Back to A Different Lens

The Frequencies type carries fifty four debated or debunked facts out of sixty three total, against an atlas wide baseline under one percent debated or debunked. Read as a type wide share, that looks like the single most contested category the atlas holds. Read tone by tone, it is not fifty four different arguments. It is two findings, restated once for each of the nine named Solfeggio tones the atlas carries: 174, 285, 396, 417, 528, 639, 741, 852 and 963 Hz.

One Origin Story That Cannot Be True

Every one of the nine tones carries the identical debunking of its claimed medieval origin, word for word. "The set is presented as the tuning of medieval chant, and the name is the whole of the evidence offered for it. Nothing in the medieval system fixes any syllable to any frequency, and the hertz is a nineteenth century unit named after a physicist born in 1857. A named frequency in hertz cannot be older than an agreed reference pitch, and no such agreement existed before the twentieth century." One tone in the set supplies, in its own separate description, the honest account of when the set was actually made: "the set is attributed to the American naturopath Dr. Joseph Puleo, who said in the 1990s he derived it and five companion tones numerologically from a table of Bible verse numbers, popularised soon after by Dr. Leonard Horowitz." A twentieth century numerological invention, and a medieval attribution the atlas's own data already answers nine times over.

One Health Claim With No Support

The second finding is likewise repeated identically across all nine tones. "The specific mechanism usually claimed, that listening to a stated frequency repairs DNA, has no scientific basis, and the borrowing of scientific vocabulary to lend authority to claims of this kind is a documented strategy of modern esoteric movements rather than a finding about sound. That a listener finds a tone calming is a different claim, and is not what is being examined here."

Nine Tones, Not Fifty Four Arguments

The type's contested share is real, not a data error: each of the nine tones genuinely carries six debated or debunked rows of its own. But eighty five point seven percent is a count of rows, not a count of findings. What actually changes from tone to tone is a name and a number in hertz; the argument against the medieval attribution and the argument against the healing claim are each written once and carried, unchanged, to every sibling tone in the set. This is reported here as a type wide finding in its own right, and presented here as a larger scale companion to the identical note class already found on individual pages elsewhere in the atlas: the same shape, copied across nine siblings of one type rather than across facts on one page.

Where To Read More

• 528 Hz528 Hz, the best known of the nine, and the one tone whose own description states outright when and by whom the set was actually invented
• 174 Hz174 Hz, one of nine sibling tones carrying the identical pair of debunked findings word for word
• 285 Hz285 Hz, one of nine sibling tones carrying the identical pair of debunked findings word for word
• 396 Hz396 Hz, one of nine sibling tones carrying the identical pair of debunked findings word for word
• 417 Hz417 Hz, one of nine sibling tones carrying the identical pair of debunked findings word for word
• 639 Hz639 Hz, one of nine sibling tones carrying the identical pair of debunked findings word for word
• 741 Hz741 Hz, one of nine sibling tones carrying the identical pair of debunked findings word for word
• 852 Hz852 Hz, one of nine sibling tones carrying the identical pair of debunked findings word for word
• 963 Hz963 Hz, one of nine sibling tones carrying the identical pair of debunked findings word for word