Or one could just wait for age to knock down the high-frequency response of one’s ears. At age 30, I could hear the flyback oscillator on a CRT. At 76, I’m glad I can still distinguish the front doorbell from my tinnitus.
(Nevertheless, I still retune my guitar’s B and low E strings according to what key I’m playing in.)
Years ago we dined in style at the Carnegie A-440 Pizza Hall near Torrey Pines. Some spicy sauce, yo. Wouldn’t have been the same at A-432.
I don’t really think you can fix that. Sure you can make the AC line frequency harmonious with a single note but most music uses more than one note. Just pick a random low note on a piano and imaging playing it randomly or continuously alongside other music. It’s perfectly on grid but will be dissonant with plenty of music.
Well…
I’m not sure what all the factors are but weather is a one. Wooden instruments swell with heat and humidity and become stiffer with cold. Pipe organ notes depend on the temperature of the air inside the pipes. An instrument made/tuned to any standard can change if it is moved to another climate or season. If you don’t have a designated standard tuning fork or electronic tuner all you can do is pick one note to be a reference and tune everything else to that.
Adam Neely has taken the 432Hz crowd to task a few times. He has a great video explaining this and demonstrating the various proposed tunings:
And they sound… Kinda bad, tbh. (As he puts it)
One of my favorite Music YouTubers, Adam Neely, made a video about this, where he doesn’t just say “432 is bullshit”, but instead goes into why music is tuned the way it is. He retunes his piano to show exactly why 12-tone equal temperament sounds “better” to most people. Which frequency you decide to tune A to is completely arbitrary.
Cellist here.
There’s a practical reason for 440 over 432 hz. Flat notes sound far worse to the human hear than sharp notes.
While playing, stringed instruments typically go out of tune ‘lower’. So if you tune to a higher pitch, you’re more likely to still be sounding good at the end of a performance.
Some conductors even tune higher than 440 for this reason.
But the brass, woodwinds, organ and marimba will be constant throughout, no? It still shouldn’t matter whether one starts at 440 (modern A), 432 ( .5 semitone flatter) or 415 (a semitone flatter). Is this conductor directing everyone to start high at the beginning of the concert or just one group of instruments?
Personally, between the vagaries of pitch in
a) this line of thinking added to
b) the mindless convenience of ET and
c) the further inequities of vibrato,
has turned most orchestral music into a mush of tuning applesauce when what I really want is the clarity of one fresh apple.
Flat or sharp relative to what?
The practicalities of playing “in tune” vary with the instrument–my brass-playing acquaintances talk about the need to warm their instruments up and to fine-tune them as playing continues. Reed players are always fiddling with their reeds. Pipe organs are mentioned upthread. Guitar intonation is a challenge for builders (where to put the frets and bridge) and something to take into account when changing string gauges. I’m sure that every non-electronic instrument (that is, those that don’t start the sound-production chain with a signal generator) has its crochets. Where one locates the home-note for individual or ensemble tuning would seem to be a separate issue.
Go back a few hundred years if you want real variety. Back then you could have multiple pitch standards in the same village. The band at the lords house played at one pitch, the church organ was at another, and the town band (think HS marching band) could agree with either, or be on its own. Repeat for the next village over. You will find pitches as low as 392 hz to north of 460 hz.
Back when I used to occasionally natter about software standards, and having so many to chose from, I started collecting tuning forks I currently have 392, 408, 410, 415, 429, 432, and 460. Would like a 466 if I can find one.
It explains the popularity of unfretted string instruments, as able to cope with both pitch and tuning system changes.
Oh yea, its things like this that allow us to have some idea what pitches used to be in the first place. They built wind instruments with extra sections tuned for different standard pitches. Here is a typical flute, with multiple center sections. (from the Boston MFA’s instrument collection)
Yesterday’s post of the the “THX The Audience is Listening” theme might be an excellent application to test whether 432 has any bearing on a crowd–given enough datapoints. I held my tuner (Cleartune app) up to this version on YT and they clearly weren’t buying into the 432 psychology.
But maybe there are different THX themes out there and I should take my tuner to each movie to check to be sure.
I love Adam’s videos. Some of the music theory is always beyond my grasp but he always finds a way to bring me along.
Both Lyndon Larouche and L. Ron Hubbard were big boosters of A=432, so by that associative metric it certainly falls squarely in the realm of steaming balderdash.
The not-very-related (but probably often conflated) topic of equal temperament vs. just intonation is a musically interesting topic though - the equal intervals compromise being based mainly on matters of practicality and convenience. There’s work being done with electronic methods that can circumvent the issues of having a fixed tuning, not only with respect to other instruments in an orchestra or group, but dynamically re-mapping in realtime on a given instrument throughout the duration of a performance using contextually appropriate just intervals, (these take into account overtone series relationships). Also related - interesting work happening with isomorphic keyboard layouts having a 2D field of note actuators that can array over a larger dimensional spaces than a linear fixed scale provides.
Maybe was because the differences in NTSC old, NTSC new and PAL C64 models, so having a C at 256 Hz makes note calculation easier?
Sorry, not ROB Hubbard 
Which “standard” AC frequency would that be? 
In most of the world it’s 50HZ, but in the US and some parts of Asia they use 60HZ.
I reckon we could find a different frequency to have an argument about for every day of the week, but let’s leave mains AC frequencies as tomorrow’s argument 
Nazi aggression against tenors, certainly. One notes that it’s common for Baroque music to be performed using A=415 Hz, which is a lot friendlier to tenors and sopranos.
Living in Australia I’m also living in tomorrow so I’ll give AC Hertz a shot.
Only recently I noticed on a 70’s (I think) turntable that had one of those strobe speed adjustments with the black and silver checkerboard with for stripes on the side of the platter - two sets of 33 & 45 rpm with 50 and 60 inscribed on the strobe light head. AC hertz I presume!
Was talking to an older folk who was a projector tech who mentioned that in Australia all projectors were synced to AC hertz up until the mid 70’s which meant that 24 fps was actually playing back at 25 fps so the pitch of all films we watched was pitch shifted up!
Never heard that before, but films were telecined at 25 fps for television broadcast in PAL and SECAM territories.
If projectors running on 50 Hz supplies were synced to the power supply, how was the speed regulated for projectors on 60 Hz supplies?
