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Comment by timehastoldme | Hacker News Reader

Ok, I see what you mean.

Then most songs would sound 'better' a half-step down, etc.

Look at it like Celsius vs Fahrenheit (this isn't a perfect analogy because both scales measuring the same value, where we're discussing different values, but it'll do).

The boiling point of water in Celsius is 100 degrees, and the freezing point is 0 degrees; in Fahrenheit, 212 and 32, respectively. What's significant is the scale of each unit. 99C is colder than 211 Fahrenheit.

In the case of music, which is all about relative frequencies, establishing A determines the size of the steps. The above poster is proposing that A=432 yields more interesting frequency relationships than A=440. I have no idea.

Well... It doesn't. The same ratios exist for A=440:A=440 * 3/2 and A=432:A=432 : 3/2, for example

I wouldn't say that's the case for most songs, but rather only for simple melodies. But yeah, a graver voice would sound better in most cases.

Consider the beggining of Bach's "Little" Fugue in G Minor (BWV 578), where the subject of the fugue is first introduced by a soprano voice and then repeated by an alto voice, while the soprano voice does the coutersubject. I'd say that, played in isolation, the melody sounds better when sung by the alto voice. But lowering the whole Fugue by a half-step wouldn't make it much better.

With respect to recorded music it tends to be the opposite: if you pitch up a track then the rhythm feels tighter and the vocals more steady, because the differences between the intent and the performance are relatively smaller. Hence an old studio trick dating at least back to the Chipmunks was to record in a lower key. Listener discrimination seems relatively less important in practice, on the other hand.

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