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Video15 Feb 2023Music & performanceHealth & wellbeingHistory

Chasing the sources behind the 432 Hz claim

Benn Jordan follows the 432 Hz story back through its citations and finds the trail leads somewhere unpleasant.

Watch on YouTube ↗Benn Jordan · Benn Jordan · 14 min

Where Adam Neely tests the tunings musically, Benn Jordan does the bibliographic work. He takes the assertions that circulate about 440 Hz — that it was imposed for sinister reasons, that 432 Hz is the frequency of nature — and traces them back to the sources people cite, then to the sources those sources cite.

His framing in the description is blunt: finding how a trend started sometimes leads you to disturbing places. The 440 Hz conspiracy narrative has a documented history in political propaganda and fringe publishing, and a claim's genealogy is relevant when the claim is being repeated as fact.

For a cymatics site this is directly load-bearing. Any rig that displays a tone will eventually be asked to display a healing frequency, and the honest answer is that the pattern on the plate depends on the plate, that 432 Hz produces a different figure from 440 Hz for the same reason 431 Hz does, and that none of this evidences a health effect. Jordan is the reference for where the surrounding folklore came from.

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