Music is an incredible carrier for expressing vast spectrum of emotions, feelings and thoughts. Given the variety of music, we all have our preferences and while loving particular songs, genres and artits we despise listening to some of the others.
Even with differences in our taste of music, we are mostly able to agree that songs written out of tune sound just bad. But what does make the sound being out of tune or not? Simple answer is "when it does or doesn't sound right", but in different context exactly the same sound can be considered "clean". Just like in the human speech words can be meaningful in one language while being completely gibberish in the others. The same applies to music's sound - it all depends on our "language" - the tuning system. In modern's western music the most popular tuning system, is a twelve-tone equal temperament which divides the octave into 12 parts - semitones. It results with chromatic scale being most commonly used musical scale in western music as it covers all of the pitches (opposed to e.g. pentatonic that uses only 5 tones). At this moment the standard pitch uses 440 hertzes for an A note above middle C while all other notes are set relatively to it. Here comes the real question - is this system correct and how do we know if it is or isn't? But before we can try answering to this question, let's talk about how does sound work in general.
Probably you already know that sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave through mediums like eg. in our case - mostly an air. It means that there is no sound in vacuum and all these explosions in space in sci-fi movies should be silent (not to mention that there would be no fire in these explosions neither). This vibrations are composed of alternately raised and lowered pressure of medium it goes through.
Simple sound wave can look like this:
It is a basic sine wave, with its amplitude (A) - which is strength of the wave (you can imagine it as a regular wave on water. Amplitude would be how high above water's level wave arises and how deep below water's level wave regresses). In this case amplitude means how loud is the sound. The bigger waves, the louder sound. Another important part of our sound wave is length of wave's cycle (period = T) which is the time it takes for a wave to completely oscillate. Keep in mind that it doesn't mean that next cycle will be identical, as a wave can weaken through time and the amplitude can decay, but we still count it as a cycle. What is important for us, is to understand that frequency of the soundwave is the amount of the cycles in one second. It is also worthy to take into account that playing instrument faster won't change note's frequency as resonation of soundwave remains same while only lenght of soundwave is shortened. This is one of the reasons why musicians have to tune their instruments to play the right notes. On the other hand - playing recorded song slower, will change its frequency as every soundwave will be played slower instead of just being played shorter - like it would happen in live music. We percieve low frequency sounds as a bass sounds and the higher frequency the higher it sounds. Here is an example of how sine wave sounds in human hearing range:
I suggest skipping to different parts of that movie to hear differences better.
Perception of a difference in the frequency is higher in lower frequencies as a difference between 20Hz and 200Hz is bigger than between 10000Hz and 11000Hz.
For the small insight into frequency range:
Frequency of male voice is between 100-1000 cycles per second (100-1kHz) with harmonics up to 8k and breath/air noises up to 16k while female voice is between 200-1150Hz with harmonics and air noises in same range as men.
Sub bass sound is up to 60Hz and it sounds like a thump or a rumble.
Then there is a bass up to 200Hz and it sounds punchy, has warmth.
Midrange is up to 2kHz - most instruments have their spectrum through bass up to midrange length.
Midrange sounds like a honk, whack or in higher frequencies a little tinny.
Then we've got high mids up to 6kHz that sound crunchy and are mostly harmonic sounds.
After that there are high frequencies that sound similar to air noises.
We know that piano's keys played higher or lower are going to sound different and even though they can be played in same frequency range as guitar they still sound different. The reason is that sound waves are shaped differently. Examples above were shown on simple sine wave (most common types of waves are sine, triangle, square, sawtooth - which is something between square and triangle), but in reality sound waves are very complex and are combination of different waves with different frequencies:
which eventually results in this:
You can see one second of a song's sound wave with even bigger magnification of the wave. At this moment we understand that sound's volume depends on wave's amplitude, pitch of the sound depends on frequency and timbre depends on shape of the wave - the different compositions of different singular waves. But there is another not so obvious but interesting factor - polarization (property related to phase of wave) which quite often is overseen. Polarization is a property of the wave which determines transverse of the wave - when wave lowers pressure of medium and when it highers the pressure. It is important to notice that on diagrams representing sound waves sometimes it is shown polarization (like in all previous examples) but sometimes (it isn't very common) it shows loudness on left and right channel of speakers:
Polarization is correlated with how our speakers work - they move back and/or farward creating waves of lower and higher pressure. It decides which way should speaker go while frequency decides how many times in one second speaker should move and amplitude decides how far away from central point speaker's membrane should move. There are interesting consequences to the fact that polarization of sound exists, because if you try playing the same song at the same volume and you reverse polarization of song's copy, speakers won't move at all and you won't hear a sound. It gets even more interesting when you try playing the same song with reversed polarization on one of the speaker's channel. Both speakers will now play the music but one of the speakers will move in opposite direction to the other speaker which will make waves extinguish eachother. We will still hear the sounds as there are multiple factors like different distance between each of our ears each of the speakers or even reverb of the room/space where we are at, but effect is still noticeable:
The original for reference:
From our perspective it is not easy to say what is wrong and why it sounds strange because at the same time, everything sounds kinda normal. For better effect - try moving your head from one speaker to other. At this point we can now clearly see the connection between speakers, sound and physics.
