The Solfeggio Frequencies
Learn the incredible discovery story of these nine numbers and the astonishing mathematical matrix found underneath.
The Original Solfeggio frequencies, or "Puleo Numbers", are a set of nine tones (originally 6 with a later 3 derived from the codex) — 174, 285, 396, 417, 528, 639, 741, 852 and 963 Hz — identified in the 1970s by Dr. Joseph Puleo, a naturopathic physician, through a numeric reading of the Book of Numbers.
There is one surprising rule underneath all nine.
Nine tones
Six were identified by Dr. Puleo. Three more — 174, 285 and 963 Hz — were added later by others. As you'll see in a moment, the mathematics had those three waiting all along.
Nine frequencies; one rule
The math is actually quite simple. Three short steps and you'll be able to generate every Solfeggio frequency yourself from memory.
Combine any number down to a single digit
Add up the digits. If you still have more than one, add again. Keep going until one digit is left. Mathematicians call the result a digital root. That's the only technique on this page.
That's it. 528 combines down to 6. Try it on your phone number — everything reduces to something between 1 and 9.
Now picture a clock with nine hours instead of twelve
Nine numbers around a circle. When you count past 9, you come back around to 1 — exactly like an ordinary clock rolling past twelve.
Here is the entire rule: start on any hour. Take three equal steps of six. Write down where you land, in order. That three-digit number is a Solfeggio frequency.
Tap any hour. Every single one of the Solfeggio frequencies is sitting there. Nine starting points and nine frequencies.
And the same numbers revealed in scripture
This is what Dr. Puleo found. Numbers is the fourth book of the Hebrew Torah (later called the Old Testament in the King James Bible). Chapter 7 is a ledger: twelve tribal chiefs bring an identical offering, and each chief is given exactly six verses of his own. Verses 12–17 are the first chief. 18–23 the second. 24–29 the third.
Take those three blocks. Combine each verse number to a single digit using step one. Stack them in the order the Torah already puts them in.
| Chief 1Verses 12–17 |
| Chief 2Verses 18–23 |
| Chief 3Verses 24–29 |
Hover or tap a column
Read the columns downward and you get 396, 417, 528, 639, 741, 852. All six. In order. Nothing dropped, rearranged, or rounded. The three rows aren't imposed on the text — they're the Torah's own paragraph breaks.
3, 6 and 9
Take each of the nine frequencies and combine it down with step one. Watch what happens.
Three, six, nine… The pattern people have been pointing at for decades.
The nine are really three, turning
Take any frequency and move its last digit to the front. You land on another frequency. Keep going and you return to the beginning. The nine tones are three families of three, each one rotating through itself.
This is also the cleanest answer to the question "where did 174, 285 and 963 come from, if Dr. Puleo only found six?" They were added later, by other people, using the mathematical matrix discovered by Dr. Puleo.
They're spaced by 111 — and 528 is a real, singable note
Line the nine up and measure the frequency gaps between each adjacent number: 111, 111, 21, 111, 111, 102, 111, 111. Six of the eight are exactly 111, and every single gap combines down to 3.
And here's the one that surprises musicians. Tune an orchestra to A = 444 Hz — a bright and historically standard tuning, about 16 cents above today's standard A = 440 — and the C above middle C lands on 528.008 Hz. So 528 Hz isn't an exotic outlier; it's simply C, in what some say is a slightly more bio-resonant state.
The most loved number in sound healing
Of the nine, one has reached superstar status. 528 Hz has been recorded, chanted, sung over, slept to and searched for more than any other frequency in the world — hundreds of millions of listening hours, and referred to affectionately as The Love Frequency.
Its syllable, MI, comes from the line MI-ra gestorum — "the wonders of your deeds." A thousand years later, people still reach for it when they are ready to open, let go, and renew.
It's also the one frequency researchers have studied in a lab. A 2018 study in Health found that five minutes of music at 528 Hz significantly lowered salivary cortisol and significantly raised oxytocin — the bonding hormone — while the same music at 440 Hz moved neither.Akimoto K, et al. "Effect of 528 Hz Music on the Endocrine System and Autonomic Nervous System," Health, 2018. Nine participants — a small, early study, not a medical finding. We're sharing this because it provides a strong science-based indicator of the power of 528 Hz. Individual results may of course vary.
On the relationship between color and sound: raise 528 Hz by forty octaves and it lands at 516 nanometres — green light. Chlorophyll's band. The color the heart has been painted for centuries! Join us in re-discovering these wonders of ancient knowledge.
Dr. Joseph Puleo and the Book of Numbers
In the 1970s, a naturopathic physician named Joseph Puleo became convinced there was a numeric pattern hidden in scripture. He was working from three places: Numbers chapter 7, Psalm 119, and the fifteen Psalms that open with the phrase A Song of Degrees — degree being, of course, a musical word.
What he pulled out of Numbers 7 were six three-digit numbers. He read them as frequencies, matched them to the six syllables of the old hexachord — ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la — and called them the Solfeggio tones. In 1999 the researcher Leonard Horowitz published the account in Healing Codes for the Biological Apocalypse, and from there they reached the sound-healing world, where they have stayed ever since.
"For more than twenty-two years, I have carried the mystery of the numbers discovered by Dr. Joseph Puleo. He did not invent them. He uncovered them."Delores DeVore · puleonumbers.com
Dr. Puleo was given three clues. Most of the sound-healing world took the first one — Numbers chapter 7 — and stopped there, because it produced six beautiful tones and six tones were plenty.
Delores DeVore did not stop there. She has spent more than twenty years on the other two: Psalm 119, whose 176 verses are grouped into twenty-two stanzas, each one headed by a letter of the Hebrew alphabet with its own numeric value — and the fifteen Psalms that open with A Song of Degrees. She reads them as a single continuing puzzle, one that runs from number into letter into scale, and she is still finding things in it.
She also gave these frequencies the name we've used throughout this page. Puleo Numbers — because a man went looking, and found something, and that ought to carry his name.
If the pattern you just worked through delighted you, her site is where the trail goes next. It is a genuine pleasure to point you toward it.
852 Hz on the CymaScope
Why "Solfeggio"?
Around 1025, a Benedictine monk named Guido d'Arezzo noticed that a hymn to St. John the Baptist — Ut queant laxis — began each of its first six lines one step higher than the last. He lifted the opening syllable of each line and gave singers a ladder: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la. Ut later softened to do, and ti joined in the sixteenth century. Every child who has ever sung "do-re-mi" is using his invention.
Many in the sound-healing world feel these tones carry the spirit of that chant tradition. What survives from Guido is the idea that a scale is a set of relationships, and the idea of these relationships "transcending" upwards. Indeed, the Solfeggio tones overshoot the octave in a way that 12-tone temperament does not, creating a sense of unresolved "spiraling" or "opening" that gives birth to a state of newness, of energetic awakening.
And the deeper you journey into archaic scales, the more astonishing the variety turns out to be — every culture, every century, drawing its own map within a world of sound.
People were drawing these shapes long before we could photograph them
Put sand on a metal plate, sound a tone, and the grains organize into a symmetrical figure. Ernst Chladni demonstrated it in 1787; Hans Jenny named the field cymatics. What's uncanny is how familiar the results look, and how these results appear in ancient art and architecture all over the world. By what means did these ancient cultures discover — or use! — these cymatic geometric forms?
Mandalas
Concentric, radially symmetrical, built outward from a still centre — the same architecture a standing wave produces on a vibrating plate. Buddhist and Hindu traditions were drawing them for well over a thousand years before anyone measured a node.
The Sri Yantra
Nine interlocking triangles radiating from a central point, described in its own tradition as the visible form of a sound. Whatever one makes of the claim, the geometry is genuinely wave-like — and it is very old.
Rose windows
Gothic cathedral glass, laid out in radial symmetry around a single centre, in buildings designed above all to be sung in. The masons weren't reading oscilloscopes, yet they were building rooms for sound, and the shapes they used are the same shapes sound makes!
Girih geometric tilework
Infinite repeating symmetry, generated from a handful of simple rules — visually near-identical to the interference figures that appear when two frequencies meet on a plate.
