Scientific pitch

Scientific pitch, also known as philosophical pitch, Sauveur pitch or Verdi tuning, is an absolute concert pitch standard which is based on middle C (C4) being set to 256 Hz rather than ~261.63 Hz, making it ~37.63 cents lower than the common A440 pitch standard. It was first proposed in 1713 by French physicist Joseph Sauveur and later promoted briefly by Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi in the 19th century.

Since the 1980s the Schiller Institute, an organisation of the LaRouche movement propagated a pitch of 432 Hz for A, which is slightly higher than the Sauveur pitch. But they also made controversial esoteric claims regarding the effects of this pitch and referenced it to Joseph Sauveur.

Scientific pitch is not used by concert orchestras but is still sometimes favored in scientific writings for the convenience of all the octaves of C being an exact power of 2 when expressed in hertz (symbol Hz). The octaves of C remain a whole number in hertz all the way down to 1 Hz. Instead of A above middle C (A4) being set to the widely used standard of 440 Hz, scientific pitch assigns it a frequency of 430.54 Hz. There is no scientific evidence that music tuned to 432 Hz has healing benefits.