal­ing and sooth­ing prop­er­ties. If you dig a lit­tle bit deeper, you will also find an “ex­pla­na­tion” of this phe­nom­e­non. Pre­sum­ably, the 432 Hz tun­ing is in some way tuned to the vi­bra­tions of na­ture it­self, whereas the 440 Hz tun­ing was in­tro­duced by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi min­is­ter of pro­pa­ganda. Yes, that’s right. There are mil­lions of peo­ple in the world who be­lieve that Goebbels in­tro­duced the tun­ing to make peo­ple feel more anx­ious. Now, why should 432 Hz be so great? Ac­cord­ing to pro­po­nents of the the­ory, the num­ber 432 has spe­cial prop­er­ties. And, in­deed, it is an in­ter­est­ing num­ber. It is a sum of four con­sec­u­tive primes: 103 + 107 + 109 + 113. It is ex­actly three gross, where gross = 144 is a tra­di­tional unit. An equi­lat­eral tri­an­gle whose area and perime­ter are equal has the area of ex­actly the square root of 432. Then you will find many mys­ti­cal ar­gu­ments, such that there are 432 Bud­dha stat­ues on Mount Meru, or that it is some­how re­lated to the lo­ca­tion of chakras. There is even a claim that sci­en­tists at Nike found out that the best golf balls have 432 dim­ples… Why the numerological explanations of 432 Hz are all nonsense I can­not say with cer­tainty that there is no dif­fer­ence in the psy­cho­log­i­cal ef­fects of A = 432 Hz and A = 440 Hz, but I sus­pect there is no sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence, since or­ches­tras around the world used to tune to any­where from 400 Hz to 470 Hz, and if 432 Hz were some kind of a sweet spot, some­one would have no­ticed by now. Any psy­cho­log­i­cal ef­fect of the tun­ing is likely caused by the sim­ple fact that 432 Hz is dif­fer­ent from what we are used to and would be pretty much the same as the ef­fect of 440 Hz if the stan­dard were 448 Hz. What I can say with cer­tainty, how­ever, is that the ar­gu­ments about nu­mer­i­cal or mys­ti­cal prop­er­ties of the num­ber 432 are utter non­sense. It is im­por­tant to un­der­stand that 432 Hz refers to the num­ber of vi­bra­tions per sec­ond, and “one sec­ond” is a rather ar­bi­trar­ily cho­sen unit. Orig­i­nally (from an­cient times through the Mid­dle Ages), the hour was di­vided into 2, 3, 4, or 12 equal parts, but never into 60 (so there wasn’t even a minute). Frac­tions of a minute were not used at all (there were no de­vices at the time that could mea­sure such short pe­ri­ods of time). Had we stuck with di­vid­ing every­thing into 12 parts, the “sec­ond” could have be­come 1/12 of a minute or per­haps 1/1728 of an hour (1728 = 12 × 12 ×× 12), which would give a com­pletely dif­fer­ent nu­mer­i­cal value for the same fre­quency. The cur­rent de­f­i­n­i­tion is just a co­in­ci­dence. The prac­tice of di­vid­ing a minute into 60 smaller seg­ments did not ap­pear until the 16th cen­tury, and even then dif­fer­ent clocks ticked at slightly dif­fer­ent rates. In order to stan­dard­ize time mea­sure­ment, peo­ple de­fined units of time as a frac­tion of the mean solar day, which is the av­er­age time (over one year) the Earth needs to ro­tate around its axis rel­a­tive to the Sun, and the first clocks that could ac­cu­rately keep track of sec­onds over long pe­ri­ods were con­structed only in the 18th cen­tury. How­ever, in the 1940s, sci­en­tists dis­cov­ered that the speed of ro­ta­tion of the Earth is not con­stant (due to var­i­ous tidal ef­fects), and the sec­ond was even­tu­ally re­de­fined as “the du­ra­tion of 9,192,631,770 pe­ri­ods of the ra­di­a­tion cor­re­spond­ing to the tran­si­tion be­tween the two hy­per­fine lev­els of the ground state of the cae­sium-133 atom”. So, yeah. The 432 Hz tun­ing, the di­vine tun­ing of na­ture it­self, is ul­ti­mately de­fined as one vi­bra­tion per 21279240.2083 pe­ri­ods of ra­di­a­tion of an un­com­mon chem­i­cal el­e­ment. Very spir­i­tual, in­deed. Why do we use A = 440 Hz? (spoiler: no Nazis) In Bach’s era, there was no stan­dard­ized way to tune in­stru­ments. The same piece could sound