Much of the time, it's our own meaning and significance that give practices their power.
Even with my skepticism, I’m still likely to enjoy a meditation on any of the 9 ‘Solfeggio Frequencies’. If someone created a beautiful track with the intention to liberate guilt or open my heart, I’ll enjoy it, and might turn to it in a moment of need.
Nonetheless, I need to address that most of these “Solfeggio Frequency” meditations are artistic license, and have no scientific backing.
If we want sound healing and sound meditation to be taken seriously— as I do, it’s important to differentiate between claims that are backed by the scientific community, and claims that are not.
‘Solfeggio Frequencies’ are a set of specific tones that are believed by some to have various spiritual and healing properties. They are traced back to Guido of Arezzo, an 11th-century Benedictine monk and music theorist who developed a method that used syllables (Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La) to denote pitches in a scale. This 'Solfège' music education method is used to teach pitch in Western music today. To the best of my understanding, the original Solfeggio scale did not include the specific frequencies now attributed to it in the New Age community.
Here’s the list of those Solfeggio Frequencies—
396 Hz: the liberation of fear and guilt.
417 Hz: facilitating change and undoing situations, releasing past trauma
528 Hz: the "Love frequency," often associated with growth and healing.
639 Hz: enabling connection and relationships.
741 Hz: help in finding creative expressions and solutions to problems.
852 Hz: returning to spiritual order and finding inner harmony.
Much of the ado about Solfeggio frequencies was popularized in the late 20th century in the book "Healing Codes for the Biological Apocalypse" by Dr. Leonard Horowitz. Dr. Joseph Puleo is credited with the discovery of the Solfeggio frequencies, which are a significant topic in the book. Puleo claimed to have rediscovered these frequencies through a vision, linking them to the six tones of the ancient Solfeggio scale.
This book is widely known for its propagation of many fascinating ideas or intense conspiracy theories, depending on your perspective. I’m not here to support, de-bunk or honestly engage with any of it at the moment. Merely to point out that these mystical frequencies come from, essentially, one person’s vision.
If you go into Youtube and type in Solfeggio Frequencies— 528hz, you’ll be brought to a soothing, droning track. Actually, that is not a track that’s playing a pure sine wave of 528hz. A pure sound wave of 528hz sounds like this. Type in ‘528’ in there. You can tell me if it’s healing or not. This is slightly above what we would call “C5” in music theory.
In most of these meditative, droning tracks labeled “528”, there are higher pitches coming in and out, and lower ones pulsating in volume. There are actually more like 10 notes happening at once (and I’d argue that it’s those intervals that make it more healing!), and on most of these tracks, I can hear a low-frequency oscillator (LFO) effect, possibly adding fluctuation to the pitch.
Let’s begin by saying that hertz (hz) is a measurement of frequency per second. And a second is an arbitrary measurement— we divine an hour into 60 minutes, and a minute into 60 seconds. This system, known as sexagesimal, was developed by ancient Sumerians and Babylonians, and it was based on their use of the number 60 for calculations. Our current measurement has been refined to be based on the properties of a cesium atom, and there’s no natural phenomenon to back a second up.
In music, as in math, it’s usually not the numbers themselves that hold special significance, but rather their relationship to one another.
For example, if you wanted to create a beautiful house, one that amplified a sense of calm and ease…you might want all of the windows to be perfect circles, or perfect rectangles. But whether the window itself was 2ft or across or 2.1ft inches across wouldn't really make a meaningful difference. As in music.
One of the phenomena that perpetuates this myth of special frequencies is that our ears attune to the first sound that we hear. So if you listen to a pure sine wave at 528hz, for example, and then turn it up or down by a few hz, it’s going to sound “off”. Anything that’s not a nice ratio to 528hz is going to sound ‘sour’. But that’s just because you heard it first!
In our sound bath training course, we do an experiment where we play one sound at 440hz, and then the next at 432hz. The second one always sounds strange. Then we reverse the order, playing 432hz and then 440hz. And the second one will sound strange no matter what!
So if you take your pure sine wave generator, and play 534 hz, and listen to that for a while (assuming it doesn’t hurt your ears), you’ll notice that 528 sounds off after that.
In all of my exploration, I haven’t been able to find anything that truly makes 528hz unique, apart from the vision that came to Dr. Joseph Puleo. But I’m only here to discourage the dogma, not the practice.
The healing arts are a beautiful arena that welcome many expressions— and our imaginations and intentions can be extraordinarily powerful. For example, in internal-family-systems therapy, we imagine characters inside us having conversations, to forgive the pain of the past. We might meditate on a particular color of light that we heard is calming, or generates a sensation of compassion. Some say that singing in the key of F is heart-opening, so maybe that’s where we turn, as artists, to open our hearts, and release heartbreak. What matters is that we have the freedom to explore what resonates for us. We can choose to play in our own imaginary world, or in someone else’s. But the bar for holding something up as fact, or truth, in a community is higher— and the Solfeggio frequencies don’t meet it for me.
———
Enrollment for our next Sound Bath Training Course (online) closes in just a few days!!
Comments