I just said in my last post I wasn’t recommending The Vagus Nerve Reset, but now I super extra don’t recommend it. I encountered this last night:
- It’s a tuning reference value. If you listened to music at 432Hz, it would be a sine wave drone. I like drone music, but I and most other people would be quite irritated by it after a few seconds.
- The whole 432Hz tuning thing was based on a really flawed, small study that claimed that participants who listened to music where the instruments tuned to an A432 reference pitch, instead of the international standard of A440, had lower heart rates afterward. This hasn’t been replicated by larger, more rigorous studies.
Also, Verdi wrote that he would rather go with 432Hz because it was slightly easier for singers to reach high notes if the overall tuning is a little lower. But for most of the history of Western music there was no standard, or different orchestras/halls/composers used different standards probably due to variances in the tuning of pitchforks / pitch pipes. Mozart reportedly expected A=421 Hz. 440 was chosen because it matched a couple of cities and was close to others and because it’s a number easily divisible by a lot of stuff — it’s completely arbitrary, as is 432.
And why does tuning refer to A above middle C, specifically? Because the four stringed instruments in a Western orchestra all have open A strings. The oboe tunes with a fork, pipe or electronic tuner and everyone else tunes to the oboe. Why the oboe? There are lots of wrong reasons people give, but the real reason is tradition. Something I encountered as a student violinist is, after a few years of that, I could hear that A440 (or close to it) in my head as an oboe tone, and I don’t even have perfect pitch.
But as with many other things, some people latched onto that flawed study, broke out the numerology and astrology and whatever else they could get their imaginations around, and decided that 432Hz is “the frequency of the universe” or especially favored by Pythagoras etc. (*) And furthermore, because 440 was a German standard, it must have been a secret Nazi plot to demoralize their enemies with anxiety and depression.
* (Pythagoras lived 1500 years before a Persian scholar invented the second. 600 years later, an astronomer came up with a standard way to measure a second. In 1950 and 1967, the standard was updated to remove references to the length of the year, because that’s not constant. The scientific standard is based on “the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the cesium-133 atom” which is 9,192,631,770 Hz.) - Hz (Hertz, after physicist Heinrich Hertz) is cycles per second. 432Hz is… 8Hz lower than 440Hz, not 100. Frequency in Hertz is exponential compared to pitch — to go up an octave you double the frequency. You could extend that 8 Hz difference to 100 Hz by multiplying the frequency by 12.5. 440 * 12.5 = 5500, 432 * 12.5 = 5400. 5500 Hz is a rather flat F8, a bit above the range of a piccolo. There’s not a lot of music written for that range.
I have to wonder how much the author used AI to write the book — either directly, or for “research”. Or maybe it was just human ignorance and failure to do decent research. Given that the book explains polyvagal theory (and doesn’t mention that it’s not at all on firm scientific ground) I’m now questioning pretty much everything in the book. I suppose I’ll keep reading, skeptical of all of it, in case there’s something practically useful in it. It did introduce me to “glimmers” which are sort of a positive version of “triggers”, anyway.
While I’m quoting stupid things…
Brianna Wu is a trans woman who is very much a transmedicalist gatekeeper and a “fuck you I’ve got mine” sort. She is not an ally, any more than Caitlin “wah my passport now says I’m male but I still love Trump” Jenner is an ally. And now Wu has descended into advocating genocide by eugenics:
Thought experiment #1: if you replaced the word “transsexual” in the first sentence with “autistic”, “deaf”, “Black”, “Jewish”, “left-handed”, “short”, “unattractive”, “nerdy” etc. how does it sound? Exactly as Nazi as it sounds now, right?
I had an emotionally rocky childhood and that was as a white, ostensibly male kid with great parents, who didn’t even know what “trans” was. I was fat and nerdy and sensitive and anxious and not into much mainstream stuff. Kids can be cruel, and the pressure to punish nonconformity of any kind is strong. My answer to that certainly isn’t “abort all the weird kids before other kids have a chance to be mean.”
Thought experiment #2: what if, and I know this sounds crazy, people just stop inflicting needless suffering and abuse on trans kids (and adults)? Stop obsessing over what’s in other peoples’ pants and just treat them like human beings? Maybe follow the WPATH guidance and all the other medical science instead of the transphobic agenda?