We can move with our analysis of the music's structure further to the tuning systems. In the music, tuning system defines which tones or pitches should be used when plaing the music. In other words, they define at what frequencies different sounds should be played. It is pretty complex topic because there are plenty of different tuning systems based on different indications. Even for twelve-note chromatic scale (Which is kind of division that is used in western music. Twelve-note division is also used in e.g. ancient chinese's chromatic scale, but it is different kind of scale and different kind of tuning than western.) there are multiple tuning systems like: pythagorean tuning, meantone temperament, equal temperament or just intonation - every tuning has different frequency ratio. Regardless of the kind of the division, scales are divided into several different notes that are tuned to different frequencies. In our case the most commonly used standard is called A440(or A4, or Stuttgart pitch) which is tuning of the note A above middle C to frequency of 440Hz. Frequency of the note is the frequency at which resonates the lowest frequency in the sum of its sound wave. Interesting fact is that every note's frequency is a multiplication of the frequency of they same note but from lower octave (in this case, as it isn't always the issue). This means that every note from higher octave is a sound wave that contains exactly the same frequencies as the corresponding note from lower octaves.
But also we are able to tell what is the frequency of the every single note.
It is now understandable that our tuning is not the only one that works and it is not result of the some absolute values that decide that this is the only way that sounds should be played. The most important factor is the relation of the notes to eachother rather than tuning them into some kind of magical perfect pitch. It opens gates for people to search for different kind of tunings. Some people believe that music sounds better when it is tuned to 432Hz (note A above middle C). But why 432? It is the result of the schumann resonances which are set of the spectrum of extremely low frequency portion of the Earth's electromagnetic field spectrum. This resonance has fundamental frequency at 8Hz and if we follow rules from above and we set C-1 (the lowest note) to this frequency we will get A-1 at 13.5Hz which leads to A4 at 432Hz. We understand what 432Hz means in the context of the whole tuning and music. We also understand that it is somewhat up to our prefernces as both scales are valid. There are a lot of people who believe that this standard is better than A440. They have a lot of reasons for supporting that opinion, but most of these reasons aren't based on facts. It is common to hear that universe allegedly resonates in that frequency, that it is frequency of life and/or earth and other similar theories. There is no hard evidence that would support chosing 432Hz over 440Hz but because these kind of theories add some flavour to this topic - it makes it worth to take a look at that.
Below you can compare which version sounds better to you.
In my opinion 432Hz in some cases might sound better because all of the sound spectrum is played slower frequencies which makes it sound slightly deeper. People usually tend to enjoy lower sounds and bass sounds, while high pitched sounds seem to be annoying. Difference in these two standards is very small but hearable and in comparision it could be the reason why some people prefer 432Hz.
Does the kind of the music you are listening to depend on your mood? What kind of music do you listen to at which mood?
What is the role of music in your life?
What do you think about correlation between mathematic and music? Can you hear and/or feel difference between 432hz and 440hz? How did you feel listening to polarized music?
Would you rather be introduced to new music or you search for new music on your own? Do you care what do you listen to? Why?
Even with differences in our taste of music, we are mostly able to agree that songs written out of tune sound just bad. But what does make the sound being out of tune or not? Simple answer is "when it does or doesn't sound right", but in different context exactly the same sound can be considered "clean". Just like in the human speech words can be meaningful in one language while being completely gibberish in the others. The same applies to music's sound - it all depends on our "language" - the tuning system. In modern's western music the most popular tuning system, is a twelve-tone equal temperament which divides the octave into 12 parts - semitones. It results with chromatic scale being most commonly used musical scale in western music as it covers all of the pitches (opposed to e.g. pentatonic that uses only 5 tones). At this moment the standard pitch uses 440 hertzes for an A note above middle C while all other notes are set relatively to it. Here comes the real question - is this system correct and how do we know if it is or isn't? But before we can try answering to this question, let's talk about how does sound work in general.
Probably you already know that sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave through mediums like eg. in our case - mostly an air. It means that there is no sound in vacuum and all these explosions in space in sci-fi movies should be silent (not to mention that there would be no fire in these explosions neither). This vibrations are composed of alternately raised and lowered pressure of medium it goes through.
Simple sound wave can look like this:
I suggest skipping to different parts of that movie to hear differences better.