much higher or lower de­pend­ing on where and when it was per­formed, and even or­gans in dif­fer­ent churches in the same city could be tuned in com­pletely in­com­pat­i­ble ways. The pitches mu­si­cal in­stru­ments pro­duce change over time due to heat and me­chan­i­cal wear and tear, so until the tun­ing fork was in­vented in 1711, there was no sim­ple way to make tun­ings con­sis­tent among dif­fer­ent re­gions and even per­for­mances in one re­gion. How­ever, even after the in­ven­tion of the tun­ing fork, there was no sin­gle stan­dard­ized tun­ing. En­sem­bles in dif­fer­ent re­gions used tun­ing forks res­onat­ing at dif­fer­ent fre­quen­cies. And then, in the 19th cen­tury, the era of pitch in­fla­tion started. You see, it is the re­la­tion­ship be­tween the thick­ness of a string and its ten­sion (i.e. “how many times you turn the tun­ing peg”) that tells you how high the string sounds; the higher the ten­sion, the higher the sound, and the thicker the string, the lower the sound. That’s why the dou­ble bass has huge thick strings, whereas the vi­o­lin has thin strings. It turns out that strings sound bet­ter (up to a cer­tain point) when their ten­sion is higher. The way in­stru­men­tal­ists in­crease ten­sion now is that they sim­ply buy a thicker set of strings, which, when tuned to the same pitch as thin­ner strings, pro­duce higher ten­sion. Un­for­tu­nately, ob­tain­ing thicker strings was not that easy in the 19th cen­tury. Man­u­fac­tur­ing of strings was a com­pli­cated pro­ce­dure, so rather than chang­ing the man­u­fac­tur­ing process, it was much eas­ier to tune the same strings to a higher pitch to in­crease ten­sion and thus im­prove the sound. Or­ches­tras, com­pet­ing with one an­other over bet­ter sound, started to tune their in­stru­ments higher and higher. This even­tu­ally led to prob­lems for singers, who com­plained about hav­ing to per­form pieces in higher reg­is­ters than they were orig­i­nally meant to be per­formed in. At the urg­ing of singers, the French gov­ern­ment made the tun­ing A = 435 Hz of­fi­cially stan­dard in France in 1859, and many or­ches­tras and Opera houses in Eu­rope adopted this stan­dard. In Britain, how­ever, the French stan­dard was in­ter­preted in an er­ro­neous way (it was un­der­stood as being rel­a­tive to a cer­tain tem­per­a­ture), due to which British or­ches­tras com­monly tuned to A = 439 Hz. In 1939, there was an in­ter­na­tional con­fer­ence held in Lon­don that re­sulted in a rec­om­men­da­tion to use A = 440 Hz, as a com­pro­mise be­tween the var­i­ous tun­ing sys­tems used at the time, some of which reached be­yond 450 Hz. This rec­om­men­da­tion was fur­ther sup­ported by the fact that the BBC re­quired their or­ches­tras to tune to 440 Hz in­stead of 439 Hz be­cause 439 is a prime num­ber, and the cor­re­spond­ing fre­quency was hard to gen­er­ate elec­tron­i­cally with stan­dard elec­tronic clocks. Even­tu­ally, in 1955, the stan­dard A = 440 Hz was adopted by the In­ter­na­tional Or­ga­ni­za­tion for Stan­dard­iza­tion (ISO). Vir­tu­ally all com­mer­cially pro­duced con­tem­po­rary music is tuned to A = 440 Hz. Nev­er­the­less, most sym­phony or­ches­tras ig­nore the stan­dard and tune to 441, 442 or 443 Hz in­stead, while or­ches­tras spe­cial­iz­ing in older music may some­times use a tun­ing close to the one for which the piece was orig­i­nally writ­ten, which may range from 415 Hz to 470 Hz. By the way, I have writ­ten sev­eral ed­u­ca­tional ebooks. If you get a copy, you can learn new things and sup­port this web­site at the same time—why don’t you check them out? 115 Subscribe to my educational newsletter to receive a weekly summary of new articles Enter your email address below: Please, enter a valid email address: You tried to submit the form very quickly after opening this page. To confirm that you are a human, please, click on the button below again: Subscribe I will send you one of my ebooks for free as a little gift. 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