Hello, I’ve converted my music to 432Hz using the Sliding Stretch tool in Audacity 2.2.3. I am new to Audacity and not musically savvy, I just like music. When I play my newly converted music in Audacity, the information to the left of the wave reads “Stereo 44100 Hz”. Also when I play the converted track in VLC and I look at codec, sample rate also says 44100Hz. Is my music still at 44100Hz? Or am I misunderstanding what I am reading? Any information would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Rich
You’re looking at two completely different measurements here.
The first one, 432 Hz, is the overall tuning of the piece; specifically, it is the frequency of the A above middle C. Usually it’s set to 440 Hz, but sometimes it’s slightly different. (And while we’re at it, determining the tuning of a recording is no simple task for a computer, so Audacity only estimates it. If you didn’t explicitly convert from 440 to 432, your conversion probably isn’t really tuned to 432 Hz!)
The second one, 44,100 Hz, is the sample rate, or the number of “points” used to plot the sound waveform per second. The more you have, the better the sound quality (unless you increase it yourself, since you can’t add detail that wasn’t there to begin with; and anything past about 44,100 Hz isn’t really noticeable to human ears anyway). It has nothing to do with musical key or tuning.
You are not likely to notice the slight pitch change unless you are a musician, or maybe if you listen to both versions back-to-back.
A musician would notice that “something’s wrong” when they can’t play in-tune. Some instruments (such as guitar) can be re-tuned to 432Hz, and some (such as trumpets) can’t be tuned, or a piano takes a long of work to re-tune. People with [u]perfect pitch[/u] might notice the pitch is off, or they might just think it’s played in a different key.
Note that A=440 is simply a tuning standard. Virtually all music uses this standard tuning, but music contains thousands of different frequencies and since most songs don’t use all of the notes on the scale, many songs don’t contain any 440Hz A-notes.
With Generate → Tone you can generate 440 & 432Hz tones to hear the difference side-by-side.