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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Decided to try searching this and found this lovely site:

> A=432 Hz, known as Verdi’s ‘A’ is an alternative tuning that is mathematically consistent with the universe. Music based on 432Hz transmits beneficial healing energy, because it is a pure tone of math fundamental to nature https://attunedvibrations.com/432hz/

Oh new age pseudo science. My mom loves this stuff and I never fully understood why. My sister gets angry at me when I point things out or level any criticism because "it makes her happy". This apathy to the issue from people who should know better is likely why nonsense like this keeps spreading in an age of Snopes and Google.

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Eh-- pick your battles.

If family members get a positive placebo effect from listening to "5 Hours High Quality BEST 432hz Meditation Healing Chakra" on YouTube...Who cares?

Because it requires a core assumption of anti-intellectualism.

It doesn't bother you when friends and family are sold on something that is baseless and are completely opposed to actually researching it and at the very least becoming more skeptical about it?

Nah. We evolved to be superstitious. It's evolutionarily advantageous. Why? Because it's much less costly to develop a random incorrect superstition than it is to miss an important correlation.

How harmful is it to meditate to 432Hz compared to... well maybe without that superstition they wouldn't even meditate at all. It's probably advantageous, even though it's bullshit.

As long as they aren't engaging in harmful behaviors (e.g. anti-vax), best to let it go.

I would argue that "not letting it go" is equally harmless and to be permitted to the same degree that you propose otherwise.

Sorry for the late response, but correcting someone often has social costs. It takes time and energy, and can cause people discomfort and can weaken friendships.

It can also make them stronger, I'm not proposing you always ignore superstitions. Just ignore them when there's a cost and minimal payoff.

I think the problem is the mindset. And it's slowly spreading because it's considered rude to challenge it. It's this mindset that leads to unvaccinated children and the use of amber jewelry[0] that's a choking and strangulation hazard on infants and toddlers because amber has supposed magical healing properties. That article is from late 2013 and if anything it's more prevalent.

[0] http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/11/amber-teething-neck...

It's fine. But I'm not going to pretend it's not BS when they try to talk to me about it. Now my mom no longer talks to me about homeopathy.

That sounds like typical libra talk. I'm an Aries so I don't do that.

The one whose inheritance is next squandered on highly priced meditation chakra recordings and excessively expensive hoax high-end audio equipment? (From Youtube to purchasing mail order junk...)

Until that person dies or is otherwise ruled incapacitated, it's their money to spend however they like.

No it isn't. Spending is very clearly regulated, and you are only allowed to spend it on sufficiently 'normal' things.

Who's to say you're going to inherit anything anyway? Maybe they've willed it all to charity.

And I might not even care so much about the inheritance, but I might want the old parents to have something saved up for the old age so they're not completely at the mercy of the welfare system...

(Not something I worry about personally, parents long gone).

Ha! I thought you were making that up...

It's the same reasoning behind Steve Jobs choosing quackery over medicine to treat his cancer.

Tunings (whether by key shift or by reference frequency or whatever other means) can evoke a different sort of feeling and mood in music IMHO. Music is such a personal thing in so many ways, so even though the "beneficial healing energy" / "pure tone of math fundamental to nature" thing is kind of BS, I'll allow a little out there mystical pseudobabble. :) It's just a pity in a way that the mystical BS focuses only on one number.

Personal example: As a musician, A=432 doesn't sound that different to me, not enough to make that much of a difference in tone. However I do like A=425, an arbitrary "in between" tuning on the flat side of the middle between A and Ab in A=440 tuning. It adds an entire new mood set for each key that is rather different than A=440, distinct enough to me where the moods don't overlap (whereas with A=432 it does).

There is no science that can explain this sort of thing that I know of, and I fully expect that others would have different interpretations.

Yea, I don't like this idea of belittling people because they got pulled into this idea.

Tuning is arbitrary. I've listened to some comparisons between A=432 vs 440 and I think the 440 actually sounds better. But then again, like this article even states, it depends so much on the piece. If you're listening to stuff from the 1700s/1800s, it would make sense to try to use the tuning they used at the time, if only to try to get the sense of emotion intended by the originally composers/arrangers/musicians (even then it's a best guess).

But yes, it is pretty arbitrary. It's the tuning of a note depended on the number of cycles per some arbitrary time unit we defined.

