What is the “432 Hz Conspiracy?” you may well ask, particularly if you’re actively searching the internet these days, what with every conspiracy theory that ever walked the face of the Earth spawning new heads everywhere you look.
In short, we’re in the Age of Madness, where conspiracies are everywhere, and the governments are all shady and mysterious and definitely not on our side.
What, you’re just now finding that out??? What planet have you been living on?
But the theory that all modern music is evil, and that it’s all part of a Nazi plot to make zombies out of us all, this is just plain friggin’ nuts, and I’ll be only too happy to explain exactly why all these conspiracy mongering fakes are heaving shovels-full of bull and horse puckey — perhaps with a little chicken poop to go along with that.
Okay, I said I’ll explain, and I will. Here goes:
First of all, you’re welcome to google search “432hz” and/or “432 Conspiracy” to see what you come up with. If you have the spare time, do just that, and then come back to this page and hear what I have to say.
What are my qualifications? None of your business, meaning that my belief or disbelief is not going to influence you. I’ll present you with fact-checkable data and you do with it what you deem right and proper.
My proofs are going to be self-evident or they don’t qualify as “proofs”.
For instance, you can tell me that there was contact between Europeans and Native Americans before Columbus, and I’ll answer you with, “So why didn’t the Native Americans have the wheel, the plow, or the compass?
And about the horse we hear nothing until the Spanish Conquistadors came slashing their way through crowds of unarmed citizens.
Within weeks or months, the horse-drawn wheeled vehicles were everywhere, and the same with the plow and the compass.
Was there SOME contact. You can bet your bottom dollar there was, but not a LOT of contact, and no permanent colonies in the New World that kept contact with the folks back home.
Being a Norse explorer was, in those days, one way to get a divorce or to get away from home and a brace of nagging relatives.
As I’ve said many times in lectures on ancient music, you got what you got when you got it. As you probably already know, the thicker the string, given the same length and tension, the more likely it will produce deeper tones.
Fat strings give deep tones, skinny strings produce higher tones. You can see this in the thick heavy strings of the double bass, compared with the thin strings of the violin.
Problem in ancient times was, there was no standard skinniness or fatness of a string, which was made by stretching a piece of gut out in the sun and letting it dry, like a sort of “jerky” that goes “twang” when plucked.
You’ll notice that if you have the string fastened solidly at one end and affixed to a rotating peg at the far end, it can be tuned by rotating the peg — looser for lower notes, more tension for the higher notes.
Okay, so there was no standard string, and stringmakers were few and far between. If it’s tough to make a living as a musician, try living on what you can make as a stringmaker who makes strings for people who are ALWAYS broke and can’t pay their bills nohow.
Then again, if you want strings, you hafta have them, and a string shop is where you would have gone, from ancient times to right now, because we still use strings for our guitars, harps, basses, fiddles, banjos, mandolins, ukeleles and the ever-popular tamboura, although they are very different now in nature, meaning how they’re made, and of what.
Strings were made from cat-gut, and bows were made of horse-hair, and neither is conducive to playing or staying on key.
You had to constantly retune between each song, if you were lucky. Most troubadours learned to tune as they sang and played, because the peg would slip right in the middle of a song.
By the way, most songs were chanted stories, not songs at all, and the practice of rhyming the words came about because it was easier to memorize.
Nobody could read or write except the clergy, remember? Books were for the very rich, and they were hand-copied and illustrated.
Nobody wrote down the songs, and there was no musical notation, so you had to memorize it or lose it.
Strings were a real issue, and no two strings were exactly alike. Strings that are reliably stable are a modern invention.
Most modern strings are made of nylon, a plastic that can be formed to precise widths and frequency responses, and the secret formulas of each maker are closely guarded secrets.
The heavier strings on a guitar or similar instrument are sometimes wire-wound to give them the right tonality and brightness.
The double bass has its own fat strings, tightened and loosened by pegs which are stabilized with bow resin to keep them from drifting downward while playing.
