If you tune an instrument, chances are you’re tuning it to 440Hz, and probably unwittingly because 440Hz is the standard all instrument tuning apps are set to by default. We can change that in the settings, but how many people actually do so?
And why might we want to?
“In every form of energy, whether it be mechanical, electrical, or heat, there is stored up a force which is in incessant activity. ”
— Nikola Tesla, from his lecture before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, Columbia College, May 20, 1891
The frequency of sound isn’t something most people think much about — even musicians or worship leaders — but we should. Scientists, mathematicians, New Age and other non-Christian religious practitioners, medical technicians, engineers, and thousands of others understand frequencies and how they affect us.
But for some reason, Christ followers don’t seem to think much about negative and positive frequency correlations between sound, mind, and body. Or if they do, they often deem it as dangerous New Age quackery, “worldly” distraction, or merely irrelevant.
All science is God’s science, and just as we’d be foolish to put anything in our mouths and call it food, the same goes for what sounds we put in our ears. Or taking it a step farther, what energy we expose our bodies to.
And frequencies are all over the Bible, especially in music.
Praise Him with trumpet sound;
Praise Him with harp and lyre.
Praise Him with tambourine and dancing;
Praise Him with stringed instruments and flute.
Praise Him with loud cymbals;
Praise Him with resounding cymbals.
— Psalm 150:3-5
But perhaps we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
What are frequencies, exactly?
Well, a frequency is the number of complete waves or cycles (often sound and electromagnetic waves) that occur in a specific unit of time. Frequencies are typically measured in hertz (Hz), where one hertz equals one cycle per second.
For example, if you listen to AM radio, say AM 500 for example, then you are tuning your radio to catch the sound being beamed from the station at 500,000Hz. If you listen to FM radio, say 88.5 for example, then you are catching the sound broadcast at 88,500,000Hz (88.5MHz).
Your phone is connecting to a cellular network that beams out a certain downlink frequency (1900MHz, 3500MHz, etc.) and your phone’s antenna and transmitter are using another frequency to connect to it, and its electrical components are creating electromagnetic fields of another frequency while drawing current to power it. Your phone’s charger has another frequency, the wall outlet still another.
In other words, they’re all around you.
It’s easy to get lost in the science and the numbers here, but suffice it to say that you and I are surrounded with more (and increasingly more harmful) frequencies than anyone in history has ever been.
But we can counter that, and we can do it the way Jesus and scripture tells us to. It’s real easy; all we have to do is speak and worship. And yet, as with all things God instructs us to do, we can do it in either a mediocre manner or in a highly effective manner.
Questions For The Sound Makers
I’ve made no bones about the fact that I’m all for innovative, unrestrained worship in whatever form the Holy Spirit moves us to create it. Modern American churches tend to keep the music simple, using guitars, keyboards, and a muted drum set.1
The reason for keeping it simple is because that’s what your average congregation knows how to play. We’re not likely to find a trumpet or a harp in most churches, and most of us would probably prefer it that way. I was once in a service where they incorporated a tenor saxophone and I wanted to hide in the bathroom until the set was over and the Hall & Oats vibes subsided.
We all have our preferences and biases; worshiping Jesus is the key element though, not the method in which we do it. That said, when it comes to the science of the matter—and I mean the literal matter: your body, and the instruments used—it’s appropriate to pose a few questions:
For the musicians:
- Do you know what frequency you tune your instrument to?
- Or why your app is set to that frequency?
- Have you ever experimented with changing it?
And for the sound engineers:
- Do you know what frequency your speakers and mics are set to?
- What are the reasons for your current presets?
- Do you use an app to fine tune everything, or do you adjust manually?
And for the pastors:
- Have you ever considered how different frequencies affect the human body?
- Do you know why the terms “loud” and “clanging” are used in Scripture?
- Have you ever searched the Bible to see what it says about frequencies?
It’s worth asking these questions because frequencies matter much more than we realize. There are three examples of them right at the very beginning of Genesis:
“Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said,“Let there be light,” and there was light.”
Genesis 1:2-3
Hovering. Speech. Light.
Motion. Sound. Waves and particles2 that emit radiation.
They all equate to frequencies in the natural world, and consequently, the natural world responds. So does the supernatural world, by the way, but for now, let’s just focus on the natural. God speaks and the universe resonates; we’ll get to frequency resonance later on as well.
We’re under constant bombardment from various frequencies, from the the rays of our lightbulbs, the WiFi signals surrounding us, the metal fillings in our mouths, the phone in our pocket, the earbuds we wear, and also (especially) the music we fill our spaces with.
We can’t do anything about a lot of the frequencies that effect us—cell phone towers and public lighting, for example—but we can do something about the frequencies we use while entering into worship.
The only question then is: Should we?
Let’s look at the history of how we got where we are, because it might inform our understanding of the science God created and how He’d like us to use it.
Concert Pitch
The reason your app is set to 440Hz is a long and convoluted one. For brevity’s sake, I’ll simplify a hundred years of musician drama, mainly pertaining to orchestras.
Different instruments give off different levels of sound.
This becomes an issue when composers and bands try to play a piece of music utilizing many different instruments. The solution is what’s known as Concert Pitch, a standard reference pitch used to tune musical instruments so they play elegantly together during a performance.
Getting a French horn to sound nice when paired with a piano is a daunting task, and for centuries composers experimented with ways to solve that dilemma. Eventually, orchestras learned to write music in different keys for different instruments, but how to tune them presented another challenge.
Artists being artists—and musicians being a particularly fussy brand of artists—meant that the musical pitch varied wildly from country to country, orchestra to orchestra.
For example, the tuning fork used by Handel set the A at 422.5Hz, whereas Beethoven’s was at 455.4Hz. If you’re a layman like me, that may mean nothing to you. But your ear will understand the difference if everyone in the group is tuning by different criteria, and your ear won’t like it.
As it turned out, vocalists didn’t like it either.
Trying to keep up the pitch meant strained voices—so much so that the French passed a law in 1859 establishing that all tuning was to set the A above middle C at 435Hz.
Other nations experimented and in Stuttgart, Germany in 1834, the Society of German Natural Scientists and Physicians set the standard tuning at 440Hz. This was a compromise based on the work of physicist Johann Heinrich Scheibler, inventor of the tonometer.
In 1938, the standard of 440Hz was established by a conference organized in London by the British Standards Institution. It was largely influenced by the advent of radio and other broadcasting signals, and especially influenced by both German and American delegates.3 The 440Hz standard was later reaffirmed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 1955, and again in 1975.
The Science of Frequencies
That’s the how and the why your worship team—and pretty much every musician, radio and television broadcast, music player, movie theater, YouTube video, streaming service, video game, or website—defaults to the frequency of 440Hz.4 The vast majority of modern audio content across virtually all platforms and mediums is created and broadcast in this frequency.5
Take a moment and check for yourself. Open up your tuning app, click on the setting tab, and see what its presets are.
The frequency of 440Hz is the standard because it ensures compatibility across devices and also with live performances. While reading this article, you may be listening to something in 440Hz (I’m currently listening to Dvorak on Spotify, and it’s almost certainly in 440Hz). If you’re listening to an AI-generated audio version of this article, that’s also being beamed to your earbuds in 440Hz. Blame Substack because I can’t do anything about it.
But what about when we can do something different?
What difference will it make if we change the frequency of our worship, or what music comes out of our devices? What effects does sound have on our our bodies, emotions, and in the heavenly realms?
This isn’t mere speculation; scientists have been studying the effects of sound on humans for as long as we’ve been able to. Some recent findings merely confirm what we innately understand: Music affects us.
“The analysis regarding cheerful music, in turn, found that the participants, this time, experienced higher levels of vitality compared to sublimity, and higher levels of sublimity compared to unease. In the most comprehensive analysis with no reference to the cheerful or sad character of the sample, the participants who listened to 440Hz pieces reported rather negative moods after listening to music compared to the participants who listened to 432Hz pieces. Moreover, men were observed to report even higher levels of negative moods after listening to 440Hz pieces, compared to their moods after listening to 432Hz pieces.”
— Journal of Human Sciences, Volume 18, Issue 1, pages 12-33, January 17, 2021
This should come as no surprise to most of us. Every coach, military unit, and boss at every job site knows that their people perform faster and more aggressively when the music is pumping. Conversely, every masseuse, cafe owner, and doula knows that soothing music generates a peaceful climate better than pure silence.6
Consider how often the Lord instructs His people in scripture to use music and words as offense weapons.
In part 2, I’ll take a deeper look at that history: the way sound can impact the physical and spiritual world, and what our bodies being composed mostly of water has to do with all of it.
The enemy will use music, even worship songs, to speak pain, or anger, or resentment, or any number of other harmful messages into the sounds we hear.
If that’s the case—and if were honest, all us have examples of sounds or songs that negatively affect us—then isn’t it important that our worship does everything possible to explore what sound and frequencies correlate to our bodies and our spirits?
This battle in our spirit between aggression and peace is therefore a ripe field for psychological manipulation, and the enemy knows how to use sounds, words, and music against us as triggers. We spend countless hours fine tuning our church services, from prayer to childcare to security to hospitality and everything else. If we’re going to spend a few hours every week fine tuning our worship, it only stands to reason we should consider the weapons the enemy might use against it, and learn how to counter them.
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[Post Image by Shawn Sim on Unsplash, not AI.]
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Footnotes:
- Drum cages are a uniquely American Christian invention and rarely exist outside church settings. Here is an insightful article on why churches should consider removing them. ↩︎
- If you ever want to get scientists arguing at a party, ask them if light is a wave or a particle. You’ll feel like you’re in an episode of The Big Bang Theory. ↩︎
- Countless articles, podcasts, books, and documentaries claim that the frequency of 440Hz was chosen because of German and American experimentation with psychological warfare and emotional manipulation. I will likely address this in a future article. ↩︎
- This is different from 48 kHz “digital standardization” you may see in the setting tabs of digital devices. These are unrelated standards; one pertains to sound performance, the other for digital file sample rate. ↩︎
- Ironically, many of the most renowned orchestras have switched to 442-445Hz, including the Berlin Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic, and the Continental European Orchestras. ↩︎
- It’s never purely silent, actually. Even unused wall outlets emit a frequency that our bodies will register even though our ears don’t. R. Murray Schafer deduced a varied response by American and European participants owing to the different wattage output of U.S. and European electrical systems. ↩︎