888 Hz and Jupiter: is there a frequency of good fortune?
No frequency has been shown to bring wealth or good luck. The pairing people play for both joins 888 Hz, an angel number tone whose digit eight is counted lucky in Chinese tradition, with 183.58 Hz, Hans Cousto's tone for Jupiter, the planet Roman astrology called the greater benefic. In tests, a lucky charm's early lift to performance did not repeat.
Ready to play Balance And Possibility 888 Hz
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Is there a frequency for wealth or good fortune?
Not one that has been shown to work. No study has played 888 Hz, 183.58 Hz or the two together to people and measured their luck, their earnings or their fortunes, and PubMed, the main index of medical research, lists none.
What exists is a pairing with a story behind each half. In August 2023 Harmonance's YouTube channel published Angel Number 888 Hz & Jupiter 183.58 Hz Fusion, one of its nine fusion videos, each named for a state such as Focus or Fearless. It joins two pure tones: 888 Hz, an angel number tone, and 183.58 Hz, the tone Hans Cousto calculated for Jupiter. People play it when they are hoping for a good run: a new job, a new venture, a fresh start.
This guide takes the pairing apart. It shows why each half is linked with good fortune, where 183.58 Hz comes from, what the ear does with the two together, measured from the site's own audio, and what research on luck has actually found, which is about lucky charms and confidence rather than any tone.
Why is 888 linked with luck?
888 is linked with luck mainly through Chinese tradition, where the digit eight is the luckiest of all. In 2003 two marketing researchers, Simmons and Schindler, found that tradition at work in real prices: price advertisements in Chinese showed "a distinct tendency to favor the digit 8 and to avoid the digit 4", the digit linked with death.
Three eights in a row repeat the lucky digit three times, and 888 Hz is that number played as a pitch. The guide to 888 Hz tells the angel number's own history, the Chinese reading and the older Greek arithmetic of 888 in full, with its sources, so this guide does not repeat it.
Nothing in the tone carries the number's meaning. 888 Hz is a pitch 15.7 cents above the A at 880 Hz, where a cent is a hundredth of a semitone. The luck belongs to the digits, and the digits come from counting the pitch in cycles a second: count it any other way and the eights disappear.
Why is Jupiter called the fortunate planet?
Jupiter has been the planet of good fortune for about two thousand years. Western astrology inherited the idea from Rome, and Wikipedia's account of the planets in astrology gives its earliest named source: "The 1st-century poet Manilius described Jupiter as temperate and benign, and the greater benefic". A benefic is a planet held to bring good things, and Jupiter was the greater of the two; the same page gives Manilius's Venus as the lesser.
The name came first. The largest planet carries the name of the chief Roman god, and NASA puts it in one line: "The king of planets was named for Jupiter, king of the gods in Roman mythology." The same idea is still inside an ordinary English word. Jovial, first recorded in 1590, came through French from the Italian gioviale, and Wiktionary gives its first meaning: "born under the influence of the planet Jupiter". To be jovial once meant to be born under Jupiter.
Cousto carries the old symbolism into his description of the Jupiter tone. His German text, from Die Töne der Kosmischen Oktave, reads:
Das Stetige, das Prächtige und das Joviale ist dem Jupiter zu eigen, er steht für philosophische und materielle Gestaltungskraft.
In English: the steady, the splendid and the jovial belong to Jupiter, which stands for philosophical and material creative power. He gives the tone the effect of encouraging creative power and steady building. Those are descriptions from a tradition, not measurements. The same text gives Jupiter to the sign of Sagittarius, and the Sagittarius page plays 183.58 Hz as that sign's tone.
Where does 183.58 Hz come from?
183.58 Hz is the length of the Jupiter year, turned into a tone by doubling. Jupiter takes almost twelve Earth years to go once round the Sun against the stars; NASA's Jupiter fact sheet gives its sidereal orbit as 4,332.589 days. Count that whole orbit as one slow cycle and its frequency is one cycle in 4,332.589 × 86,400 seconds, about 0.00000000267 Hz.
Double it and the pitch rises by one octave. Double it 36 times and it reaches 183.58 Hz, which is Cousto's method for every planet.
The arithmetic is short enough to redo. 2 to the power 36 is 68,719,476,736. Divide it by the Jupiter year in seconds, 374,335,689.6, and the answer is 183.5771 Hz. Cousto's own tuning tables use a year of 4,332.588 days and list the 36th octave as 183.58 Hz, an F sharp. On NASA's figure and on Cousto's, the result is the same to three decimal places: 183.5771 and 183.5772 Hz.
