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417 Hz, 639 Hz and 741 Hz are three of this atlas's most internally contested subjects, each carrying six debated or debunked facts of its own. Read across all three together rather than one at a time, the eighteen rows are not eighteen different objections. They are two objections, stated identically for each of the three tones.

A Pitch Cannot Predate Its Own Reference

Each of the three tones is presented as the tuning of medieval chant, and the name is the whole of the evidence offered for that claim. Guido of Arezzo's solmisation assigns a syllable to a position in a hexachord, not a number of vibrations to a note, and a singer using it in the eleventh century began wherever the voice happened to be comfortable. A named frequency in hertz cannot be older than an agreed reference pitch, and no such agreement existed before the twentieth century; concert A itself has been anything from about 415 Hz to over 460 Hz in documented practice. A chant sung in the eleventh century cannot have been sung at any stated number of hertz, because nothing at the time fixed what a pitch was a number of, and this reasoning is recorded identically against all three tones' origin period.

A Borrowed Claim About What the Tone Does

The remaining debunked fact on each of the three tones is not about history but about mechanism: the specific claim usually made, that listening to a stated frequency repairs DNA, has no scientific basis, and the borrowing of scientific vocabulary to lend authority to a claim of this kind is a documented strategy of modern esoteric movements rather than a finding about sound. That a listener finds a given tone calming is a separate claim this atlas is not examining here. Three tones, eighteen debunked rows between them, and the whole of it is one dating error and one borrowed mechanism, each stated three times because there are three tones carrying the same two-part claim, not because there are eighteen separate problems with the solfeggio set.

Where To Read More

• 417 HzOne of three tones carrying the identical two-part debunking
• 639 HzOne of three tones carrying the identical two-part debunking
• 741 HzOne of three tones carrying the identical two-part debunking