Okay, so strings are now standardized, and … wait, did I say “standardized”? I couldn’t possibly mean it, in conjunction with the world of music.
Everyone has their own standard of what constitutes a “perfect” string for whatever instrument you care to name. Every maker of strings has got their own brand and secret formulas to make the perfect string, one that tunes perfectly, keeps its tune for a long time, doesn’t wear out and always sounds bright and new no matter how many years it’s been since you put new strings on your seldom-used guitar.
Then there’s the thing about the instrument itself. You’re a troubadour, you’re on the road and your string broke and when you tried to fix it, the other string, your only backup string, also broke, and while that happened, the peg busted off there, too.
Now you need to find a string shop and HOPE there’s a luthier there who can fix your lute. Is your lute like any other? No, there’s no reason to suppose it is, so your luthier is going to have to fudge it and figure out what the guy who built it might have had in mind, and the very next lute he’s going to work on will have its own unique problems, because there is no standard instrument of any kind, right up until now.
That goes double for tunings. Not only did everyone have their own idea of what is tuning, they also were saddled with total ignorance of other tunings or why they happened.
Now, if you play an instrument with anyone else, or you try to do a solo run against a backing track on youtube, you have to be in agreement about tuning, or you’ll sound like a bunch of cackling geese in a hollow thicket. In short, cacophonic as hell.
So you tune up, and that’s exactly what an orchestra does, before playing a song. The conductor waggles his wand, and they all bang, hoot, toot and squeak their way to the same note, usually the note “A” at 440 hz, or four hundred and forty cycles per second, which means the string vibrates back and forth exactly four hundred and forty times every single second.
Second? Second? What is a second???
Measured by what? A clock? A Big Five Sports Timer? The clock at the downtown parking mall?
Don’t forget that the ancients measured time by the HOUR — there were no “minutes”, and they didn’t happen until the year 1593 A.D.
That’s right, 1500 years later than the Romans, who also didn’t have minutes — they had sun dials that had divisions, but they weren’t 60 to the hour, not then, not for a long, long time.
The hour was typically divided into quarter-hours, and that was as exact as you needed to be back then.
When voyaging and navigation and the astrolabe and compass were introduced into commerce and shipping, the clocks had to be very precise, so you could determine where you were, in the middle of the ocean.
You got your position by the inclination and declination of the sun, the moon and the stars, and you measured your progress across the endless and featureless water by comparing your apparent position with known anchor points, stellar, lunar and solar.
Clocks that could keep ticking off seconds accurately didn’t come along until the year 1723, but even that newly-invented Swiss clock couldn’t stay accurate enough for the shipping trade and the world-merchants of the day.
In addition to the lack of standards for tuning, there was no copyright, no registry and no radio broadcasting or internet marketing.
Nobody knew anyone else’s songs, but if they could steal the material, they did — there was no copyright, no patent office, no nothing.
Intellectual property rights were noted for their absence, as they are today once again. When the world crumbles, the artists and musicians always go first.
So what is the “432” conspiracy, anyway?
Well, it starts with connecting the sound frequency that happens at 432 hz or cycles-per-second and ancient healing and the introduction of today’s orchestral standard, the 440 A.
There’s more.
Supposedly the Nazis used the 440 hz tuning to brainwash the world and turn everybody who listens to music tuned to the 440 A into brain-mush zombies who will bend to the will of the nearest Supreme Leader.
Anyone who listens to Nazi broadcasts of Wagner’s Ring Trilogy will see immediately that the brain does indeed turn to mush, but it has the same brain-mushing effect, no matter which so-called “Standard Concert Pitch” was used to tune up the orchestra.
First of all, until very recently, with the advent of the digital tuner, there were no absolute tunings.
Even the tuning fork didn’t exist until John Shore, who performed as trumpeter and lutenist for both Henry Purcell and George Frederick Handel.
