The Scared Sounds Scale

I have no doubt certain arrangements of tonal frequencies can have calming (and other) effects on human physiology. Whether these folks have cracked some code to find some particularly helpful combo IDK.
 
What I DO know is if I am completely flipping the hell out and need to calm myself I can put on a professionally performed recording of the Bach Cello Suites and the murderous rage subsides.
 
Then of course there is the infamous "Brown Note"... but let's not go there.

Also perhaps relevant... when I was a young street kid one of my buddies brought me up to the Krishna temple for their weekly vegetarian feast (open to the public... awesome food). We hung out for the ceremony after which was just a whole bunch of people in a large gymnasium type room and the temple doods started doing their chants and whatnot accompanied by these little hand held brass bell things. Those bells and the way they rung them (which was VERY precise and obviously took tons of practice) were extremely soothing and calming.
 
Of course I wasn't about to shave my head and start wearing a bed sheet and was mostly there for the food and a new experience but as a musician those bells and their effects were very fascinating to me.

Or Pedro.
 

drewfx1
1. Pick a frequency, any frequency at random.
 
2. Go looking for "natural" occurrences of said frequency, or multiples of it or something. Make sure you give yourself some margin for error.
 
3. You will inevitably find some!
 
4. Congratulations! The frequency you selected in #1 is a sacred and magical "universal frequency"! 
 
5. You couldn't have really selected it at random - your brain must have been tuned into this universal magic frequency and that's how you knew to pick that particular frequency! Wow!!!!
 

lol... yup.
 
Semi OT... I just mentione this to Baps the other day but don't think I've stated it elsewhere. The old live of the floor recording of my old band (which I have been wrangling with/whining about foooorever it seems) is in an oddball tuning. Since I want to/am overdubbing all the bass and guits this posed a bit of a problem (amongst many) at first being a "beginner".
 
The band was SUPPOSED to always be downtuned a half step (so G# "440" instead of A 440). However I always just tuned to the bassist who didn't have a tuner (but I did) and because until things started sounding totally wonked and his bass kept it's tuning rather well we'd let it drift. Really we only ever tuned him up every six months or so.
 
I had THOUGHT we had tuned him (and us geeter playas) to G# 440 for the session but I guess amidst the setup chaos (it was recorded in our bandspace at the time which was being slooowly built into a full fledged studio, which the owner never finished, so we brought in our engineer with his DAW/gear and set it up in the existing room) we neglected to do that. It was just supposed to be a pre production demo anyway and we thought we'd be recording properly within the next year.
 
When I loaded the files up years later to see if I could salvage the drum and vox tracks I figured out it was actually in G# "445" (so A 445 downtuned a semitone). Of course I didn't/don't want to do any pitch correction (on top of the extensive timing correction) so I'm leaving it as is in that regard and using Guitar Rig 5's fine tuner knob to acheive that "445" based freqs to match the vox (and the bleed in the drum tracks).
 
At first, being the anal spazz I tend to be about this type of stuff I was piiiiiissssed but now I'm thinking the variation might be psychologically beneficial. As in it might stand out just that little bit more when one of tunes is tossed into a playlist of other songs where the musicians actually tuned up like normal humans. Like it's even oddball for concert pitch (335).
 
Since it's crustpunk that I'm trying to give slick production values to that little oddity might add that "out of tune" feeling without anything actually being out of relative tuning.
 
 
Of course I could be over estimating the power of such subtleties (and maybe there ARE already a lot of tunes intentionally skewed this way) but it's interesting to contemplate and it makes me feel a little less stoopid for not doing my job at the time and making sure everyone was tuned properly. The extra string tension while still being tuned a little lower is nice too and 445 is a nice sounding number to satiate my OCD side. Like if it were 443 or 447 I might pop (more of) an aneurism over it... just because... yanno.... spazz.
 
/CSB
 
 
 
 

Although it was not really my bag at the time (as a white guy thrasho metalhead) I have always marveled at the old school turntable pioneer kids. Like Sugarhill Gang and whatnot.
 
At first glance to an outside observer it was easy to dismiss as "Oh, that guy's just playing records of other people's stuff. Lame!" but for me, as I was learning music myself, I started realizing how crazy that actually was and still don't fully get it.
 
I mean you usually would only have TWO turntables ("and a microphone" fwah fwah) so you can only have two stereo samples going MAYBE over top of a drum machine (if you were lucky). Being able to tempo match/pitch match/drop the needle EXACTLY where it needed to be/add flourishes like drag and scratching/etc with just that old analog gear...
 
that is PSYCHO shiz.
 
Of course I guess once vinyl pressing companies caught on and started making custom discs for that type of DJing and of course now in the digital age where it can all be prepped before hand at home and triggered with a poke at a button it's... well still occasionally impressive in some cases but those OG spinners man...
 
Just seems like a lot more talent and effort than those cats were given credit for and I kind of want to learn exactly how it all worked... someday... once I figure out how to work the crap I'm already wrestling with. lulz
 
/blather

By the way, I was a DJ from 1980 thru 1983 (before everyone though they were a DJ).  If the manager caught any of us doing the crap they did to records in clubs, we were fired.  You have one song playing on one turntable, then you monitor the next song on the second turntable, find a good beat then (with your finger on the record) carefully move the record forwards and backwards over that beat until you get the timing right.  Then you let it spin and, at the right time, slowly fade one out as you fade the other one in.  Whenever you had a significant change in beat, you did those whenever you had to speak so no one really noticed the change.
 
Sure, you could do some sample teases of what was coming up, but any scratching or extreme sampling was a sure way out the door.

Mesh
Just curious, what are some of the common soft synths that easily support retuning (i.e. A432)?

Pretty sure Dim Pro has fine tuning.

I think it is set in the sample area (and maybe has to be done for each "dimension" sample in the patch?).
 
I watched the videos for all the Cake synths/instruments (the SWA Karl Rose one) a while back but have mostly been guiting it up since. I may be thinking of Rapture or Zeta... but I think those might have fine tuning as well (seems like Zeta definitely would).
 
So basically... I don't know what the fruck I'm talking about aside from that at least one of the included higher end synths has fine tuning and likely more.
 
Haven't checked out Rapture Session yet so that might be worth looking at as well.

I think Yoko Ono uses the Scared Sounds Scale (after rereading the actual thread title). 

Mesh
Just curious, what are some of the common soft synths that easily support retuning (i.e. A432)?

Um. Any juan with a tuning knob? 

That's the obvious answer if you just want to change the overall tuning.
 
It's trickier with much more varied support if you want to use non-equal temperament tunings (i.e specific mathematically pure intervals).

there used to be a guy who would write big long forum posts about healing frequencies.  claimed he and his wife were Ministers of some kind and that he could (for a fee, of course) heal you of any ailment you have with his music.

The name diabolus in musica ("the Devil in music") has been applied to the interval from at least the early 18th century, though its use is not restricted to the tritone. Andreas Werckmeister cites this term in 1702 as being used by "the old authorities" for both the tritone and for the clash between chromatically related tones such as F♮ and F♯, and five years later likewise calls "diabolus in musica" the opposition of "square" and "round" B (B♮ and B♭, respectively) because these notes represent the juxtaposition of "mi contra fa". Johann Joseph Fux cites the phrase in his seminal 1725 work Gradus ad Parnassum, Georg Philipp Telemann in 1733 describes, "mi against fa", which the ancients called "Satan in music"—and Johann Mattheson, in 1739, writes that the "older singers with solmization called this pleasant interval 'mi contra fa' or 'the devil in music'."Although the latter two of these authors cite the association with the devil as from the past, there are no known citations of this term from the Middle Ages, as is commonly asserted.

Actually Wendy Carlos did an album explicitly exploring "scary" music:
 

 
http://www.wendycarlos.com/+thh.html