Skip to main content
Participating Frequently
November 23, 2019
Question

How To Change Music from 440 HZ to 432 HZ? [Audition]

  • November 23, 2019
  • 2 replies
  • 24052 views

Hi,

 

As an example, this guy shows you how to do it with Audacity (https://youtu.be/dl6sae66oWk)

 

He mentions that you can do the same in Audition and the quality turn out better.

 

Thank you...

2 replies

batu_64
Participant
March 3, 2020
SteveG_AudioMasters_
Community Expert
Community Expert
March 3, 2020

Yes, and if you read the comments below the video, you'll see that many people are making exactly the same points I made above, and this is regardless of whether you believe any of this or not - you can't just do blanket conversions and expect all the results to be the same; they clearly won't be.

batu_64
Participant
March 10, 2020

Hello Steve, so how about this?
 In a syhthesizer set to 440 Hz, I played the full notes from C4 to E7 and recorded them in a Wav file. I converted it to 432 Hz and saved it to another Wav file (The link of both is at the bottom).

 

 While playing this converted file, I checked the note frequencies one by one in the Pano Tuner application, which is the most sensitive tuner known. All of the frequencies given by the tuner match the 432 Hz list! As a result, it is not a problem that the frequency differences are logarithmic. Because Pc, adjusts the frequency of each note with a formula, not manually:

 

432 Hz * 2^(n/12)

 If n is positive, it gives the frequency of the notes after A4 in accordance with its order, and if it is negative, it gives the frequency of the notes before A4.

n=0 --> A4 = 432 Hz
n=1 --> A#4/Bb4 = 457.69 Hz
n=2 --> B4 = 457.69 Hz
...
n=-1 --> G#4/Ab4 = 407.75 Hz
n=-2 --> G4 = 384.87 Hz
n=-3 --> F#4/Gb4 = 363.27 Hz
...

 You may check the frequencies of the notes in the file with Pano Tuner. If you set the tuner to 432 Hz, you may see that the notes are also in place:

Pano Tuner - Chromatic Tuner (for Android)

Free Chromatic Tuner: Pano Tuner (for iPhone and iPad)

Wav Files (440 Hz and 432 Hz)

SteveG_AudioMasters_
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 23, 2019

The settings you need are these:

 

But, I feel morally advised to warn you about this. The reasons stated for wanting to do this all seem to revolve around some sort of brain magic that happens, and multiples of 8Hz, but really, all this stuff about 'converting everything you've got' are WAY wide of the mark. This is because they simply don't take account of the fact that a heck of a lot of recorded music (especially in the past) wasn't recorded at 440Hz in the first place! For instance, most 'early instrument' music is already recorded at the 'correct' pitch, and altering it will simply make it sound wrong. A lot of organs are tuned to quite weird pitches - if you apply this correction to most Henry Willis organs, you'll get them back nearer to 440! Anything recorded by analog means is likely to have marginal pitch differences by the time it's been between at least two tape recorders and a pressing lathe, so this makes any shift that's blanket-applied look pretty dubious too. In fact, the only way you could ever apply this rather dubious processing correctly would be to assess the pitch of your recording, and then doing some math, because each recording is going to be different.

 

Basically, the whole idea's a crock of....

KorasiaAuthor
Participating Frequently
November 23, 2019

Hi Steve,

 

I thank you for your reply.

 

I'm trying to understand how those settings translate into 432 HZ, could you briefly explain how those numerical values = a decrease in frequency from 440 HZ (which I believe is the standard) to a -8 HZ decrease?

 

And also, I'm not one to argue or get in long debates over why I do this but I think one needs to understand numbers, energies, and frequencies (AKA the work of Nikola Tesla) and the Satanism behind The Rockefellers decision to standardize all audio to 440 HZ and why that is disharmonous to the human body in terms of the vibration frequencies it emits in order to break the surface of the understanding of why I would want to do this. Unless one has done some extensive research on this subject matter, it'll all seem like quack science, but I've definetly noticed a difference in my mental/psychological wellbeing, and if that's just placebo, then let it be so. Even if our minds believe it to be good for us, it will be, and that among antecdotal evidence is enough for me to change my habits. There are also studies done to prove this, but take of it what you will~ https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=432hz+study+research&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart

 

Ty again

SteveG_AudioMasters_
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 23, 2019

Yes, this is clearly your problem - you simply don't understand how musical pitch works, or you wouldn't ask that question at all. Firstly, the effects of frequency in sound are logarithmic, not linear - you aren't just 'taking off 8Hz' across the board - that would make no difference at high frequencies, and a massive difference at low ones. We are talking about pitch here, not frequency. So, those settings would only translate to 432Hz if the original pitch was A=440, and only for that note. - But this only applies to  music pitched at A=440 And there's a lot of music that already isn't at that pitch.

 

And incidentally, the way I've written this is correct - A=440Hz. That's the A below middle C on a piano. The A an octave below that is A=220Hz (half the frequency, but an octave in pitch) For A=432, the A below would equal A=216. You will now notice that there is a difference of only 4Hz between the notes, whereas there's 8Hz difference the octave above. If you play the A above, then the frequency differences double - A=880 becomes A=864, and there's a 16Hz difference. That's the effect of a logarithmic change.

 

The one thing you will find about the research, though (otherwise it would have been shot down from the outset) was that all researchers will have checked very carefully what the pitch of the original music was before pitch-shifting it to A=432Hz. If you don't do this on an individual basis with each piece, then you will not be achieving whatever it was they claimed, and you will, as far as I'm concerned, have justified your thought that this might be a placebo effect...

 

And you should bear in mind that as somebody with a Master's in acoustic science, I might just know what I'm talking about. What I was referring to as a crock of .... was the idea that you can do pitch changing on a blanket basis - you really can't! As for how pitch got standardised at A=440, that has nothing to do with Rockefellers at all. It originated from Johann Heinrich Scheibler in Germany, who recommended A440 as a standard in 1834, although I think that he got the idea from the French, who'd been using it earlier than that. Anyway, it was adopted by the German Natural History Society the same year, but not implemented in the US until 1926, and then only informally. In many practical ways, it was a good idea, as pitch had been wandering around all over the place for a long time and having it standardised had all the same advantages as any other standard does for the bulk of users. In many ways it was an arbitrary decision as to what the number was - it was more important that it was fixed.

 

I can't say that I'm surprised that lowering pitch slightly has the effect of calming people a bit. But - and it's a big but - one of the significant problems with most of the research I've seen into this is that they've only tested these effects at one alternative pitch, so as it stands, none of this so far can be conclusive.