9 ms·
Music Tuned to 440 Hz versus 432 Hz and Health Effects (2019)
- MeteorMarc 5y agoWas it a double-deaf study?
- tgv 5y agoThis has been discussed before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29849033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29849033 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".
- taran_narat 5y agoI agree, there are too many confounders to draw a conclusion from this, a lot of the things in this study could be just down to random chance.
- gibspaulding 5y agoJeesh, 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.
- OscarCunningham 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
- fathyb 5y agoThe 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.
- roelschroeven 5y agoJust 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.
- janekm 5y agoTo 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.
- JohnHaugeland 5y agoI'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. It's all horseshit.
- aaroninsf 5y agoMic drop comment. 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.)
- acadapter 5y agoHow did they transform the original music to A=432Hz? If they did it in the naïve way, it would result in a decrease in tempo by almost 2%.
- rob74 5y agoGood 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...
- cannam 5y agoIt 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. [edit: removed warranted but uncivil snark]
- insickness 5y agoYou 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.
- cannam 5y agoI 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)
- ppqqrr 5y agoAs 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.
- nixpulvis 5y agoI 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.
- insickness 5y agoIt'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: Cigarettes After Sex - Slowed https://youtu.be/GGfWuK-fZYM https://youtu.be/GGfWuK-fZYM Cigarettes After Sex - Original https://youtu.be/sElE_BfQ67s https://youtu.be/sElE_BfQ67s
- scrollaway 5y agoThis is the only thing you need to really watch about this nonsense: https://youtu.be/EKTZ151yLnk https://youtu.be/EKTZ151yLnk
- rafaelturk 5y agothanks for sharing.. sums up all conspiracy theories
- OscarCunningham 5y agoFunny how we all know the YouTube video is more credible than the peer-reviewed study. If I had to explain why to a stranger I'd really struggle.
- incrudible 5y agoThe 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.
- tanseydavid 5y ago>> "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? </sarc>
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- karmakaze 5y agoIt 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.
- petters 5y agoLooking at the number of tested variables, this seems very relevant: https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/
- jacquesm 5y agoDon't go breaking the Treaty of Versailles now! https://net.lib.byu.edu/~rdh7/wwi/versa/versa9.html 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.
- benwad 5y agoWow I hadn't heard that before! Why would that be in the Treaty of Versailles?
- mannykannot 5y agoIt is listed as one of the many pre-existing conventions and agreements (in this case, from 1885) which are not affected by the treaty.
- EvanAnderson 5y agoInteresting! 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. [0] https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1919Parisv13/ch19subch2 https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1919Parisv...
- stfwn 5y agoThat'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: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/mini-stories-volume-8/4/ 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.
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- erwincoumans 5y agoDoes this resonate with anyone?
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoWhy are you like this.
- sideshowb 5y agoIt's his temperament
- erwincoumans 5y agoNegative vibrations? Don't tell me that -432Hz is better than +432Hz.
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- frickinLasers 5y agoMan, I wish I could downvote these threads. This low-effort karma farming garbage belongs on reddit, not here.
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- erwincoumans 5y agoWhy not skip this whole article? The topic invites jokes. I enjoyed the 'double-deaf' review joke.
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- Wolfenstein98k 5y agoAbsolute garbage.
- spacechild1 5y agoSeriously?
- stathibus 5y agoAnother hilarious indictment of our academic peer review system
- JohnHaugeland 5y agothis wasn't peer reviewed. most papers aren't. 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
- OscarCunningham 5y agoWhat makes you think it wasn't peer reviewed? It says it was published in 'Explore', which is a peer reviewed journal. https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/explore https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/explore
- an_alien_heat 5y agoutter tripe. A=whatever is a social convention and there have been many, many, many concert pitches historically in the European musical tradition.
- fortran77 5y agoHow 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?
- obiefernandez 5y agoI wrote a successful track based on this called “Natural Harmonics” [1] and it’s tuned to 432Hz. Definitely gives it a different feel. [1] https://g.co/kgs/A6Vpi8 https://g.co/kgs/A6Vpi8
- snarfy 5y agoI'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?
- bruce343434 5y agodissonant 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.
- belter 5y agoNot if you have perfect pitch...
- snarfy 5y agoDissonant with any western music that might be playing in the key of C.
- marcan_42 5y agoB 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.
- snarfy 5y agoPlay a B and C together. Dissonance. It is true it's not a very good idea.
- marcan_42 5y agoA 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.
- ChrisKingWebDev 5y agoDoes 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?
- marcan_42 5y agoSlowing 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.
- milesvp 5y agoRight, but we already know slower music is more soothing, so it’s a confounding effect.
- kashunstva 5y agon=33? main outcome measures just at, or not even meeting statistical significance. Meh. It’s an interesting, but still open, question though.
- cestith 5y agoThe only takeaway from the study was that it warranted a similar study with more participants.
- gremlinsinc 5y agoI'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.