A432 is a road that runs from Bristol to Old Sodbury, it's also how we should be tuning our instruments. Right now the international standard for A on the treble clef is 440 Hertz or vibrations per second, but a better and more harmonious result would come from tuning that A to 432 Hertz. Our ears are uniquely tuned to this lower frequency because of an electromagnetic phenomenon known as the Schuman Resonance. Lightning resonates in the cavity between Earth and the ionosphere in a series of harmonic peaks with a strong fundamental at 8 Hertz. Now whenever you multiply a frequency by 2 you get its octave, so if we set C to 8 Hertz, this Schumann resonance, and also a power of two. It will also be 16 Hertz and 32 Hertz all powers of 2 now this is called Scientific Pitch. It was first proposed by French physicist Joseph Sauveur in 1713. When you set C to powers of 2 and octave displacements of the Schumann resonance, A will equal 432 Hertz. There are plenty of videos out there on the Youtubes that do AB comparisons between A equals 440 and A equals 432 but let's do it ourselves! Which of these sounds better to your ear? [440 rendition of All Star plays] [superior 432 rendition of All Star plays] Aesthetically and scientifically it is preferable to tune to A equals 432 Hertz. We have a deep connection to this tuning, because it more accurately reflects the vibrational frequencies in the universe around us. [ambient sounds play] Ah yeah, um... so everything I've said so far in this video has been complete and utter bullsh** There are a lot of misconceptions around pitch standards out there on the internet, especially concerning tuning down to A equals 432 Hertz. Thinking that tuning A to 432 Hertz reflects some sort of Sacred Geometry is kind of like a flat Earth theory for musicians. An internet hive mind worldview that has absolutely no basis in reality. Now there definitely is such thing as the Schumann resonance which has been used to justify all kinds of new age sh** But it's fundamental is generally a little bit lower at 7.8 Hertz and so it doesn't actually reflect a scientific pitch. Scientific pitch does exist, but when you calculate A through scientific pitch in modern equal temperament you get 430.4 Hertz not 432 Hertz. What gives? Well, the strangely apocalyptic think tank known as the Schiller Institute has been the chief proselytizer for A equals 432 Hertz in the modern era. They disingenuously used some fuzzy math, "Practicing fuzzy math again," to calculate a value of 432 Hertz for A by using Pythagorean tuning instead of a modern equal temperament. "Well hold on there, I just found this table on the internet that proves it! 432 has better looking math. Look at this math right here, this math is so much better than this math! This is uglier math." That table does not mean anything. Equal temperament for 432 will give just as ugly math as 440 because equal temperament is a logarithmic system. It will always spit back decimal points. "Well then let's use Pythagorean tuning, what's wrong with Pythagoras? He was greek, he was smart, he was into math and harmony of the spheres and ancient primordial learning, his math was pretty." Sure, I guess we could use the pythagorean system which involves stacking a bunch of just intonated perfect fifths on top of one another. The problem is that we get sharper and sharper the higher we go. Major thirds are really out of tune and so we completely abandoned the system 500 years ago. We also get aggressively out of tune intervals like the Wolf Fifth. Check it out, this is technically Pythagorean tuning in 432 Hertz: [really dissonant piano sound] [consonant piano sound] "Was that A equals 432? That's supposed to open my third eye?" Yeah, that's what it is. Once you start investigating any of the claims that you might find about A equals 432 with any degree of rigor, they either fall apart or start veering into conversations about about intonation and temperament which is far beyond the scope of cheap new age truisms. "Okay, but when you played those two examples earlier I did like the 432 version a lot better than the 440 version." Well funny thing about that. You didn't listen to a comparison of 440 and 432, you listened to a comparison of 440 and 428. Any preference for the 428 version is simply because it was tuned lower relative to the 440 version, and things that are tuned lower sound warmer and less strained. If I asked you to tell me if this note was tuned to a 440 or 432, *breathes* would you be able to tell me without a reference? Unless you are one of the rare people with perfect pitch, you do not perceive absolute frequencies. Instead, you as a human perceive the relationships between frequencies. You can easily tell the subtle differences in pitch between two musical examples and then make value judgments about them, like these people have... [OH BOY IT'S ALL STAR] "I definitely feel a difference with 432. I feel like I start to vibrate." "432 is in alignment with the universal frequencies permeating the planet." "Pretty conclusive, indeed 440 is metallic and cold whereas 432 resonates well with my emotions and heart center naturally." "But I really do hear a difference when I listen to songs in 432, I don't have perfect pitch." Well yes, granted, you might be able to tell if something has been tuned to 432 because of something called the Levitin effect. In 1994, a study was published that found that people even without perfect pitch could fairly reliably Identify the key of a popular recorded song they were very familiar with from memory. This seems to indicate that we all have some degree of absolute pitch in certain circumstances. Because the vast majority of all the music that you've heard so far has been tuned to A 440, any deviation from the standard will be small but noticeable. "Aha, take that! 432 truly is a mind expanding new way of listening to music in the world! It will open your Chakras, it will open your third eye!" Please stop. I mean the reason why we have 440 vs. 432 or literally anything else is more because of physics and nationalism and also singers bitching about keys than any sort of new