Perception of a difference in the frequency is higher in lower frequencies as a difference between 20Hz and 200Hz is bigger than between 10000Hz and 11000Hz.
For the small insight into frequency range:
Frequency of male voice is between 100-1000 cycles per second (100-1kHz) with harmonics up to 8k and breath/air noises up to 16k while female voice is between 200-1150Hz with harmonics and air noises in same range as men.
Sub bass sound is up to 60Hz and it sounds like a thump or a rumble.
Then there is a bass up to 200Hz and it sounds punchy, has warmth.
Midrange is up to 2kHz - most instruments have their spectrum through bass up to midrange length.
Midrange sounds like a honk, whack or in higher frequencies a little tinny.
Then we've got high mids up to 6kHz that sound crunchy and are mostly harmonic sounds.
After that there are high frequencies that sound similar to air noises.
We know that piano's keys played higher or lower are going to sound different and even though they can be played in same frequency range as guitar they still sound different. The reason is that sound waves are shaped differently. Examples above were shown on simple sine wave (most common types of waves are sine, triangle, square, sawtooth - which is something between square and triangle), but in reality sound waves are very complex and are combination of different waves with different frequencies:
which eventually results in this:
You can see one second of a song's sound wave with even bigger magnification of the wave. At this moment we understand that sound's volume depends on wave's amplitude, pitch of the sound depends on frequency and timbre depends on shape of the wave - the different compositions of different singular waves. But there is another not so obvious but interesting factor - polarization (property related to phase of wave) which quite often is overseen. Polarization is a property of the wave which determines transverse of the wave - when wave lowers pressure of medium and when it highers the pressure. It is important to notice that on diagrams representing sound waves sometimes it is shown polarization (like in all previous examples) but sometimes (it isn't very common) it shows loudness on left and right channel of speakers:
Polarization is correlated with how our speakers work - they move back and/or farward creating waves of lower and higher pressure. It decides which way should speaker go while frequency decides how many times in one second speaker should move and amplitude decides how far away from central point speaker's membrane should move. There are interesting consequences to the fact that polarization of sound exists, because if you try playing the same song at the same volume and you reverse polarization of song's copy, speakers won't move at all and you won't hear a sound. It gets even more interesting when you try playing the same song with reversed polarization on one of the speaker's channel. Both speakers will now play the music but one of the speakers will move in opposite direction to the other speaker which will make waves extinguish eachother. We will still hear the sounds as there are multiple factors like different distance between each of our ears each of the speakers or even reverb of the room/space where we are at, but effect is still noticeable:
The original for reference:
From our perspective it is not easy to say what is wrong and why it sounds strange because at the same time, everything sounds kinda normal. For better effect - try moving your head from one speaker to other. At this point we can now clearly see the connection between speakers, sound and physics.
We can move with our analysis of the music's structure further to the tuning systems. In the music, tuning system defines which tones or pitches should be used when plaing the music. In other words, they define at what frequencies different sounds should be played. It is pretty complex topic because there are plenty of different tuning systems based on different indications. Even for twelve-note chromatic scale (Which is kind of division that is used in western music. Twelve-note division is also used in e.g. ancient chinese's chromatic scale, but it is different kind of scale and different kind of tuning than western.) there are multiple tuning systems like: pythagorean tuning, meantone temperament, equal temperament or just intonation - every tuning has different frequency ratio. Regardless of the kind of the division, scales are divided into several different notes that are tuned to different frequencies. In our case the most commonly used standard is called A440(or A4, or Stuttgart pitch) which is tuning of the note A above middle C to frequency of 440Hz. Frequency of the note is the frequency at which resonates the lowest frequency in the sum of its sound wave. Interesting fact is that every note's frequency is a multiplication of the frequency of they same note but from lower octave (in this case, as it isn't always the issue). This means that every note from higher octave is a sound wave that contains exactly the same frequencies as the corresponding note from lower octaves.
But also we are able to tell what is the frequency of the every single note.
It is now understandable that our tuning is not the only one that works and it is not result of the some absolute values that decide that this is the only way that sounds should be played. The most important factor is the relation of the notes to eachother rather than tuning them into some kind of magical perfect pitch. It opens gates for people to search for different kind of tunings. Some people believe that music sounds better when it is tuned to 432Hz (note A above middle C). But why 432? It is the result of the schumann resonances which are set of the spectrum of extremely low frequency portion of the Earth's electromagnetic field spectrum. This resonance has fundamental frequency at 8Hz and if we follow rules from above and we set C-1 (the lowest note) to this frequency we will get A-1 at 13.5Hz which leads to A4 at 432Hz. We understand what 432Hz means in the context of the whole tuning and music. We also understand that it is somewhat up to our prefernces as both scales are valid. There are a lot of people who believe that this standard is better than A440. They have a lot of reasons for supporting that opinion, but most of these reasons aren't based on facts. It is common to hear that universe allegedly resonates in that frequency, that it is frequency of life and/or earth and other similar theories. There is no hard evidence that would support chosing 432Hz over 440Hz but because these kind of theories add some flavour to this topic - it makes it worth to take a look at that.
