432hz

[Julf]

Amen to that. It's hard enough to play a flute in tune with itself, since even under ideal conditions the tone hole positions are a compromise. Don't make it harder by making me tune it to a pitch it wasn't even designed to play.

You think that is bad? Try it on a fife. [/QUOTE]

 

[MRC01]

You think that is bad? Try it on a fife.

Oh, I have, and I know. I play flutes of all kinds of sizes, from piccolo and fife to bass. The smaller the flute, the higher the pitch, the more sensitive & difficult intonation is. There's a reason a symphony has only 1 piccolo!
http://mclements.net/Mike/intonation/mrc-flute-intonation.html

 

[Julf]

Oh, I have, and I know. I play flutes of all kinds of sizes, from piccolo and fife to bass. The smaller the flute, the higher the pitch, the more sensitive & difficult intonation is. There's a reason a symphony has only 1 piccolo!
http://mclements.net/Mike/intonation/mrc-flute-intonation.html

Indeed. My wife used to be a kick-ass fifer in a fife and drum corps that did cutting edge stuff like Stravinsky.

 

[Sergei]

Oh, I have, and I know. I play flutes of all kinds of sizes, from piccolo and fife to bass. The smaller the flute, the higher the pitch, the more sensitive & difficult intonation is. There's a reason a symphony has only 1 piccolo!
http://mclements.net/Mike/intonation/mrc-flute-intonation.html

Very interesting! So, if tuning from 440 down to 432 happens to result in less beats or slower beats in certain compositions, that would make them sound more peaceful, right?

 

[Julf]

Very interesting! So, if tuning from 440 down to 432 happens to result in less beats or slower beats in certain compositions, that would make them sound more peaceful, right?

Not really. The difference between 440 and 432 would only cause random variations in the beats (depending on how precisely the instruments tuned in). The discussion MRC01 linked to talks about much larger frequency differences (on the order of one or more octaves).

 

[RayDunzl]

440 - by Carla Bley

Hope the link works.

 

[restorer-john]

Maybe I'm confused but I thought perfect pitch simply meant someone could walk up to a variable oscillator and tune it to exactly 440 by ear only.

I was only playing with a RTA phone app the other day and was able to consistently hit 438Hz from cold, even after half an hour I came back and hit it again. Can't sing for nuts however. Turn the phone over, sing the note and look at the peak hold freq. Good fun.

I reckon you could do the same- decades listening to test tones will do it.

 

[Sergei]

I've had some software glitches which resulted in 48 khz recordings playing back at 44.1 khz. That is almost exactly the same ratio as 440 vs 432 hz.

Hmm, I know 48 vs 44.1 is quite noticeable to me. 440 vs 432 not so much.

((48000-44100)/48000)/((440-432)/440) = 4.46875

48 to 44.1 is ~4.5 stronger than 440 to 432. ~8.1% vs ~1.8%.

Apologies for being a stickler on this subject. Numbers matter to me, I guess the way notes matter to musicians

 

[Sergei]

Musicians can readily notice tuning that is off by maybe 10 cents or so (100 cents is the range from one note to the next).

10 cents sensitivity is amazing!

What is your perception of a symphony delivered in a compressed format, such as MP3 or AAC, compared to CD? Do you readily notice pitch errors?

 

[digicidal]

I do well on those pitch perception tests... at least until 1/64th tone then it's a toss-up. I can't even imagine being able to perceive a minute adjustment in the pitch of an entire piece. I imagine if I were a professional musician I might be able to with the instrument I was playing however. It's on a whole different level to do that with a recorded piece or an unfamiliar instrument though.

 

[MRC01]

Very interesting! So, if tuning from 440 down to 432 happens to result in less beats or slower beats in certain compositions, that would make them sound more peaceful, right?

Beats only happen when musicians are out of tune with each other. So if they stay in tune, no beats at any pitch. Since beats arise from the arithmetical difference, and pitch perception is geometric difference, then at lower pitches, the same perceptual difference beats slower.

However, 440 to 432 is not enough to make a difference in this regard.

PS: I should amend this: with equal temperament, some intervals like 3rds and 5ths are necessarily out of tune so there will be beats. However, whether A is 440 or 432 won't change this.

 

[GrO]

https://jakubmarian.com/the-432-hz-vs-440-hz-conspiracy-theory/
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.

One of my friends is a piano teacher, she prefers 442Hz tuning!

