Thread by @lexdeblanca

I keep seeing this shit and fuck me I didn't study musicology in college for nothing (apparently) so here goes the explanation

let's start with TL;DR:
We tune A to concert pitch (440hz) because at the time of standardizing musical pitch, when tuning was done with a diapason fork, it used to be difficult in a laboratory to achieve 439Hz (for technical reasons of that era) which was standard pitch in UK

Before the 19th century pitch was all over the place and nobody really thought about it. It was the wild fucking West. You'd find an organ tuned 5 semitones below your lute, or whatever. It was broken string season. Broken vocal cords also..

The thing everybody leaves out when it comes to the history of pitch is the evolution of organology, aka "the instruments". As instrumental music took over vocal music, a curious effect started developing.

On the one hand, there's the nature of sound. The human ear is tuned to hear 4000hz first and foremost. We don't hear every frequency equally, the human ear prioritizes the frequencies that correspond to the average female scream (😏)

Because of this natural bias (Psychoacoustics is a very fascinating field of study), there is a tendency to associate higher pitch with "clarity". This began something called "the pitch wars", where orchestras all around the world started slowly but surely raising the pitch

They did this for acoustic reasons, to maximize how clear the orchestra sounds inside of a venue. Eventually, each venue would get its own preferred pitch, which (like everything in sound) had a kernel of truth at its core but also a lot of hocus pocus.

On the other hand, the instruments that begin the pitch wars are much more rudimentary than the ones that finished it. There's a symbiotic relationship between the needs and wants of orchestras and the luthiers. As pitch becomes more and more intense, so the tension of strings

So the instrument makers really enable the orchestras to delve into their pitch experiments, and through the decades this relationship strengthens and culminates in musical instruments as we know them today

This is going on for a couple centuries until the mid 19th century. And mind you, this only applies to instrumental music. Voices cannot be thusly manipulated and because of this we see the appearance of two tuning standards: instrumental pitch and vocal pitch.

This of course worked well when each is performing separately, but became a big nightmare when instrumentalists and singers had to perform together. There was a power dynamic that set the orchestras' needs above the demands of straining singers, who had to eat shit, basically

Until mid 19th century. In France under Napoleon III, a series of pamphlets and demonstrations by singers who were lamenting the degradation of French music and the loss of certain musical traditions. This caught the ear of the French government, who decided to standardize pitch

By law, the government told you exactly how to build a diapason fork, setting the tuning at A=435hz.
Up until then, A was tuned anywhere from 400hz to 490hz, which is a big big range.

The third factor in this story is popularity. As French music became standard and easier to control when performing, it started spreading more easily. And with the rising popularity of French music came the pitch's popularity. 435hz became known as "continental pitch"

Eventually there was a conference in Vienna where the tuning was also adopted by the rest of the European nations (those that mattered musically, at least) and they all settled on 435. Cool

AMAZINGLY, this standard is part of the Motherfucking Treaty Of Versailles, bitch. Which means that not only Hitler violated this treaty by creating the Luftwaffe, he probably also sang out of tune a couple times (in a beer hall, possibly)

Enter Britain, as usual.
The 4th element of this story is temperature.
In 1839 there was a series of Promenade Concerts at the Queen's Hall. Orchestras from around the world would go to London to perform, tickets were purposely cheap. They wanted to host a music Olympics

And they built a fabulous organ

But they were about to discover a couple of sound's properties, the hard way.
An organ is tuned "cold", which means that you tune to a certain pitch, compensating for the fact that when the place is full, it gets hotter, the pipes expand, the pitch goes up.

The Queen's Hall organ had to be tuned at 435.5hz in a 15° hall to sound 439hz in a 30° hall or whatever. And they'd do that all the time, except this time, two things got in the way.

1st, there were going to be performers from Italy, France, Germany, who insisted on Continental Pitch.
2nd, it was an abnormally hot summer and they realized that all the efforts in tuning and retuning would be in vain, so they decided to adopt continental for the whole thing

This pushed the UK to adopt the continental tuning, for practical reasons but also in an attempt to penetrate foreign markets.
This didn't happen overnight. The big orchestras adopted the lower pitch while provincial ensembles stayed on 439, up until WW1

The 5th element of this story is math.
Musicians used diapason forks, but scientists made them. And these scientists started complaining about the difficulty of making a 439hz diapason, since 439 is a prime number and this is apparently a thing that bothered them (Germans..)

Now if you're following, continental pitch is 435, British pitch is 439. That's why the 6th element of this story is human error. Ever since these two standards started co-mingling, there was confusion over what temperature to measure the tuning at.

The Society of German Natural Scientists proposed to set the tuning at 440 to avoid confusions AND avoid prime numbers. They were the ones who submitted it all to the International Standardization Organization, and so that's how we now have A=440Hz

✌️

So no,
It's not that the Rockefellers wanted you to suffer under the influence of a certain pitch. DONT BE FUCKING DUMB.
Tuning to 440 doesn't mean you will hear that one frequency, dummy. First of all, it's impossible to tune non digital instruments to perfection

Second of all, not because the A of your instrument is at 440 that you'll even hear an A in the song. And if you do, it'll be in the context of thousands of other simultaneous frequencies, and this causes what is called "masking".

Train a dog to hear 440hz, then play him My Chemical Romance, see what happens.

Nothing.

The dog doesn't know what the fuck is a black parade either

Third of all, music is not legos, there's glissando, vibrato, there's all sort of "jumping out of the pitch" that occurs by the simple facts of expression and melody writing. Most of music is just a wash of all sorts of pitches, standard and not. The standard is a blueprint.

Which leads me to conclude that IF I had secret knowledge about frequencies and IF it was true that 440 turns you into a drone, I would 100% not use music as the delivery mechanism for the frequency because it would be THE MOST unreliable way of exposing you to 1 single frequency