888 Hz is not on the ladder. Rung 38 is 734.31 Hz and rung 39 is 1,468.62 Hz, and 888 Hz sits 0.27 of an octave above rung 38. The pairing joins two numbers from two different traditions, a planet's year and a run of lucky digits, and nothing in the arithmetic links them.
On a piano tuned to A at 440 Hz, 183.58 Hz sits 13.3 cents below the F sharp below middle C, at 185.00 Hz. As the guide to planetary frequencies explains for every planet, the tone is arithmetic applied to a real orbit, not a sound that travels from Jupiter. The guide to 183.58 Hz follows the Jupiter year further, through its other cycles and its path across the sky.
What do 888 Hz and 183.58 Hz sound like together?
They sound clean and wide apart: the two tones sit so far apart in the ear that nothing in the pair beats or roughens, and Harmonance measured exactly how far.
The inner ear sorts sound by pitch along a coiled membrane, and each place along it acts like a filter a few semitones wide. In 1965 Reinier Plomp and Willem Levelt played pairs of pure tones to listeners and found where roughness comes from:
These intervals are evaluated as consonant for frequency differences exceeding critical bandwidth, whereas the most dissonant intervals correspond with frequency differences of about a quarter of this bandwidth.
The width of those filters is measured in Cams, after the formulas of Glasberg and Moore: on that scale every filter is one Cam wide, and each Cam is about 0.89 mm along the membrane. Harmonance placed every line the two pages play on that scale, measured from the pages' own audio files played together.
| Line | Level | Place in the ear |
|---|---|---|
| 183.58 Hz, Jupiter | loudest | 5.47 Cams |
| 367.16 Hz, Jupiter, 2nd harmonic | 23.1 dB down | 8.90 Cams |
| 550.74 Hz, Jupiter, 3rd harmonic | 34 dB down | 11.39 Cams |
| 888 Hz, the angel number tone | loudest | 14.73 Cams |
| 1,776 Hz, 888 Hz's 2nd harmonic | 23.1 dB down | 20.17 Cams |
| 2,664 Hz, 888 Hz's 3rd harmonic | 34 dB down | 23.58 Cams |
Download the measurements (CSV)
The two tones themselves are 9.26 Cams apart, more than nine filters, so by Plomp and Levelt's finding they sound consonant. Each page's tone also carries two faint harmonics, at twice and three times its pitch, 23.1 dB and 34 dB below it. The closest any two lines come is Jupiter's third harmonic, 550.74 Hz, and its second, 367.16 Hz, 2.49 Cams apart, still well over two filters.
On the roughness measure Harmonance uses for its own sound, the pair scores 0.08% of the roughest possible pair of equal tones near 888 Hz, which is as close to none as a pair of tones can come. Nothing else in the mix competes: the next strongest line, at 173.06 Hz, is 54.1 dB below the tones.
As an interval, 888 Hz is 4.837 times 183.58 Hz, or 2,729.0 cents: two octaves and a minor third, played 29 cents wide of the piano's version and 13.3 cents wide of the pure ratio of 24 to 5. On the piano that is close to the F sharp below middle C and the A two octaves and a third above it.
The two do not sound equally loud at the same level. The ear is less sensitive to low pitches, so at the pages' shared level Jupiter reads 51.4 phon and 888 Hz 64.1 phon in the equal-loudness model (ISO 226) that Harmonance uses for its own sound. For the two to sound even, Jupiter would need 10.1 dB more, so the gentler way to balance them is to turn 888 Hz down rather than Jupiter up.
Does believing in luck change anything?
A first study said it could, and the larger studies that followed found it did not. The question was tested with lucky charms and good-luck sayings, not sounds, but it is the nearest research to what this pairing is played for.
What the first study looked at. In 2010 Lysann Damisch, Barbara Stoberock and Thomas Mussweiler published Keep your fingers crossed! How superstition improves performance in Psychological Science. In four experiments, people heard a good-luck saying such as "break a leg", had someone keep their fingers crossed for them, or kept a lucky charm with them, and then did a task; in the golf task, they were told the ball was a lucky one.
What it found. The authors reported that a good-luck saying, crossed fingers or a lucky charm "improves subsequent performance in golfing, motor dexterity, memory, and anagram games", and that the gain came through people's belief in their own ability, not through luck itself.
