![]() If it is then I will read on a little before assigning it to the crackpot category. Whenever, I read a claim that some values of any measurement (musical or not) are special due to mathematical properties of the numbers, a crackpot warning light turns on in my head but my first question is whether or not the measurement is dimensionless. And no logical reason why such impact, if any existed, would take form of a single value, universal across different instruments and brains. There is no indication that using SMALLER steps will have BIGGER impact. ![]() Moving melody up and down does change how it sounds - due to how our brains work and how instruments are built, but musicians have been using that trick for centuries, using semitone steps. ![]() TLDR (added after reading one of the comment)Ĭhanging the root of tuning does not bring anything that wasn't already covered by transposition. The absolute pitch of A might be baked into some instruments and perhaps even environments (due to resonance) but this makes the question still different: "do our tools impose constraints on the absolute pitch of A that we use". But this has nothing to do with the absolute pitch of A. The thing that does matter is whether you use the equal-temperament or some other system. In short, no argument about pitching up or down applies to discussions about tunings, because you can transpose melodies regardless of the tuning. But this "supersuperwarm" tuning is 100% the same as using our original (A=440) tuning, but simply transposing down by a semitone to G#. Does that make (A=432) tuning warmer or brighter? No, because you can pitch the same piece down further to (A=415.3), making it even warmer. If you write a piece in A (=440) you can pitch it down to A(=432), and yes, it will sound "warmer". Pitch it down and it will sound warmer, pitch it up and it will sound brighter. When you tune music up or down people hear it differently. The other answers miss the point and answer a different question altogether. They probably would have gotten the same results if they chose 431 or 433 or 435. Unless they compared other frequencies aside from 432 to 440 (and it doesn't look like any of them did) then they haven't shown that there is anything special about that frequency in particular. Maybe the other studies are better (although one of them is just someone's undergrad thesis), but I wouldn't bet on it. So they probably designed this study specifically to build support for their conspiracy theory. Thirdly, if you read between the lines of their introduction (and look at their citations), you can tell that the authors buy into the Lyndon LaRouche/Shiller institute's "the earth vibrates at 432 and there is a worldwide conspiracy to keep the truth from the masses" conspiracy theory. And we don't always want our music to be "relaxing." ![]() So at BEST they only showed that "turning music lower means it's more relaxing." But we already knew that. ![]() And although they measured a bunch of stuff only a few of the results were statistically significant, which (to statisticians) is a marker that they engaged in what we call "p hacking," which is kind of like searching through every verse in the bible until you find one that seems like it predicted 9/11. They didn't check whether what would have happened if they compared 440 to some other random "lower" tuning (say 428). Second, note that they ONLY compared 440 vs 432. I just looked at the first paper cited (from 2019) and it is clearly bogus (because I'm in academia I can actually read it even though it's pay-walled).įirst of all, the study itself is tiny (only 30 or so subjects) and badly designed. I'm a statistician as well as a musician and I can tell you that just because something is published in a peer reviewed journal (especially in an Elsevier journal) doesn't mean it's not bogus. If you turn piece of music down by some amount it will sound "warmer." Maybe you like that, maybe you don't, but there is NO mathematical or psychoacoustic reason why 432 should be objectively "better" than 440 or 432 or 428 or whatever.Īs for that paper. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |