I Love This: Did the Nazis Mistune Our Guitars?
Actually, not just our guitars but all our Western instruments. And no, this isn’t some kind of Godwin’s Law putsch. It’s real history, so remove your tinfoil hat and give this story at The Daily Beast a read.
I’ve spent the last week listening to out-of-tune music.
Or maybe I’ve been listening to out-of-tune music all my life without realizing it. Yes, it’s possible. A small cadre of disgruntled listeners insists that we have tuned our instruments incorrectly for decades. And now they want to use digital technology to fix the situation—eliminating all those bad notes with just a click of the mouse.
Musicians don’t agree on much, but they tend to concur that the note A in the middle of the treble staff should be tuned to 440 Hz. The International Standards Organization even issued guidelines to this effect back in the ’50s. But the conspiracy theorists will tell you that this pernicious tuning was promoted by the Nazis—Joseph Goebbels, chief propagandist for the Third Reich, imposed the 440 Hz tuning as part of a heinous plan to warp the consciousness of the masses.
And the record labels may be in cahoots with these Nazis. “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,” claims Dr. Leonard Horowitz in his paper “Musical Cult Control.”
