I have met some very competent musicians who have found 432 tuning to be powerfully effective. When I dug into this, I discovered they were tuning the other notes in the scal to frequencies in whole numbered cycles per second, using tables being passed around. So the real change was in the qualities of intervals; many of these became far more resonant than the compromised resonant qualities we get with equal tempered tuning. This trade-off was once well known in the musical world, but it is now long forgotten. I consider "432" to be a symbol that suggests the restoration of forgotten methods for tuning scales, rather than a literal value to be used to proportionally change the frequency of every note.
If you're interested in this sort of thing, look for Wendy Carlos' album Switched-On Bach 2000. She revisits the material of her classic electronic music album with modern synthesizer equipment, and uses authentic Bach tunings for the pieces as well. The liner notes for the album explain the tuning systems used, and how they differ from the modern, mathematically-perfect equal temperament. She notes that Bach was himself a first-rate tuner and theorist, and was not above retuning "on the fly" to improve the sound of various compositions. Of course, with synthesizers, a tuning is just a block of data, which can be reloaded as needed.
(As a "bonus track" on the album, she included a realization of "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor." Especially appropriate for the season!)
Wendy Carlos is awesome! I didn't know about the 2000 version, I will check that out.
Tuning is just a block of data on a digital synthesizer, but on an analog synthesizer it's not. If you use a keyboard controller, it's generating pitch control voltages with a fixed 2^(1/12) ratio between notes (or logarithm thereof). It would be challenging to convert this into a just intonation.
On the other hand, if the pitch control voltages are generated by potentiometers on an analog sequencer [1] and the musician is setting those potentiometers by ear, the musician will probably end up tuning to a just intonation because it sounds more correct to the ear.
Just intonation is a system of getting beautiful pythagorean intervals for rich harmonies as the expense of modulation from one key into another (a staple of the western musical tradition for several centuries). It's what makes barbershop quartets enjoyable to listen to. High end electronic instruments let you switch between equal-tempered or other tuning schemas.
could also be about the instruments, say a violin built in the olden times tuned differently so the tension of the strings is different and the body accentuates certain harmonics in a certain way...
