Originally Posted by MarioD
There is a lot of controversy about what sounds better, songs in 440 or songs in 432. Through out the ages there has been no tuning standard, that is until 1955, or 1939 if you want to include the suggestion to standardize 440. If you are interested in 432 here is the history of it:

https://432playerplus.com/a-brief-history-of-432-hz-tuning-in-music/
This is becoming a quite worthwhile discussion. For those that don’t know, a big part of music for me is all about growth and this thread is promoting growth.

The article you supplied provided at least a glimpse of all the fuss that was required to get us where we are today. Good historical info. We should all hold those that participated in the 1939 London conference in high esteem.

“The modern standard of 440 Hz became more widely accepted in the 20th century, particularly following a 1939 international conference in London. The British Standards Institution recommended 440 Hz as the standard pitch, and this tuning gained more traction globally after World War II.”

As good as that webpage is, it doesn’t shed the light I’m looking for in regards to the quote in question. So let me try this.

So you’re invited to a birthday party and you're the only muscian invited. And as they bring out the cake, someone starts singing Happy Birthday. Nobody is carrying a pocket tuner with them and no one has any preconceived ideas on “the proper key”. But as soon as the first note is sung, the entire room is able to sing along quite nicely. And even if a high-pitched woman or child starts everyone off, the low-pitch males can easily adjust their singing down an octave or two quite naturally to blend with the crowd. I find it amazing that we are wired this way.

Now back to the Zepelin quote. I’m still baffled by how an alternate tuning (432 for example) can some how create an “unusual sound” or be linked to some children’s folk song if the relationships among the notes are not altered. Presumably, the standard 440 is inadequate? For starters, who in the audience can say, “This music stinks because the tuning is all wrong”? likewise when a song is transposed say from Amaj to Cmaj (to meet the needs of a singer or other requirement) don’t we all recognize and enjoy the piece in the same way that Happy Birthday can be sung quite nicely in different keys?

I think part of the answer to all this involves “equal temperament” and how we are designed to understand and sing based on relative frequencies (the musical distance from one note to the next) as opposed to absolute frequencies.

But for that matter, I wonder if 440 tuning has its own set of compromises and is it possible that no tuning scheme is perfect in all situations?
I understand that one benefit of 440 is that it allows (near?) perfect transposition.

Adam Neely sheds some light on this.
432Hz

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BiaB 2026 Windows
For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.