He made the first tuning fork in May of the year A.D. 1711, and until then, concert tuning was up to the guesswork of the conductor or the First Violin.
Metal gongs were sometimes used in ancient times to “find” the tuning, but they were all fabricated by different makers at different times in different cultures having different metal alloys.
There was no standard for anything, including spelling — that condition is once again with us. It’s the norm now to make up your own spelling as you go along, and to leave out as many vowels as possible when texting.
Even history changes according to who’s in charge. In the end, it’s all about convenience.
So the ancient musician relied on himself or herself to find the right tuning, the right notes to sing, and the right presentation thereof, keeping in mind that they tended to copy one another, like they do — all the popular bands and not-so-popular bands of the 1960s had to look, act and sing like the Beatles or not get work in the Mickey Mouse clubs of the day.
There were no recording machines in the ancient world, so it’s very unlikely that a singer would repeat the same song the same way each time — in fact, it’s guaranteed that they improvised about 100% of the time.
Doubt me? Check out ancient music — there’s lots of it known today, some songs dating back seven thousand years, such as the music collected by Hillel & Aviva in the 1950s.
So having established that there was no way the ancients could have actually MEASURED a precise 432 cycles per second of anything, it’s very unlikely that it could have achieved becoming a national or international standard.
In fact, there were no countries at that time, only city-states, such as Rome before the Empire which also wasn’t a country.
Italy didn’t exist then, nor did France. They got melded together much, much later, during the Medieval Wars and such.
Okay, so ancient healers couldn’t possibly establish or share or keep historically the precise tone of A=432hz no matter what.
Sure, they could get CLOSE to it, but that’s as far away as 402hz on one end and 470hz on the other end.
Is the 432hz sound connected in some way with the world-vibration established by authority of Wikipedia? Of course it is, but what isn’t?
So is there a special HEALING EFFECT that happens at 432hz that doesn’t happen at 440hz? The simple answer is, “No.”
No, Virginia, there is no magic 432hz healing effect, at least not one that doesn’t occur at other frequencies.
As anyone familiar with waveforms will tell you, every harmonic device drifts frequency to some degree, even atomic and subatomic measurements will DRIFT across frequencies, some more than others.
According to the Collective Wisdom of the Internet, God’s phone number is easy to find — God is often up on 39.17mhz and the ringtone is always the same: “Bing, Bang, Bong!”
Is there anything magical about the 432 number? Well, yes, as a matter of fact, it is the sum of four consecutive primes — 103, 107, 109 and 113, but numerologists are pretty unconcerned about primes, except in the matter of personal hygiene, meaning that if they also happen to be mathematicians, they might find this micro-fact of some vital interest.
Now, the fact is that musical tones drift through frequencies, especially when playing harmonies against one another plus a melodic line or two.
Even a single instrument will drift in tone somewhat, during the course of practice or performance, which is why you need to keep tuning it, unless it’s electronic, and that’s another story entirely.
So people have been playing music for a very long time, all the way from beating on a hollow log to making a whistle out of a blade of grass.
Don’t you suppose that if 432hz were the perfect “sweet spot”, somebody would have noticed?
But they didn’t, at least up to the invention of Social Media. The Conspiracy theory didn’t actually manifest until the 1980s, but the trail is blurred up now by overpopulation.
You can no longer determine the origin point, but I know exactly when it happened, because I was there.
So keep in mind that you couldn’t possibly measure a second until 1593 in the West, and a few years earlier in the East, meaning India and China and Japan and Korea, not New York City, or Arlington, Virginia.
Clocks ticked at different rates, had different gauges and different spring tensions and unwinding accommodations when a spring was used instead of weights.
Although clocks that could keep track of seconds were developed in the late 1600s and early 1700s, the second itself was in serious doubt.
Did you know that the rotation of the Earth is NOT constant? The speed of rotation varies with the tides, so you can’t measure the second against the planetary rotation and be right all the time.
ONE SECOND is defined as, and I quote, “The duration of nine billion, one hundred and ninety-two million, six hundred and thirty-one thousand and seven hundred and seventy periods of radiation between two hyperfine levels of the ground-state of the most reliable stable isotope, Cesium-133”, and I’ll bet you can’t name a single ancient lab that had THAT number right.
So ancient healers had to guess, and ancient musicians could never have gotten the same answer twice in a row, just as modern musicians who don’t use a tuner will guess at the tones and most pro guitar players will be able to tune by ear, and that’s a fact.
You get used to the tone, and you’re pretty right, but never exactly, without a tuner. It’s just not possible to get it on the money every single time without fail.
The other thing is that a second is not an objective measure of anything. It’s totally arbitrary, and it’s dependent on being able to measure the tick-tock of the rotations and radiations of a very uncommonly found element, not generally present in ancient households at all, and not in plentiful supply even now.
Okay, so consistent tuning didn’t exist in the ancient world, and hardly in this one, but was Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Nazi Minister of Propaganda, actually responsible for selecting the 440hz “A” tone as the universal standard?
Sorry to disappoint you, but it was adopted officially as the standard orchestral tuning in the International Conference of Music in 1939 in London, having nothing whatever to do with Goebbels, and what’s more, nobody actually uses 440.
Most orchestras tune up at 441, 442 or 443, and some revert all the way back to a 403hz A, and variations occur from one group to another all across the planet.
Actually, the reason they chose A to be at 440hz is that 439, the optimum frequency, is a prime, and that would have made it difficult to standardize.
Using “Pitch Inflation” to raise the tone slightly made the work of the conductor easier, but the life of singers a living hell, so in 1859, in Paris, the 435 pitch, but that soon fell at the roadside.
The number 432 is exactly three gross, of 144 units each, and an equilateral triangle, which is not a Pythagorean Triangle by any stretch of the imagination, whose area and perimeter are equal will have an area which is the square root of 432.
Numerologists go crazy over those stats, but they prove nothing, and you can even throw in the belief that there are 432 statues of the Buddha on Mount Meru, and that somehow the 432 activates the Root Chakra.
All music activates the chakras, and passing frequencies guarantee that the 432 will hit, along with all the other audible frequencies, as you play and sing.
Had the Medieval practice of dividing the hour into 12 parts, each part marked by a chanted prayer, we’d be thinking in Vespers, not frequencies per second. There was no second until very very recently!
Does this mean that music doesn’t heal?
No, music heals, and so does humor. You can get healing effects from theater, music, comedy, dance, painting, sculpture and more.
The 440hz tone is no different — all tones are part of one enormous collective tone, which you can see, but cannot hear.
It’s the universe ringing back.
If you want to know how to really use the frequencies, plan on attending one of my workshops, where you can ask any question and get a straight no-bull puckey answer.
The RADIO frequencies are much higher, meaning that they are faster and vibrate more times per second than sound waves, which happen around the 440 A pitch, going up and down a few octaves, but it soon runs out of the human range of hearing.
Many folks never hear the C1 on the piano for that very reason, and most folks are unaware of the low tones of a recording, mostly because they play their stuff on junk machines and pipe the whole thing into little tiny earbuds that only vibrate the ear, not the whole body.
The guitar strings produce a sound that is palpably different from that of a vibrating paper cone, which is what’s inside a speaker.
Paper cone vibration versus string vibration — there is no comparison. Once you record it and play it back, it CAN’T be the same as the guitar. It just can’t.
Paper cone reproducers only capture the approximate effect of a vibrating string, but never the whole effect, which is why it’s slightly better to have the live instrument than the recording.
There is a way to adjust the recording to bring it more into alignment with the string effect, but most folks don’t know that there’s a problem, let alone how to fix it.
I do, and I’m happy to pass it on at my workshops in ZOOM, about which you can get more information by clicking on the link in the description below.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby