Tag: Books

If I read something and recommend it, I very much think you should read it.

  • 432Hz music and the hidden problem of tuning

    About ten years ago, I released Splendor, a project I later removed from my discography. I built the album around the 432Hz tuning, keying each track to one of the seven chakras.

    As I kept experimenting with tuning and retuning my synthesizers, I realized I’d been going about it all wrong. Most of the “432Hz” music I’d been listening to wasn’t actually composed in that tuning at all—they were just 440Hz recordings pitched down by 8Hz. That approach made even less sense than what I was doing; no matter who was doing it, the math simply didn’t math.

    But the thing that drove me to drop the project completely was best articulated by Christopher Jaros in his book Sonic Alchemy (Amazon):

    Claims about the ancient origins of the 432Hz tuning encounter a major obstacle, which is the anachronism of the concept itself. The idea of consciously tuning instruments to an absolute value measured in cycles per second (cps), or today’s Hertz (Hz), is inextricably linked to the modern, scientific paradigm.