I have a longstanding interest in electronic music & composition. In electronic music, the various "Rockefeller standards" and tuning are completely optional, because a synth unlike a piano, is capable of retuning every single note in real time, to any frequency if desired. However, most people don't know/care about this and just use the default standard.

I felt the need to experiment and find out what's what in this whole realm, and learned some things about what you wrote above.

Here are my findings for you:

• It is completely irrelevant whether the base tuning (440hz) is divisible by two or by three. This bit might be disinformation or confused. That's because it's based on the measurement in Hertz (defined as cycles per Second). A Second is quite an arbitrary human measurement when it comes to measuring time. The natural (and hence musical) world doesn't really work based on seconds, minutes, hours - arbitrary time units - so I would claim that a frequency like 440hz also doesn't correspond to some deep universal concord/discord, at least not just because its measurement in Hertz is divisible by 2 or 3.

• There may well be other reasons why 440hz was especially evil and got chosen, it certainly does change the music a lot if you choose a different base tuning. I do not like how 440hz tuning sounds, if you change this frequency your music will sound more unique and "personal" in a strange way.

• It we take two frequencies (say 440hz and 880hz) then the ratio of the two frequencies might involve the numbers 2 or 3, which could indeed be very important in music, and correspond to universal truths, natural law, etc. In fact this is a certainty if your instrument is tuned properly, more on that later. Ratios like this lead to the concept of a musical Scale, or a collection of frequencies in some relation to one another, that we're going to use to compose our music. We can imagine how from Pythagoras on, humans have used Pure Intervals like 3:2, 1:2, 4:5, etc. to make music, both instruments and for vocal singing. It was actually used tens of thousands of years before Pythagoras, but that is not too imporant. What we need to know is that Pure Intervals (determined by pure, simple math ratios) were hot, everything else was thought by people to be "contaminated" and discordant. The tuning that contains pure intervals is called Just Intonation; you will likely never hear it in your life in the West unless you're into some specialized vocal musics like "Barbershop Quartets", microtonal composers and so on.

• The 12 Tone Equal Temperament (your basic Western piano tuning) is specifically designed to contain NOT A SINGLE pure interval of this kind. It is mind boggling, really. There is no pure 2:3, 4:5, or 1:3 kinds of ratios in this type of tuning, it is always just a littttttle bit detuned, a little bit off. On purpose, to divide the musical octave into exactly equal chunks and enable some of the key-changing tricks used in the tonal music of Bach and Mozart.

You understood correctly, if you understood I'm saying that you literally cannot play anything pure on a Western piano keyboard, except the largest interval called the Octave (1:2 ratio). All our piano intervals are "out of tune"! All serious composers and indeed popular music producers know about this, it's not a secret to them. Most just "accept that's how it is", and get on with their lives.

Using a synthethizer, you can get any tunings you want, including all those pure intervals. I have tried it, and at first it sounds very strange and eerie, but after a while you really fall in love with the pure interval sound, or even distorted intervals like those sometimes heard in Metal where the distortions force sounds to deviate from 440hz and 12-TET intervals.

Anything but the 12 Tone Equal Temperament, which sounds like... I struggled to find the adjective to describe what it sounds like, but then it came to me - it sounds like Television.

If some of this intrigues you as much as it did me, then I would invite you to follow the thread where it leads you, because this is all just the very beginning and the true possibilities in creating completely new types of music by breaking these "standards" and "rules" remain to this day almost entirely unexplored: