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417 Hz

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Origin 417 Hz was published as one of the original six Solfeggio frequencies by Leonard Horowitz and Joseph Puleo in their 1999 book Healing Codes for the Biological Apocalypse, presented there as recovered through a numerological reading of Bible verses. It is not attested in any older musical or scientific source, and the atlas's separate origin-period dates for concert pitch standardisation describe an unrelated development.

417 Hz is the second of the original six Solfeggio frequencies attributed to the American naturopath Dr. Joseph Puleo, who said in the 1990s he derived the set numerologically from a table of Bible verse numbers, and popularised soon after by Dr. Leonard Horowitz. Advocates describe it as the tone for facilitating change and undoing past situations, the set's claimed second stage. Like every tone in the set, its healing claims come from alternative wellness practice rather than acoustic or medical research. It follows 396 Hz and precedes 528 Hz in the set's conventional ordering.

Facts
Debunked
Origin Period
1917 to 1975 2Tradition: Modern sound healing: the Solfeggio frequencies
ISO 16:1975, Acoustics, Standard Tuning Frequency (Standard Musical Pitch) (International Organization for Standardization, 1975) is the international standard that fixed concert A at 440 Hz, the first globally agreed reference pitch in the instrument's history. Before that kind of agreement existed, documented historical tuning practice put concert A anywhere from about 415 Hz to over 460 Hz depending on period, region and instrument maker. Comparing that documented range against the eleventh century, when Guido of Arezzo's chant tradition is set, the standard shows no reference pitch existed then against which to measure any tone, so a chant of that period cannot be assigned a hertz value such as 528 Hz at all. The claimed date is set aside because the unit it is expressed in did not yet have a fixed meaning.
Origin of the Name
The name is taken from solfeggio, the European system of singing syllables, ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, which Guido of Arezzo drew in the eleventh century from the opening syllables of successive lines of the hymn Ut queant laxis. Guido's syllables name positions within a hexachord. They are relative pitch and carry no frequency. 3
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, eds., 2nd edition, Macmillan, 2001) documents Guido of Arezzo's eleventh-century solmisation system, the evidence offered for the claim that the Solfeggio set preserves the tuning of medieval chant. Guido's system assigns a syllable, ut, re, mi and so on, to a position within a hexachord, a relative relationship between notes, not a number of vibrations per second; a singer using it began wherever their voice was comfortable, with no fixed reference pitch at all. Comparing that documented medieval practice against the modern claim, nothing in Guido's system fixes any syllable to any frequency, and the hertz itself is a unit defined in the nineteenth century and named after the physicist Heinrich Hertz, born in 1857, centuries after Guido. The name trades on a real medieval system's prestige without carrying forward anything it actually specified.
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
Nothing here is medical advice or a treatment for any condition 4
Olav Hammer's Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age (Brill, 2001) examines the claim, common to Solfeggio tone marketing, that listening to a stated frequency repairs DNA. No study demonstrates this mechanism, and Hammer's analysis of how modern esoteric movements build authority identifies the borrowing of scientific-sounding vocabulary, frequency, hertz, resonance, DNA, as a documented rhetorical strategy for lending a teaching the appearance of scientific support rather than a real finding about sound. That a listener finds a given tone calming is a separate, subjective claim the atlas does not dispute; the DNA-repair mechanism specifically is what this property records as unsupported.
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
The atlas records that the claims are made within a modern therapeutic movement and attributes them to it; it does not record them as facts 4
Olav Hammer's Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age (Brill, 2001) examines the claim, common to Solfeggio tone marketing, that listening to a stated frequency repairs DNA. No study demonstrates this mechanism, and Hammer's analysis of how modern esoteric movements build authority identifies the borrowing of scientific-sounding vocabulary, frequency, hertz, resonance, DNA, as a documented rhetorical strategy for lending a teaching the appearance of scientific support rather than a real finding about sound. That a listener finds a given tone calming is a separate, subjective claim the atlas does not dispute; the DNA-repair mechanism specifically is what this property records as unsupported.
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
These tones are sold and streamed with claims of physical and psychological benefit 4
Olav Hammer's Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age (Brill, 2001) examines the claim, common to Solfeggio tone marketing, that listening to a stated frequency repairs DNA. No study demonstrates this mechanism, and Hammer's analysis of how modern esoteric movements build authority identifies the borrowing of scientific-sounding vocabulary, frequency, hertz, resonance, DNA, as a documented rhetorical strategy for lending a teaching the appearance of scientific support rather than a real finding about sound. That a listener finds a given tone calming is a separate, subjective claim the atlas does not dispute; the DNA-repair mechanism specifically is what this property records as unsupported.
Origins
Origin PeriodSourced to the subject's own account
417 Hz was published as one of the original six Solfeggio frequencies by Leonard Horowitz and Joseph Puleo in their 1999 book Healing Codes for the Biological Apocalypse, presented there as recovered through a numerological reading of Bible verses. It is not attested in any older musical or scientific source, and the atlas's separate origin-period dates for concert pitch standardisation describe an unrelated development. 1
Learn More
417 Hz, the Second Core Solfeggio Tone