If you're listening to a song today, with all our sound precision technology, you're hearing it the way the original author/musicians wanted it to sound (depending on your equalizers, speakers and various other audio setup).

> 440 actually sounds better

I'm curious how you can tell. A double-blind test spaced a few minutes apart (enough for you to forget the frequency so you couldn't tell if what you were hearing was tuned higher or lower than what you heard on the previous trial) would be interesting.

In that place between physical frequencies and brains there is some appreciation that different tuning standards feel different.

I play a lot at A=440, but I also play a lot at A=415 - mostly on the viola da gamba. A=415 is roughly one semitone lower, and it changes the way the instruments resonate. My viol happens to sound good at either pitch, but as an ensemble we find that when we're playing at A=440 the whole sound doesn't blend in quite the same satisfying way. This is due to the construction of the instruments themselves, but also just how those slightly lower pitches sound.

Oh and recorders built to A=415 just sound great. I think that slightly bigger body gives them the chance to produce a richer resonance, but then again you also don't find cheap plastic recorders (or cheap wooden ones) built at A=415 because only "serious" players go looking for those instruments.

One nitpick on the article though - historical tunings don't range from A=415, my recorder teacher has two flutes at what is sometimes called "French baroque pitch" - that's A=392!

> There is no science that can explain this sort of thing that I know of, and I fully expect that others would have different interpretations.

The article had a pretty good explanation: that strings sound different at different tensions. Musical instruments tuned lower would sound darker, mellower, and "looser" than those tuned higher. The instruments would probably feel a little different to the musicians, who would probably play differently, especially if they'd just heard somebody expound on the mystical properties of a certain tuning. I'm not at all surprised that it would sound different.

This is exactly it. If you have two identical pianos, both precisely equally tempered, but one tuned a half step lower, and then you played notes of the same pitch on both pianos (the notes are a half step apart, the pitch is not), they will sound different. Disregarding all the differences surrounding the natural wood and other materials, and the fact that it's impossible to use the same velocity, and the pianos aren't in the same exact position relative to the room, and everything like that -- you will be left with just the differences that have to do with tension.

On an FFT graph, you'll have the same fundamental and a very similar next few partials, but eventually you'll see (and hear) the results of the different tensions. Those differences represent what people like and don't like about different tunings -- nothing to do with the slightly different pitch between 440/442/438/432/etc!

Star Wars is nonsense too but it makes people happy.

Nonsense spreads not just because of apathy.

Star Wars isn't interpreted as a cure though, which is where new age stuff can be borderline dangerous sometimes.

Every work of fiction is "nonsense", but they still have value as entertainment and story-telling. The difference is that fictional works are understood by the reader/viewer to be fictional.

The problem with nonsense that purports to be true is that there's usually a scam attached to it, to separate people from their money. Fictional stories don't have this: everyone knows they're fictional before they spend their money on it, and they know what to expect from it (i.e. pure entertainment, not a cure for whatever ails you).

You leave my space wizards out of this!

And you actually pointed out why those two things are different.

We understand Star Wars is space wizards. New-agers do not understand that their beliefs are mostly bogus.

Luckily for us software development is a completely rational discipline, and is immune to fads, fashions, rhetoric, snake oil, and beliefs with no empirical foundation.

There's a difference between the practice of software development and the effects of software on the world.

She's right to get angry. There's nothing special about 432Hz (see my comment above on it's absolutely arbitrary nature), BUT the numerology that falls out of musical harmony is is indeed special and makes most of human race happy because of the aesthetic satisfaction that Pythagorean harmony (or even it's equal-tempered cousin) delivers to people.

Science is very good at describing things and why they're interesting, but science can't tell you what's beautiful or how to live. I understand your desire to point out the meaningless nature of setting up 432hz as some gold standard and agree with you that it's nonsense, but a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down' you could invest more time in exclaiming over the beauty and meaning of the relative pitch relationships in music, the most popular of which happen to nicely (albeit slightly inaccurately) mirror the ratios of planetary orbital periods. Your sister has the right idea in the wrong context, and you're missing out on some aesthetic insights by overlooking this.

> science can't tell you what's beautiful or how to live.

Yes it can. If you feel otherwise, it is because you're ignorant of how science actually works and how general its base principles are.

Not sure if serious, but if so no it can't except in the most primitive way (like describing harmony vs dissonance in musical notes). Art is far more complex than that, and as for prescribing philosophies of living, forget it.

Thats a very flippant comment.

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