It's a very, very bad study. If you want to know how bad: it would lend equal support to the hypothesis "everyone's heart rate drops 4.8bpm in one day".
Jeesh, I wondered about that confounding variable but dismissed it, thinking surely they would have the sense to split their subjects so that half did 440 the first day and half did 432 the first day.
It seems completely unsurprising that one would be slightly more relaxed the second day than the first.
Edit: In another comment someone mentions that this study was split the way I would have expected so hopefully they did account for schedule at least. Unfortunately I'm not seeing an easy way to access the whole paper to verify.
The fact that music tuned to 432 Hz might sound slightly off to listeners might explain the change in attention, which in turn might explain the change in heart rate.
It would have been helpful measure other tuning values like 430 or 445 Hz to determine if it's caused by 432 Hz specifically.
Just the act of going through the experiment a second time, now being more familiar with the whole situation, is a plausible cause of lower heart rate all on its own.
To give the bare minimum of credit to the study, it was a cross-over design, so half of the participants started with the higher frequency first and vice versa.
I'm a classically trained pianist with near perfect pitch.
I have ABXed myself with half-hour gaps on music re-tuned to 432, and music re-turned to 432, then 440, to control for that it has to sound like it's been retuned.
I have Audeze planar magnetics and a relatively quiet apartment.
I'm not able to tell the difference, even on music I listen to very frequently.
Hard agree. Worked for an instrument builder for a decade, of fixed-pitch esoteric instruments. Client community had a distinct minority who went all in on such things as 432 Hz woo-woo.
Happy to make them, with the footnote that instruments made to this or other custom-request references could not play in concert with most others.
No discernible difference, with one interesting qualifier: for acoustic (or emulated) instruments one is familiar with, there is an audible shift in timbre correlated with tuning to different resonances, most dramatically if you retune a given specific instrument.
This is because you are shifting the fundamentals and overtones of the instrument while keeping the natural resonances of the instrument fixed. This naturally produces a different "signature" of relationships between such frequencies and in the case of the instruments I was close to, in their internal resonance, which was completely defining of their "character."
(Something similar is going on with pitch-shifting algorithms which do "formant correction" to try to keep voices sounding natural within modest shift of pitch... we have deeply internalized expectations wrt the various resonant landmarks in human voices because of the bounded variation in their geometry and the physics of voice production; this is less so but absolutely still true of familiar acoustic instruments.)
One of the similarly anecdotal but significant "tells" of the placebo nature of perceived difference in 432 Hz and 440 Hz is to my memory, very few players were incapable of telling instrument key, let alone pitch referent, based on hearing them alone. (Knowledge of available instrument keys and tunings was commonly deep given the cult following they received.)
Good question, but nowadays all video players and platforms are able to increase/decrease the speed of a video without affecting the audio's pitch, so I guess the reverse is also widespread...
It is, but I'm sure the audible artifacts introduced by a pitch shifter would outweigh any perceptual effects due to the change in tuning. It has to be one of the two - either the lower-frequency music is fractionally slower or it has been modified in a non-transparent way - I don't think the article tells us which.
There seem to be other things the article doesn't tell us, such as how the authors verified that the music they used had been tuned to A=440 in the first place (since it's far from universal) or why, given an infinite number of possible tuning frequencies, a great many of which have been chosen by musicians at some point, and given no obvious physical basis for this specific choice, they went for A=432 instead of any other value below 440.
You can transparently slow music without changing the pitch or pitch music without changing the tempo far more than 2%, which was what was done here. This technology has been in use by DJs spinning CDs since the 90s and is also used in music production. Depending on the source material, you can actually double the pitch or tempo with no artifacts.
I agree with you that you can often do this in a way that is still pleasant to listen to. But timestretching/pitch shifting is very far from being transparent in the way that a decent resampler is.
Even a small shift will introduce some audible artifacts in most music. Will they be more or less apparent to the listener than the difference between recordings tuned to A=440 or 432 would be? I don't know. Depends on the music and the listener, I imagine. That would (be one of the many, many unstated things that would) matter to a paper like this.
(For what it's worth, I wrote and maintain a widely-used timestretcher library. Possibly this means I am more aware of the limitations than the strengths of such technology)
There is no way to do this with no artifacts; it's just fundamental to how audio works. We have pretty good algorithms for it, but in the end you're doing psychoacoustics to try to make it sound good. There's no mathematical model for doing this "perfectly" like there is for resampling.
It's not hard to hear the artifacts in DJ tempo stretch algorithms if you listen closely, especially when they are applied to a full mix (as opposed to single instruments). Of course they're small these days, but when you're trying to measure a subtle effect, they're too much of a confounding variable.
i'm also guessing they didn't test different temperament tunings either, which is a shame given that the whole argument for 432Hz has to do with mathematical symmetry
You are just wrong. Musicians can absolutely tell the difference between 432Hz and 440Hz. Audience typically can too, although they might not be able to put into words what is different.