This is completely untrue what you've posted here. Even the statement about orchestras, because the more backwards the lower the tuning, and it's not cautious to believe everything you'll find on 'youtube'.

I explore the subject for about 5 years now and here you have some facts I gathered.

A4=440Hz is widely used in the U.S. since 1926, but previously recommended by Johann Heinrich Scheibler in 1834. It's a very specific subject, because even 'wikipedia' says not much about A4=432Hz, more about A4=435Hz what you may notice here:

A440 (pitch standard) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

...but we know for sure that Giuseppe Verdi used '432 tuning' (later called a 'scientific pitch' what's been totally omitted in the '440' article linked above):

Scientific pitch - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I'm far from all those conspiracy theories, but deep spectrum analysis revealed that web services like 'youtube' are able to modify the pitch, also all those digital re-editions use the higher pitch (440-466), and it's also happening with some old movies that were digitally reconstructed.

It's hard to get the real '432 album' today, so it's easier and safer to treat all albums as tuned with A4=440Hz while currently it's a global standard.

There are some modern artists recording with the '432 tuning' and you'll easily know it because they spread the information vividly.

I've even made a tutorial showing an easy way of retuning your whole music library and CDs without a quality loss, using on-the-fly method:

...and this is the previous version from May 14, 2017 made in polish:

I hope it'll make someone happy while it works for me.

Take care.

EDIT:

There's also one simple and logic argument: if there was no bigger difference between A4=440Hz and A4=432Hz, then nobody would ever make any effort to change the global standard for the higher one.

 

[Julf]

I'm far from all those conspiracy theories, but deep spectrum analysis revealed that web services like 'youtube' are able to modify the pitch, also all those digital re-editions use the higher pitch (440-466), and it's also happening with some old movies that were digitally reconstructed.

I would love to see that "deep spectrum analysis" and evidence.

 

[Hayabusa]

Watching TV in Europe gives the noticable conversion from 24Hz material to 25Hz were the audio is just played 4% faster. So that will be a 458 1/3 Hz pitch

 

[001]

I recall a few years ago being asked to play in a church at a wedding. There were three of us, guitar, keyboards and bass. We thought we were doing alright. That was, until the pipe organ joined in. Instant 'what just happened' between the three of us and couldn't work out why. Until we were passed a note from the organist "Sorry, I should have mentioned that this organ is tuned to 414 instead of 440". A quick tune and we were away again.
Apparently after 1939 the global standard tuning for pipe organs was 440. Must have escaped this one.

 

[Julf]

Watching TV in Europe gives the noticable conversion from 24Hz material to 25Hz were the audio is just played 4% faster. So that will be a 458 1/3 Hz pitch

That used to be the case back in the day, before digital video processing.

 

[Hayabusa]

That used to be the case back in the day, before digital video processing.

For some material it still is the case, watching The Big bang Theory series for instance. Clear difference between 24Hz version played on a media player.

 

[Julf]

For some material it still is the case, watching The Big bang Theory series for instance. Clear difference between 24Hz version played on a media player.

Not just speeded up to make more space for ads?

 

[GrO]

I would love to see that "deep spectrum analysis" and evidence.

Yeah, me too! (joke ^^). You can do it by yourself using Audacity's "Plot Spectrum" effect, with this classical music video in example, remembering that it requires you to find a moment where a single instrument is audible at a time.

I don't have Audacity installed at the time, but there's something much worse related to 'youtube' and similar services. Namely it's high lossy compression totally ruins the sound quality and flattens it to 128 kb/s M4A (or AAC), what's even worse than medium-quality 256 kb/s MP3. You can't compare it in any way to WAV's or FLAC's 1411 kb/s, but nobody should be surprised while 'youtube' was never designed for music sharing, nevertheless most people started doing so because it's very convenient, free, and they have no idea about the codecs, bit rates and the quality, or they just don't care about it.

I'm sure that most people would hear and even feel the difference, if they just compared a specific song from the original CD with 'youtube's counterpart. I believe that Music is a wonderful phenomenon which should never be disturbed, and people should hear it as it was recorded, considering the quality of sound.

 

[Julf]

I'm sure that most people would hear and even feel the difference, if they just compared a specific song from the original CD with 'youtube's counterpart.

I am sure they wouldn't (in a blind test), if there was no equalization and levels were matched. But happy to be proven wrong - with evidence.