Two beautiful artifacts
These have travelled with the Solfeggio story for decades. We keep them because they're part of our history and because they're genuinely lovely to look at.
Before and after one session
Taken before and after a twenty-minute session by SomaEnergetics founder David Hulse, with a woman he had never met. Kirlian imaging captures the corona discharge around an object, and it shifts with moisture, pressure and voltage.
Before
After
All six frequencies, frozen
Water photographed after exposure to each of the six tones, in the tradition made famous by Masaru Emoto. We don't present them as data. We present them because a lot of people fell in love with this work through them — including us.
Nikola Tesla kept hotel rooms on floors divisible by three, walked around a building three times before entering it, and worked in threes his whole life. This documented fixation provides the Solfeggio's 3, 6, 9 with interesting company!
Hear the nine for yourself
A number on a page is interesting, but experiencing these vibrations as real energy waves activating your vagus nerve or heart chakra is why we created SomaEnergetics. Experience your first set of frequencies today, or begin the journey as a Soma practitioner.
Solfeggio tuning forks
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A set of nine tones — 174, 285, 396, 417, 528, 639, 741, 852 and 963 Hz — identified by Dr. Joseph Puleo in the 1970s through a numeric reading of the Book of Numbers, and used in sound healing ever since. All nine are generated by a single rule: start anywhere on a nine-hour clock and take three steps of six.
Dr. Joseph Puleo, a naturopathic physician. His work was published in 1999 by Leonard Horowitz in Healing Codes for the Biological Apocalypse. Because the numbers are his, many researchers now call them the Puleo Numbers.
The syllables are genuinely medieval — ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la come from an eleventh-century hymn to St. John the Baptist. The specific pitches are not. Hertz wasn't adopted as a unit until 1930 and Europe had no shared tuning standard until 1939, so a medieval choir had no fixed frequency to sing. Many people feel the tones carry the spirit of that tradition, and we're glad they do — we just don't state it as history.
Not necessarily, or in any way that has been scientifically proven — and we'd rather tell you that plainly than repeat a claim we can't stand behind. That idea traces back to a 1988 experiment that exposed DNA samples to four styles of music, not to 528 Hz, and measured how much ultraviolet light the samples absorbed, which is not the same as repair.
What we can point to: a 2018 study found five minutes of 528 Hz music lowered cortisol and raised oxytocin, where the same music at 440 Hz did neither. It's a small study, and it's about stress hormones rather than genetics. It's also real, published, and checkable.
The next frontier: Many on the cutting edge of science and spirituality are starting to understand DNA as a structure with characteristics of a type of "antennae," and speculate on DNA's ability to detect and react to energy waves and patterns — such as sound frequency, intention, different types of radiant and mechanical energy, and dare we say "Love." We are excited to honor a community of practitioners dedicated to understanding the mysteries of alternative healing modalities at the intersection of science and spirituality.
Because every one of the nine frequencies reduces to a 3, a 6 or a 9 — in that repeating order. It isn't a coincidence or a selection effect; it's forced by the rule that generates them. Stepping by six around a nine-hour clock cannot produce anything else.
Dr. Puleo identified six. The other three were added later by other practitioners — which sounds like an invention until you look at the mathematics, where they're simply the same rule continued in both directions. Nine starting points on the clock, nine frequencies. The three "extras" were always part of the set.
Our original six-frequency Solfeggio set is the set our core trainings are based around, though some of our supplemental trainings incorporate the remaining three Solfeggio frequencies for work in the outer auric chakras known as the "Soul Star" and "Earth Star."
It's C. Specifically, tune to A = 444 Hz — about 16 cents brighter than the modern A = 440 standard — and the C above middle C falls on 528.008 Hz. Middle C lands on 264.00 Hz.
The numbers are real, the pattern connecting them is real and reproducible, and the tones are real pitches you can play. What people experience with them — calm, focus, emotional release — is widely and consistently reported, and while it's subjective rather than clinically established, millions of individuals have been incorporating these frequencies into their healing journey, and we're honored to say over thirty-five thousand of them carry Soma tuning forks by their side.