Below you can compare which version sounds better to you.
In my opinion 432Hz in some cases might sound better because all of the sound spectrum is played slower frequencies which makes it sound slightly deeper. People usually tend to enjoy lower sounds and bass sounds, while high pitched sounds seem to be annoying. Difference in these two standards is very small but hearable and in comparision it could be the reason why some people prefer 432Hz.
Does the kind of the music you are listening to depend on your mood? What kind of music do you listen to at which mood?
What is the role of music in your life?
What do you think about correlation between mathematic and music? Can you hear and/or feel difference between 432hz and 440hz? How did you feel listening to polarized music?
Would you rather be introduced to new music or you search for new music on your own? Do you care what do you listen to? Why?
Comments
2. Music I very important in my life, I can’t imagine my life without music. I need to have my headphones with me everywhere. My memory and music are connected, I connect people or places with these one song e.g.
3. Yes, I can. I heard „Happy” so it was easier to hear a difference than in „Living”. I’ve never heard this song before and both versions are good :D. But there is a moment (~0:40) where is only music without singing and there I finally heard differently. It’s hard to say what I heard. Polarized music is like as if behind a wall or under the water? It’s lower and a little quieter? The correlation between mathematics and music is real. I heard that. But some people wouldn’t hear and feel it.
4. I like some artist very much and I’m can’t wait to hear new albums or go to the concerts, but I really like when someone plays me something new. One artist can be a minute or hundreds of minutes. It is exactly the same situation when you are listing the radio. There are 50 song which the play all the time. Sometimes they change „Nothing else matter” to „Whisky in the jar” but it’s boring. How many times you can listen this same song? There are a lot of good songs. It can be still Metallica, but you can play something, which is not as well known.
Well, I have a very large kind of repertoire, so moods is not important so much but the music is.
What is the role of music in your life?
A lot, cannot even stay 1minute without even listening a music.
What do you think about correlation between mathematic and music? Can you hear and/or feel difference between 432hz and 440hz? How did you feel listening to polarized music?
For me there were no difference or I couldn't catch the differences.
Would you rather be introduced to new music or you search for new music on your own? Do you care what do you listen to? Why?
Of course i do cmon, who don't care what they don't listen tho, i do search my music by myself from different online platforms.
Music is very close to me. If I don't listen it through my headphones, it's still in my mind. Sometimes I feel addicted to it, maybe i listen too much.
What do you think about correlation between mathematic and music? Can you hear and/or feel difference between 432hz and 440hz? How did you feel listening to polarized music?
I'm not audiophile, I think I'm not able to notice the diffrence.
Would you rather be introduced to new music or you search for new music on your own? Do you care what do you listen to? Why?
When it comes to picking music genre, I'm quite universal. It really depends on my mood. I'm open to most of them. The only criteria for song is to be likeable by me.
I forgot to mention that polarization might not work on some speakers as it need space for opposite soundwaves to fight eachother. I might be wrong but I think that this strange feeling is caused by soundwaves muting particular parts of eachother.
I can totally relate to the boredom of radio listening. I'd rather spent time to search for something new instead of repeating same jingles all over again.
I know there are a lot of people who enjoy and valuate music but it always warms my heart when I find another one.
I forgot to mention that it wouldn't work on headphones - it could be the case.
I've met a lot of people who are like "I listen to everything, just whatever is playing on the radio" hence my question but yeah, from our point of view it is a strange question. Glad you care.
It could be the same case as in other comments - I forgot to mention that for hearing the effect of polarization you need space between speakers. If you listened to it on headphones you wouldn't hear the difference as it is mostly the nullification of the soundwaves. Difference with 432 vs 440 hz is more subtle though.
2) I have a hard time differentiating such minute details when listening to a song on my headphones, but I absolutely can do it when I perform something on my violin. Playing off the pitch even so slightly stings my ears.
3)I prefer to introduce to the new music by the people I like. Then I can associate it with them, and it makes music so much more meaningful.
2. Haha I talked to this about many musicians I know and most of them just laughed at this theory. I don't believe it
3. I like to explore and discover new types and genres of music myself. Sometimes I trust Spotify, who chooses songs that may interest me.
2. Music plays important role in my life. It is the cure for everything.
3. I think that there is a correlation between mathematic and music but I have never think about it before. I Can hear the difference between 432hz and 440hz.
4. I like to search for new music on my own. I do care what I am listen to because I am fussy. I listen only the songs that I like.