Richard D. James aka Aphex Twin speaks to Tatsuya Takahashi

Summary

But I’ve also read studies from the old Philips laboratories in the Netherlands that show orchestras average deviation from 440 Hz was measured over many concerts and was seen to differ by a few Hz, usually slightly below. Pretty anal. Some people obviously really cared that 440 Hz was being adhered to in practice. Why 440 Hz was chosen in the first place is another interesting story, but looking at the resonances of water and sound is a great place to start, or read up on cymatics. If you aren’t already familiar with it, that is. TT: So many things are standardised that you don't really think about because they were there before you started using it. 440 Hz was brought about to standardise the way people play together and, yeah, someone can bring a guitar to a piano and it would work together because of that standard. It's like how a green light means you can cross the road or if you shake your head sideways it means no. Those two standards will help you through life in many places around the world. But it's dangerous to enforce standards in creativity. I have a son who's started school in Japan, where every kid will paint the sun red. Now that is some fucked up standardisation! Just really messed up on so many levels. Anyway, I'm not going into that whole 432 Hz vs 440 Hz debate. (BTW: I absolutely love cymatics and I've done some nice workshops for kids with it.) But I will say different frequencies sound different, so why not use that in your music? You got to use whatever feels right and the monologue let's you do exactly that with pitch. RDJ: Yep. TT: Talking of standards, the sample rate of 48 kHz is another one for sampling and signal processing, but the volca sample uses a weird one at 31.25 kHz. Purely because of technical constraints, but I was thinking that might be part of the reason you liked it so much, because the different sample rate gives it a unique sound. RDJ: Haha, yes, it was pretty much the first thing I noticed. Yeah, I thought the 48 kHz, w...