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Comment by errantspark | Hacker News Reader

Is "dropping the phase" the same thing as computing the spectral power distribution?

P.S. A4 = 432Hz is a stupid fad that can't die soon enough.

432 vs 440 Hz in music is the equivalent of the C++ vs Java battle. Vivaldi was a proponent of 432 Hz, so it's only when he died, newthinkers had recalibrated pianos to 440 Hz. I believe the newthinkers are simply lacking taste, and rounding 432 to 440 is same as chopping off a chunk of Parthenon to "fix" its proportions from the golden phi ratio to 3/2.

No, it's not. Java and C++, hell even Java and C# are much more relevantly dissimilar than setting A at 440 vs 432. I'd love to see a citation on Vivaldi's love for 432, he wasn't even playing in 12-TET was he? He'd probably be playing in meantone during that era right? I figure he'd be way more mad about using the wrong intonation to play his music than a difference absolute pitch reference.

> rounding 432 to 440

Rounding from what to what? Why does the number cycles relative to seconds being any particular number matter?

Well, I don't know. My personal reason is that 432 has at least some connection to reality, e.g. half day = 43,200 sec, or speed of light = 432 x 432 miles/sec, or Sun's radius = 432,000 miles. This means that if we take distance that light covers in 1/432 sec, then Sun's radius is exactly 1000 such distances, which is pretty cool.

On the other hand, 440 Hz seems just a random number to me picked by someone with little imagination.

To quote the dude, "that's like your opinion, man."

For others less familiar with this poster's preference and their angst: https://producerhive.com/editorial/432hz-vs-440hz/

Seems so, except that in this case it is basically just the modulus whereas the PSD is the modulus squared |A|^2

Ahh yeah, magnitude vs. power, my mistake on the terms.

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