But you won’t find the words “sound healing” in how I describe my work, and you won’t hear me call myself a sound healer either.
“Healing frequencies” is a term with a growing amount of interest behind it. More people are typing those two words into a search engine every year.
That makes sense to me. Sound is powerful, and people need it at the moment. Life is fast and loud and asks a lot of your attention. Most of us are living in thinking and doing rather than feeling and being. We’re carrying a lot of stuff on top of that: work stuff, family stuff, friend stuff, life stuff. People come to sound the way they come to anything that has been described to them as “help”, hoping it will meet what they’re going through.
I’ve spent years carefully not speaking about this, but it’s become impossible to avoid. There are the infographics circulating on social media, the confident AI summary sitting at the top of the search results, assembling an answer out of questionable sources. So I went back to my notes from my sound training, especially the session on 11.11.2020 when I heard directly from the man who came up with the numbers.
Cosmically in tune: where the numbers came from
In 1978 a Swiss-born mathematician named Hans Cousto published a book called Die Oktave. The idea in it is simple and, I think, rather elegant.
A cycle is one full repetition of anything that repeats, and frequency is a count of how many happen per second. Sound is a wave of pressure moving through air, so a note at 136 Hz means the air is completing 136 cycles every second. A heartbeat is a cycle too, and so is the Earth going once around the Sun.
Cousto’s approach was to treat them all as the same kind of thing. An octave is a doubling. Play a note at twice the frequency and you get the same note, higher up. So you can take any cycle at all, however slow, and keep doubling it until it lands in the range of human hearing.
Take the Earth’s year, which is about 31,556,926 seconds. That works out at roughly 0.000000032 cycles per second, far too slow for any ear to register. Double it thirty-two times and you arrive at 136.10 Hz, which sits comfortably in the range of a cello, or a large gong.
That’s the whole method. Do it with the orbit of Venus, or Saturn, and you get the tunings stamped on the planetary gongs and bowls in most practitioners’ collections, mine included. Cousto’s Earth-year tone also implies a concert A of about 432 Hz, which is where a lot of the modern interest in 432 comes from.
Gong Life: how it shows up today
Walk into a sound bath or scroll a wellness feed and you’ll meet plenty of theories about what particular frequencies do. Here are three of the most common.
Tuning to planets. This one is Cousto’s, more or less directly, and it’s the most mathematically careful of the three. You’ll find no shortage of gongs tuned to planets. One of my favourites is a Platonic Year gong made by Paiste in the 1970s that has passed through the hands of several sound legends, and it’s the one I reach for most.
Tuning to chakras. This is the familiar seven-note ladder, with C for the root, D for the sacral, and up through the scale to B at the crown. You’ll find Himalayan singing bowls, crystal bowls and chimes tuned to these notes, usually with a frequency attached. Musicians tend to choose 440 Hz and yogis tend to choose 432 Hz, and I think you can guess why.
Tuning to emotions and outcomes. This is the solfeggio set, with 396 Hz for releasing fear, 528 Hz for repair, and so on. It’s the most recent of the three, put together in the late twentieth century and popularised in the nineties. You’ll find tuning forks, bowls and an enormous number of playlists built around these numbers, and it’s the family that has travelled furthest online.
I own instruments from all three and I play them happily. Knowing where a number came from has never made an instrument sound worse to me.
Letting Go: why any of this is out there
What people are feeling is real. Nobody invented the fact that an hour of sustained sound leaves you different from how you arrived. I have watched it happen for years – people who came in sceptical, people who came in exhausted, and people who came along only because a friend made them.
And when it happens, people talk. They come out lighter, or clearer, or like something has shifted, and they want to tell someone. That’s how most people end up at their first sound bath, not through an advert but because a friend wouldn’t stop going on about it.
The trouble is that the experience is very hard to carry across. “It was amazing, I can’t really explain it” doesn’t get you very far. So people reach for the part they can hand over, often a number they found on the Internet.
Someone lets go of something they’ve been holding. You can’t package that. It needs a room, a length of time, and someone who knows how to hold both.
Stories from the Bath: things I can’t explain
A thousand or so sound baths leave you with a collection of stories. Here are three.
The Heart Tunes In
The first one is a coincidence, or I assume it is. I often use a 16-inch handheld gong near the end of a sound bath. Scores of people have asked me about it afterwards. They tap at their sternum and tell me that’s where they felt it most, and then they’re surprised to see there’s a big heart on the face of the gong, and that it’s meant to be tuned to the heart chakra. I don’t know what to do with that, but it keeps happening.
The Hug of Relief
The second one has stayed with me. At one of my earlier sound baths I played for a friend who had never been to one. When she came out of it she looked like she needed a hug, and as I hugged her she burst into tears. I couldn’t tell at first what kind of tears they were, until I realised it was relief. She’d felt what a clear mind was like for the first time.
The Only Way Out is Through
The third one is funny. I was sitting in a studio reception area when a woman came over and told me she’d been to one of my sound baths about six months earlier. The next day she went away for a weekend with friends and was violently ill the entire time, cursing me and the sound bath the whole way through. And then, straight after, she said she’d never felt better in her life. She was convinced it had shifted something she’d been carrying.
So, back to the words
“Sound healing” makes two claims at once. It says something in the sound is doing the healing, and it says the person playing is the one doing it. I can’t stand behind either. What I can tell you is that people come in carrying something and often leave lighter.
If you came here hoping to find out which frequency does what, I’m afraid I haven’t been much help. What I’d say instead is that the thing you felt, or the thing you’re hoping for, is real enough on its own. It doesn’t need the explanation usually attached to it.
Ready to give your nervous system an hour off
Find a sound class at a studio near you and see what it can do for you.
About David Tran
David (@yogongster) spent years as a strategy consultant before making a full pivot in 2020, into yoga, breathwork, and sound. What followed was five years of teaching mostly in East London and holding sound baths on MoreYoga WellnessTV. His sound baths were named among the best in London by Condé Nast Traveller. Before moving to Los Angeles in 2025, he trained a cohort of sound artists who are now holding their own space around London.
Today, David is building The Tamashi Collective, a business acceleration studio that helps founders grow without losing the soul of why they started. It turns out the same principles that make a great sound bath, presence, attunement, knowing when to lead and when to listen, make for better businesses too.