417 Hz is the second of the six core Solfeggio frequencies, and in the sound-healing literature it is the tone associated with the sacral centre and with "facilitating change" and undoing difficult situations, the tone of clearing and of new beginnings. Like the rest of the set it is part of a modern system: the six core frequencies were assembled by Joseph Puleo in the late twentieth century and popularised from 1999, derived through a numerological reading rather than recovered from any historical source.

The syllables of the medieval solfege scale are borrowed for the name, but the eleventh-century chant tradition of Guido of Arezzo knew nothing of fixed pitches in hertz, so the connection is nominal only. These tones are now widely sold and streamed as sound-healing tracks, sometimes tuned against the alternative concert pitch of A=432 Hz that circulates in the same milieu. There is no scientific evidence that the frequency produces the claimed effects, and nothing here is offered as medical advice or as treatment for any condition.

Sources Healing Codes for the Biological ApocalypseLeonard G. Horowitz and Joseph S. Puleo with Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New AgeOlav Hammer

Where 417 Hz Came From

The Solfeggio set is not ancient, and its own literature is fairly open about where it comes from. The nine tones were put into circulation by Joseph Puleo and Leonard Horowitz in Healing Codes for the Biological Apocalypse, published in 1999, where they are presented as recovered from the medieval Latin hymn Ut queant laxis by a numerological procedure. The hymn is real and important: Guido of Arezzo took the first syllable of each of its lines in the eleventh century to name the notes of the hexachord, which is why the syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol and la exist at all.

The structure of the set is arithmetic, and 417 Hz shows it clearly. Its digits sum to 12, and reducing that gives 3; every tone in the nine reduces to three, six or nine, and no other value appears. The tones also fall into triads a hundred and eleven apart: 417, 528 and 639. That pattern is the reason the set has the members it has. It was chosen for its numerology, which the source is explicit about, and not derived from any measurement.

Two problems sit under the ancient claim, and neither is a matter of opinion. The hymn carries no frequencies: medieval music had no absolute pitch standard, singers pitched to a comfortable range, and the idea of tuning a note to a fixed number of cycles per second is a later development. The hertz itself is a nineteenth century unit, named for a physicist born in 1857, so a number in hertz cannot have been handed down from an eleventh century source. The therapeutic effects attributed to this tone belong to the 1999 book and to the literature that followed it. The atlas records the claim, and records who makes it.

Sources Healing Codes for the Biological ApocalypseLeonard G. Horowitz and Joseph S. Puleo with Western Plainchant: A HandbookDavid Hiley, ISO 16:1975, Acoustics, Standard tuning frequency (Standard musical pitch)International Organization for Standardization

Cross-Tradition Connections

Contained In

The Solfeggio Frequencies, Disciplines

One of the nine tones the set is made of.

Disciplines That Use This

Sound Healing, Disciplines

The solfeggio frequencies. The claims attached to them are attributed, not endorsed.

Source Tibetan Singing Bowls: Where Did They Really Come From?Tricycle Magazine
Sources
1. Healing Codes for the Biological Apocalypse
Leonard G. Horowitz and Joseph S. Puleo, Tetrahedron Publishing Group, 1999Origin of the modern Solfeggio set (cited for attribution only, not for any claimed effect)
2. ISO 16:1975, Acoustics, Standard tuning frequency (Standard musical pitch)
International Organization for Standardization, International Organization for Standardization, 1975ISO 16:1975, scope and specificationView the Source
3. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition
Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (eds.), Macmillan, 2001Solmization; Guido of Arezzo
4. Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age
Olav Hammer, Brill, 2001ch. on the appeal to science in modern esoteric claimsView the Source
A History of Performing Pitch: The Story of 'A'
Bruce Haynes, Scarecrow Press, 2002Standardized pitch in hertz as a modern development, absent from medieval chant
Western Plainchant: A Handbook
David Hiley, Clarendon Press (Oxford University Press), 1993Guido of Arezzo and the hymn Ut queant laxis, source of the solmization (solfege) syllablesView the Source
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