Who doesn’t enjoy a good music conspiracy theory?
From the allegations that Jay Z and Beyoncé are agents of the Illuminati, to the batty plot by the FBI and MI5 to bring down The Rolling Stones through a drug dealer called Acid King Dave, or the one about 90s record label executives hatching a plot to use gangsta rap to line the US’ prisons with impressionable youths in order to get rich.
Now the latest one to crop up across our feeds involves all the elements of a great conspiracy theory, including mind control, out-there scientific theories, and even Nazis.
Firstly, some background. Most instruments and music around the world is tuned to a pitch called ‘Concert A’, which is the musical note of A above middle C in the western music scale that is pitched at a frequency of 440 hertz and generally used to tune musical instruments and notation by.
Except that music in western society didn’t always use the frequency of 440Hz as the standard reference point. Many European countries and groups originally used a pitch tuning around 432Hz, based on a recommendation from Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi back in 1884. But by 1926, the American music industry had begun standardising the use of 440Hz for the manufacturing of musical instruments.
Ten years later, the American Standards Association recommended that ‘Concert A’ be tuned to 440Hz, an order made official by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) in 1953 and reaffirmed again as a global standard by ISO in 1975 and has remained that way since.
Got your tin foil hats on? Here’s the clincher. As Why Don’t You Try This? claims, this nearly 60-year-old standard of 440Hz is unnatural and “recent rediscoveries of the vibratory / oscillatory nature of the universe indicate that this contemporary international concert pitch standard may generate an unhealthy effect or anti-social behavior in the consciousness of human beings.”
The theory goes that the original 432Hz tuning, or ‘Verdi’s A’, was “mathematically consistent with the universe… [which] transmits beneficial healing energy, because it is a pure tone of math fundamental to nature.” While the 440Hz – the now global standard of ‘Concert A’ – is only a slightly subtle change in tone, it is in fact ‘unnatural’ and subconsciously promotes aggression and anti-social behaviour.
You can hear the subtle difference in frequencies in the video below.
The links between certain frequencies and vibrations holding hidden powers that are linked to health and the mind is studied by the science of Cymatics, the study of visible sound and vibration, which has sought to prove that the organisational principles and foundations of creation are tied to sound waves as they pass through particular elements (eg. water, sand, air etc.). So through the lens of Cymatics, 432Hz = good, 440hz = bad.
Dr. Leonard Horowitz, a former dentist who has penned literature opposing vaccination in a number of controversial AIDS theories, wrote a paper called Musical Cult Control describing the differences between the natural harmony of ‘Verdi’s A’ and the unnatural disharmony of the ‘Concert A’. “The music industry features this imposed frequency that is ‘herding’ populations into greater aggression, psycho social agitation, and emotional distress predisposing people to physical illness,” writes Dr. Horowitz.
Why Don’t You Try This? certainly buys into it, noting: “You just have to go out in the street and take a look around. What do you see? School kids, young adults on their way to work, a woman pushing her baby in a pram, a man walking his dog – and what do they all have in common? iPods or MP3 Players! Ingenious, isn’t it?”
So if the theory goes that the masses are being subtly manipulated through a fraction of a difference in frequency, oblivious as their ears and headphones are glued to a constant stream of music that’s tuned to cause aggression and violence – then who’s behind it? Why the change and the official sanction of the 440Hz frequency?
Hang on tight and check the grassy knoll music fans, here comes the magic bullet.
The conspiracy theory says that the change from 432Hz to 440Hz was originally dictated by Nazi propaganda minister, and Hitler’s right hand man, Joseph Goebbels, who used it to influence people to think and feel in a certain way that could be controlled and “make them a prisoner of a certain consciousness.” So naturally, when the Americans began adopting his unnatural pitch as the standard in the 30s and made it official in the 40s, little did they know they were secretly introducing a mind controlling pitch to the world. Or maybe they did? (*dramatic strings*)
The hidden facts that they don’t want you to know, or over-zealous fiction?
If it’s all too much to debate, you can always take a look at the pretty patterns formed by different sound frequencies in the video below and let the hidden rulers continue to shepherd your life little lamb (now go back to sleep. Baa, baa).