Personally, I prefer a brighter concert-A, 444 or higher.
Doubtful the audiences can, unless maybe they just heard another piece in 440 for comparison. Maybe those with good pitch memory would notice something before they readjusted. Maybe.
Yes, 432 is much easier to work with when you're factoring - as music demands. As well though, many musicians can certainly hear the difference, as pointed out.
Incidentally, there are 432,000 seconds in 12 hours.
Also fun - while continuing to acknowledge the somewhat arbitrary nature of human units - the diameter of the moon is 2159.1 miles - remarkably close to half of 4,320. The Sun's diameter is 865,370 miles - very close to twice 432,000. That they look the same size from Earth is wild to me, and suggests that Pythagoras may have been onto something with the music of the spheres bit.
Also, just because our units could be otherwise, doesn't mean they are entirely arbitrary. I believe that things like that have a sort of wisdom of the crowds, evolution over time thing going on. Like other aspects of language, there is more to its development than is immediately obvious.
That's exactly where this 'symmetry' or 'mathematical' argument falls apart. A second is pretty much arbitrary - it's 1/60 of 1/60th of 1/24th of a day, but how long is a day?. And the scientific description ("the time duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the fundamental unperturbed ground-state of the caesium-133 atom.") has no 'magic resonance' with anything either.
As an avid vaporwave listener, I’d wager that listening to music slowed down / pitched down has a calming psychological effect in general. In other words, 432hz is not some magic number, it’s better because it’s lower.
I wager your talking more about BPM than the pitch of each note. Perhaps there's some argument that lower tuning naturally gives rise to lower BPM when composing a song, but I'm skeptical of that. If you take a song and transpose it or detune it a bit, you don't mess with the rhythem do you?
So if we ignore the tempo; What makes the flattening of a note "calming"?
If anything I might become a bit excited or agitated by the breaking of expectations. Though 8Hz is somewhat subtle.
I'd be curious what songs they used for testing, since I'm thinking that some songs are simply calmer than others at 432Hz for whatever reason. Or visa-versa.
I was expecting to read something about the temperment as well, since changing the tuning allows for different spacing between notes. This too can somewhat dramatically change the feel of each key.
It's not just the BPM. When music is pitched down, it loses some of it's shrillness. The lack of higher pitches can have a calming effect because that's where the ears get most fatigued and feel the most "pain" from listening.
There's a whole genre of music called Slowed and Reverbed that slows all kinds of music down. Here's an example of a slowed song and a it's original:
You're not wrong that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference as long as you don't have perfect pitch (it's a fraction of a semitone), but you might want to check your math.
The study makes no claims about why 432Hz is better, it just reports what they measured. I listened to the examples in the video myself and the 432Hz version really did feel about 1.0185 times as relaxing.
>> "I listened to the examples in the video myself and the 432Hz version really did feel about 1.0185 times as relaxing."
I tried to reproduce your result but I came out with 1.0815 times as relaxing. Are you sure you didn't commit a transcription error -- I doubled-checked mine.
Also: I had the BASS BOOST turned on my $9 bookshelf speakers while I listened. Did you have BASS BOOST on or off?
It should have just mentioned that Hz includes the arbitrary definition of 1 second. If we wanted real/natural values, everything should be done in Planck units.
Interesting! US State Dept. has some background[0]:
> The declarations of the International Conference on Concert Pitch convened by the Austrian Ministerium des Kultus und Unterricht at Vienna, November 16-19, 1885 were published by that ministry and are also in Italy, Ministro degli affari esteri, Trattati e convenzioni tra il regno d’Italia e gli altri stati, xii, 727.
That's such a cool nugget of information. The Versailles one is apparently A = 435 Hz, the 'diapason normal'. Nowadays we mostly use concert pitch at A = 440 Hz. The 99% Invisible podcast has a mini-story on it:
> London’s Royal Philharmonic Society would still tune higher to about 439 Hz though. This was because the mandate specified that Concert A should be 435 Hz according to a tuning fork of a specific weight at 15 degrees Celsius. The temperature was specified so that the metal tuning fork could be accurately reproduced, but British orchestras reasoned that their concert halls were warmer than that, and so to compensate they would tune higher.
I wonder if they tested their assumption with a conformant tuning fork.
Apparently their pitch standard was an Oboe at room temperature (20 degrees) which went up just enough to make up that 4 Hz difference compared to tuned at 15 degrees against that fork. It's a neat little hack.
How do you do a double-blind study here: A significant portion of people would be able to tell A=440 from A=432 with no external reference. Do you screen both tester and recipient for the inability to distinguish?
I've wondered about the effects of 60 cycle hum. If 440 is an A, I believe 60 is a B. In a lot of popular musical scales this is a dissonant tone. Dissonant tones are associated with anxiety. Is constant 60 cycle hum giving people anxiety?
dissonant with what? I don't think a tone can be dissonant in and of itself, dissonance is a foul combination of waves that are just slightly misaligned.
B is in the key of C. It's the seventh degree of the scale. It's the seventh of the I chord and the 3rd of the V chord and more. That's not dissonant in any way, shape or form.
Nevermind that obviously music is written in more keys than C anyway.
A CMaj7 chord has both a B and a C in it and it sounds perfectly fine. You're saying the home chord in the key with the simplest extension is dissonant. That makes no sense. You hear music with two adjacent semitones played together all the time. It's in all jazz music and everything derived from it, which is a huge chunk of modern western music.
Seriously, music isn't all just 3-note chords and a B and a C together sound perfectly fine in the right context, and even moreso when they are separated by several octaves, as in the mains hum theory.
Does anyone know how they got a soundtrack tuned to 432Hz? If it was just an existing soundtrack slowed down a bit, that's not going to sound right. Did the study get an orchestra to record a whole soundtrack at 432Hz?
Slowing down music by that much isn't going to make anything sound noticeably off. You need to go quite a bit further for timbres to start sounding weird. 440 to 432 isn't even half a semitone.
I'd be more curious on if (coined) 8D music has any actual effect on ADHD/autistic brains. Personally, I feel it calms me, but I can't say if it actually is making me more focused or affecting depression or if it's just placebo. Some sort of real study would be nice...
Unfortunately the greatest effect comes from eyes-closed listening, as the music sort of swirls around me, so the movements it illicits almost feels like I'm floating, it loses effect if I'm not really just all-in on listening. I.e. it doesn't seem to do much if I don't think as background noise while coding, but it could help clear my head at the end of the day so I focus better the next day or don't deal with insomnia.
92 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadIt's a very, very bad study. If you want to know how bad: it would lend equal support to the hypothesis "everyone's heart rate drops 4.8bpm in one day".
It seems completely unsurprising that one would be slightly more relaxed the second day than the first.
Edit: In another comment someone mentions that this study was split the way I would have expected so hopefully they did account for schedule at least. Unfortunately I'm not seeing an easy way to access the whole paper to verify.
It would have been helpful measure other tuning values like 430 or 445 Hz to determine if it's caused by 432 Hz specifically.
I have ABXed myself with half-hour gaps on music re-tuned to 432, and music re-turned to 432, then 440, to control for that it has to sound like it's been retuned.
I have Audeze planar magnetics and a relatively quiet apartment.
I'm not able to tell the difference, even on music I listen to very frequently.
It's all horseshit.
Hard agree. Worked for an instrument builder for a decade, of fixed-pitch esoteric instruments. Client community had a distinct minority who went all in on such things as 432 Hz woo-woo.
Happy to make them, with the footnote that instruments made to this or other custom-request references could not play in concert with most others.
No discernible difference, with one interesting qualifier: for acoustic (or emulated) instruments one is familiar with, there is an audible shift in timbre correlated with tuning to different resonances, most dramatically if you retune a given specific instrument.
This is because you are shifting the fundamentals and overtones of the instrument while keeping the natural resonances of the instrument fixed. This naturally produces a different "signature" of relationships between such frequencies and in the case of the instruments I was close to, in their internal resonance, which was completely defining of their "character."
(Something similar is going on with pitch-shifting algorithms which do "formant correction" to try to keep voices sounding natural within modest shift of pitch... we have deeply internalized expectations wrt the various resonant landmarks in human voices because of the bounded variation in their geometry and the physics of voice production; this is less so but absolutely still true of familiar acoustic instruments.)
One of the similarly anecdotal but significant "tells" of the placebo nature of perceived difference in 432 Hz and 440 Hz is to my memory, very few players were incapable of telling instrument key, let alone pitch referent, based on hearing them alone. (Knowledge of available instrument keys and tunings was commonly deep given the cult following they received.)
If they did it in the naïve way, it would result in a decrease in tempo by almost 2%.
There seem to be other things the article doesn't tell us, such as how the authors verified that the music they used had been tuned to A=440 in the first place (since it's far from universal) or why, given an infinite number of possible tuning frequencies, a great many of which have been chosen by musicians at some point, and given no obvious physical basis for this specific choice, they went for A=432 instead of any other value below 440.
[edit: removed warranted but uncivil snark]
Even a small shift will introduce some audible artifacts in most music. Will they be more or less apparent to the listener than the difference between recordings tuned to A=440 or 432 would be? I don't know. Depends on the music and the listener, I imagine. That would (be one of the many, many unstated things that would) matter to a paper like this.
(For what it's worth, I wrote and maintain a widely-used timestretcher library. Possibly this means I am more aware of the limitations than the strengths of such technology)
It's not hard to hear the artifacts in DJ tempo stretch algorithms if you listen closely, especially when they are applied to a full mix (as opposed to single instruments). Of course they're small these days, but when you're trying to measure a subtle effect, they're too much of a confounding variable.
A 432 A makes the math behind music so much nicer to work with (ignoring legacy baggage).
Personally, I prefer a brighter concert-A, 444 or higher.
432 vs 440, independently of any unit, makes the math easier.
432Hz vs 440Hz, obviously, is two pitches that form an audible interval.
But 432 can be a valuable explaining tool. Just don't read it as Hz, but Hz' (prime), cycles per s', such that 432Hz' = 440Hz.
That's about as far as I'm willing to defend 432.
Incidentally, there are 432,000 seconds in 12 hours.
Also fun - while continuing to acknowledge the somewhat arbitrary nature of human units - the diameter of the moon is 2159.1 miles - remarkably close to half of 4,320. The Sun's diameter is 865,370 miles - very close to twice 432,000. That they look the same size from Earth is wild to me, and suggests that Pythagoras may have been onto something with the music of the spheres bit.
Also, just because our units could be otherwise, doesn't mean they are entirely arbitrary. I believe that things like that have a sort of wisdom of the crowds, evolution over time thing going on. Like other aspects of language, there is more to its development than is immediately obvious.
More involved would be to re-tune a piano and play the same song twice.
So if we ignore the tempo; What makes the flattening of a note "calming"?
If anything I might become a bit excited or agitated by the breaking of expectations. Though 8Hz is somewhat subtle.
I'd be curious what songs they used for testing, since I'm thinking that some songs are simply calmer than others at 432Hz for whatever reason. Or visa-versa.
I was expecting to read something about the temperment as well, since changing the tuning allows for different spacing between notes. This too can somewhat dramatically change the feel of each key.
There's a whole genre of music called Slowed and Reverbed that slows all kinds of music down. Here's an example of a slowed song and a it's original:
Cigarettes After Sex - Slowed https://youtu.be/GGfWuK-fZYM
Cigarettes After Sex - Original https://youtu.be/sElE_BfQ67s
slowing something down from 440 to 432 that's three minutes long will result in less than 1 screen frame of difference time
you wouldn't be able to tell the difference
You're not wrong that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference as long as you don't have perfect pitch (it's a fraction of a semitone), but you might want to check your math.
sorry
I tried to reproduce your result but I came out with 1.0815 times as relaxing. Are you sure you didn't commit a transcription error -- I doubled-checked mine.
Also: I had the BASS BOOST turned on my $9 bookshelf speakers while I listened. Did you have BASS BOOST on or off?
</sarc>
https://net.lib.byu.edu/~rdh7/wwi/versa/versa9.html
art. 282
(22) Convention of November 16 and 19, 1885, regarding the establishment of a concert pitch.
> The declarations of the International Conference on Concert Pitch convened by the Austrian Ministerium des Kultus und Unterricht at Vienna, November 16-19, 1885 were published by that ministry and are also in Italy, Ministro degli affari esteri, Trattati e convenzioni tra il regno d’Italia e gli altri stati, xii, 727.
[0] https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1919Parisv...
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/mini-stories-volume-8...
They say that after Versailles:
> London’s Royal Philharmonic Society would still tune higher to about 439 Hz though. This was because the mandate specified that Concert A should be 435 Hz according to a tuning fork of a specific weight at 15 degrees Celsius. The temperature was specified so that the metal tuning fork could be accurately reproduced, but British orchestras reasoned that their concert halls were warmer than that, and so to compensate they would tune higher.
I wonder if they tested their assumption with a conformant tuning fork.
Alas, dang is firmly in the pocket of big karma.
individual papers getting through would hardly be an indictment besides. people make too much fuss over slips
the idea that a system would never pass a single mistake or is otherwise defective is kind of surprising to me, frankly
[1] https://g.co/kgs/A6Vpi8
Nevermind that obviously music is written in more keys than C anyway.
Seriously, music isn't all just 3-note chords and a B and a C together sound perfectly fine in the right context, and even moreso when they are separated by several octaves, as in the mains hum theory.
is this true in all cultures?
If practicing an area with electrical hum, tuning A down to 420 (7 * 60) is definitely a relief.
It’s an interesting, but still open, question though.
Unfortunately the greatest effect comes from eyes-closed listening, as the music sort of swirls around me, so the movements it illicits almost feels like I'm floating, it loses effect if I'm not really just all-in on listening. I.e. it doesn't seem to do much if I don't think as background noise while coding, but it could help clear my head at the end of the day so I focus better the next day or don't deal with insomnia.