For the fourth and final post in this series on alternative tunings, I present to you a magical tuning guaranteed to (maybe) make your dreams come true. I call it LexTune*, and you can listen to a song played in this tuning here:
Okay, I admit it, I’m being cheeky. I can’t guarantee anything about what listening to a song in this tuning will bring you. My summary on songs in alternative tuning begins with this point: neither, do I believe, can the composers of the “Crystal Whale Sunset Healing 432hz Abundance Vibration” music.
To summarize what claims you might find online about alternative tunings such as 432Hz:
- 432 has nicer mathematical properties than 440
- The number 432 can supposedly be derived by applying mathematical transformations to the natural rate of vibration of the Earth
- Some ancient instruments were maybe tuned to 432Hz
I wanted to go on a journey exploring 432Hz vs 440Hz over the past few weeks. Here’s a summary of the feedback I got about the different tuning experiments, carried out on guitar and synthesizer:
For the guitar tracks played in the It’s All Vibration, More or Less post, I got a number of emails where people expressed a preference for one or the other.
For the purely synthesized tracks played in the Voices From The Void post, the feedback I received was that the two were too similar to discern. And notably, no one commented that they preferred one to the other.
This supports the hypothesis I put forth in the post entitled The Tires and The Bicycle, that the differences in tuning are inconsequential, but the changes in the tone of an acoustic instrument are much more noticeable.
That’s the crux of it. To follow, I’ll add some additional information on why I don’t believe the claims that 432Hz is somehow magical…
The most compelling argument to me is that classical Indian music, which is an ancient system, (and I think one of the most mystical systems of music on the planet) does not prescribe any particular tuning system. I had the fortune of studying at the Ali Akbar College of Music for a summer in the mid-1990’s. During a performance, the lead musician tuned their instrument to their liking (never using a tuner) and the supporting musicians tuned to match. If there was a vocal performer, the musicians tune to accommodate the range of the singer, using their voice as the standard of tuning, not an electric tuner.
Similarly, the instruments of a Javanese Gamelan orchestra, which is another ancient musical system, are tuned to the ear of the instrument maker. Each of the instruments in the orchestra are tuned to each other, but can’t be used to play with the instruments of another orchestra, for they would be out of tune!
*to get LexTune, I loosened my guitar strings, and then brought them back up to a pitch that I thought made the guitar I was playing sound extra nice. No numerical measurement involved, although I did verify it’s not in the standard 440Hz tuning. I thought it sounded great. Feel free to let me know if you like the sound of it.
Finally, why in the world did I name this post “Where Old Lentils Go to Die”? Because it evokes a story from my life when I something I was told, and believed to be true, was so thoroughly debunked by an experience, that it added to the erosion of my ability to blindly accept untested truths.
The story goes like this:
I lived in Hawaii in 2002. I was in the rainforest on the Big Island. It was a time of there being a critical mass of “conscious community” in that part of the island. Diet was a frequent subject of conversation. There were entire communities organized around dietary choices. There was a “raw foodist” commune where I would sometimes go to attend events. I became familiar with some of the claims around that diet. I occasionally wondered if I was somehow failing to live up to my health potential due to eating “dead” cooked food?
Well, one day after putting some extremely well cooked lentils in the refrigerator, I encountered them again a couple days later, still in the refrigerator, and they all had the little sprout tails sticking out! It was at that exact moment that I dropped all negative illusions of cooked food being dead.
May this post bring you some tools to further evaluate claims around alternate tuning systems, should you ever encounter them.
This article is part of a series: