“Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.”
Saturday morning; and it’s day 27 / 30 of my campaign to raise awareness of my new coaching programme, expressly designed for film and television creatives. It’s my very own social media ‘experiment’…
There’s nothing I find more intriguing that a well-baked conspiracy theory; mainly because so many of the seemingly unthinkable scenarios of late have actually come to pass (and I’ll leave it at that).
But as a friend of mine said recently, “The time between a conspiracy theory and it being a proven fact is now being measured in months, not decades.”
Nonetheless, whilst remaining a cautious sceptic, I do enjoy the research of topics that interest me; especially if it involves sound and human emotions, the area of my PhD research. So the debate about music referenced to 440Hz tuning, compared to that of 432Hz, has intrigued me.
A favourite villain in many conspiracy theories is the Rockefeller family, who without doubt from the late 19th century have pursued and persuaded so many things from farming to pharma, for their own almost incalculable financial gain. But a recent post doing the rounds on social media claiming the ‘rotten Rockefellers’ had nefariously been responsible for a change in music tuning, turned me into a super-sleuth.
It was an agreement internationally agreed in the 1950s and ratified in 1975, that orchestras, for instance, would standardize at a common tuning of ‘Concert A’ (440Hz). 432Hz had been a common standard long before then, particularly in opera (but so had 440Hz in some places). So it’s a bit like the argument between analogue vinyl records and digital audio, or the difference in audio sampling rate of a CD (44.1kHz) compared to the soundtrack of video (48kHz); some people genuinely find one better than the other to listen to.
Interestingly, when a harp is present in an orchestra, everyone tunes to the middle ‘A’ of that instrument (tuning a harp is laborious!), whatever that frequency might nominally end up being (bear in mind that in musical terms, the difference in frequency between 440Hz and 432Hz is miniscule: 32 hundredths of a tone, where a tone is 1/6th of an octave.)
There are however some really interesting scientific papers on the perceived benefits of 440Hz tuning versus 432Hz, in controlled, blind tests. (Plot spoiler, it turns out that there are some. I encourage you to look.)
But did I not look hard enough for the Rockefeller’s interference? Are their tracks too well covered? (Agh! I’m back to where I started!)
The waiting list for my coaching services and details of my coaching content, including how to download my free eBook on the benefits of coaching for creatives, awaits you here:
www.soundproducer.com.au/coaching
Joining my waiting list is an easy and non-committal way to receive more details and arrange a 1-to-1 Zoom call to discuss your own needs.