age Sacred Geometry. The musical note A originally was just set to the lowest notes that monks were supposed to sing when they were singing Gregorian plain chant. This...was not particularly precise. A could mean whatever the hell you wanted it to mean and varied wildly from town to town and country to country. In 1711, John Shore invented the tuning fork, which was the first step to standardization. Surviving tuning forks from the era put A around 400 to 420 hertz, but that would change wildly in the centuries to come because of something called "Pitch Inflation." When a pitch standard is established, alternative pitch standards will sound, well, quite different to our ears. 18th century musicians were used to a much lower A. When people started experimenting with higher tuned As, they found them more exciting, and brighter. This can be quantified mathematically by something called the "Spectral Centroid." Anytime you hear a note you'll hear upper harmonics vibrating along with the fundamental. The spectral centroid is the mathematical average of all of these harmonics, and we perceive this average as timbral brightness. So the higher the pitch, the higher the spectral centroid, the objectively brighter something is. Soon those higher tuned, higher "spectral centroided" As became the new standard, and so even higher tunings for A were sought. Much the same way that we have lived through an epoch of guitarists tuning their guitars lower and lower, the 18th and 19th centuries brought an arms race among orchestras to see who could tune the highest. London Orchestras tuned their A as high as 455 Hertz There was pushback, because singers were becoming more and more strained with the higher pitch standards. Instruments can be tuned up, but the physiology of the human voice remains the same. And so, in order to combat pitch inflation, the first International Standard for A was set in 1859 by the French government to 435 Hertz. Even still, this was too high for the Italian Opera composer Verdi who preferred his A to be tuned to... *snare* 432 Hertz. At a 2001 Production of Verdi's La Scala, Placido Domingo said, So its Verdi who we can blame for all this nonsense the Schiller Institute has been promoting about A equals 432. But for Verdi, while he was a composer and a musician and composers and musicians just care about two things: Does the music sound good? And how can we keep the singers from being complete Divas? Tuning A to 432 Hertz checked off both boxes for Verdi, and so he went with that tuning. Now the French A 435 was considered too low for the British. They wanted to factor in pitch changes due to temperature and so calculated that their A should equal 439 Hertz to sound the same as a French 435 A. A few scientists complained that 439 was a prime number and would be hard to replicate in laboratory conditions so that number was bodged up to 440 Hertz. This standard was soon adopted by American instrument manufacturers in 1926, which caused A 440 to become more and more popular as American instruments were exported. The A 440 standard was set in stone in 1955 by the International Organization for Standardization. Incidentally you can...uh, buy a 440 from the iso for 38 Swiss francs. Not really quite sure what that means, but hey you can so go for it if you're so inclined. "Yeah but check this out the number 432 you can do all kinds of crazy math to! It proves that 432 Hertz is the math-iest of music. Sacred Vibrational Geometry™." Well let's remember what 432 Hertz means. Hertz means cycles per second and the second is an entirely arbitrary measure of time. It's a sixtieth of a minute which in turn is a sixtieth of an hour which in turn is a 24th of the amount of time it takes Earth to rotate once That in itself is extremely imprecise because of many exceptions to the rule, so the current technical standard for what a second is is the duration of nine billion, one hundred and ninety-two million, six hundred and sixty-one thousand, seven hundred and seventy periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom. There is literally no practical reason to do this, but technically speaking the most mathematically precise way of measuring pitch would be in terms of caesium atom radiation. This would mean that A equals 432 cycles per second would equal, uh nine billion, one hundred ninety-two thousand (mumbles through numbers) divided by 432 is equals to that number periods radiation and A equals 440 cycles per second would equal, uh (mumbles again) that number, and as we all know this number is clearly more divine than this number. Pitch is arbitrary because it's based upon a standard that itself is an entirely arbitrary number of radiation periods in a caesium atom. And that's okay, because we don't perceive pitch in a vacuum. When we listen to music, and when we play music we experience and react to the relationships between notes, the ratios between frequencies and not the absolute frequencies themselves. That said, there are a couple of practical reasons why you may want to experiment with tuning a little bit lower, whether it's to A 432 or anything, really it doesn't really matter. And Levitin Effect might suggest that we have long-term exposure to 440 and any deviation from that will yield new and surprising results, and also it might be easier to sing certain things a little bit lower than strain ourselves with high tuning. Beyond that, there really isn't anything to A equals 432 Hertz. It's the new-age snake oil for the internet musician. And, like any snake oil, *inhales* you can buy it now! You, yes, you, can get true 432 Hertz Music for the low low price of $19.95. Who could resist? At least it's less expensive than the 38 franc A equals 440. [Sequence Start plays] Anyway guys. Thank you so much for watching! If you really enjoy what I do here on this channel please comment, like, and subscribe. I have a new video coming out every Monday. If you really enjoy what I do here, please consider joining my Patreon because it's my Patreon patrons that really make this channel what it is and allow me to continue doing this. And-uh-yeah, until next time MATH!