What happened next. In 2014 Robert Calin-Jageman and Tracy Caldwell repeated the golf experiment, a 10-shot golf task, in two high-powered and precise replications published in Social Psychology. Their result was plain:
Participants told they had a lucky ball performed almost identically to controls.
When they pooled their studies with the earlier ones, the effect varied from study to study, and no effect was seen among the studies with the strongest research designs.
What it does not show. Neither paper tested a sound, and neither measured wealth, income or fortune; they measured a few minutes of golf, dexterity, memory or word games in a laboratory. Nobody has tested 888 Hz, 183.58 Hz or the pair this way.
Why it matters for listening. If the pairing helps at all, the research suggests it would be the way any ritual might, by settling you before something you care about, and even that small effect did not hold up when tested again. Play it for the story and the sound, and put your hopes in the work itself.
The guide to the science of sound healing sets out what research on sound and music has and has not found more widely. The US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health sums the field up plainly:
However, because much of the research on music-based interventions is preliminary, few definite conclusions about their effects have been reached.
How do you listen to the 888 Hz and Jupiter pairing?
Play each tone on its own page, or both together in Studio. On the 888 Hz page, press play to hear the angel number tone, and the Jupiter page plays 183.58 Hz, the other half. Each page also has a Strings mode beside its player, with the tone itself quietly underneath the strings. Nothing plays until you press play, and no account is needed.
To hear the two at once, open Harmonance Studio, which plays several tones together after a free sign-in. Set 888 Hz well below Jupiter so the pair sounds about even, then listen for a few minutes while you think through what you are hoping for. No study sets a length or promises a result, so notice what you notice.
Keep the volume low. Loud listening is the one risk that is well established: the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health notes that "listening to music at too high a volume can contribute to noise-induced hearing loss", and the World Health Organization's safe listening advice is that "you can safely listen to a sound level of 80dB for up to 40 hours a week", with your device's volume at no more than 60% of maximum. 888 Hz sits where the ear is more sensitive, so it is the one to keep down.
Both tones belong to larger sets. The angel number collection plays 888 Hz beside the other repeating numbers, and the planetary collection plays Jupiter beside the other planets. Jupiter also appears on the quiet moment to think page, among the tones for reflection.
For other ways in, the guide to angel numbers and their frequencies sets 888 beside the other repeating numbers, the guide to a frequency for confidence takes apart another of the channel's fusions, Mars with 396 Hz, and the Studio guide shows how to build and save a mix.
Sources and limits
The story of each number rests on primary records: NASA's fact sheet and pages for the Jupiter year and the planet's name, Cousto's own tables and text for the Jupiter tone, a study of Chinese price endings for the luck of the digit eight, and Wikipedia's and Wiktionary's sourced accounts for Jupiter in astrology and the word jovial. No study has tested either tone, or the pair, on luck, wealth or fortune. The research described is about lucky charms and performance, and its first result did not replicate; it cannot say what this pairing does for anyone. The measurements of the two pages' sound are Harmonance's own, made from the site's audio files; the loudness comparison comes from a model of an average ear, not from listeners.
- NASA, Jupiter fact sheet: the sidereal orbit of Jupiter, 4,332.589 days.
- Hans Cousto, tuning data for the planets: the Jupiter year of 4,332.588 days and its 36th octave, 183.58 Hz, an F sharp.
- Hans Cousto, Jupiter, 183.58 Hz (in German): the symbolism, effect and sign his text gives the Jupiter tone.
- NASA Science, Jupiter facts: the planet named for the king of the Roman gods.
- Wikipedia, Planets in astrology: Jupiter: Manilius and the greater benefic.
- Wiktionary, jovial: the word's origin in being born under Jupiter, first recorded in 1590.
- Simmons and Schindler (2003), Cultural superstitions and the price endings used in Chinese advertising, Journal of International Marketing: the lucky eight in Chinese prices.
- Damisch, Stoberock and Mussweiler (2010), Keep your fingers crossed! How superstition improves performance, Psychological Science: lucky charms and four tasks.
- Calin-Jageman and Caldwell (2014), Replication of the superstition and performance study by Damisch, Stoberock, and Mussweiler (2010), Social Psychology: the lucky golf ball tested again.
- Plomp and Levelt (1965), Tonal consonance and critical bandwidth, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America: tones further apart than a critical band sound consonant.
- Moore (2014), Development and current status of the Cambridge loudness models, Trends in Hearing: the ear's filter widths and the Cam scale.
- National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, Music and Health: What You Need To Know: the state of music research, and loud listening.
- World Health Organization, Deafness and hearing loss: safe listening: safe levels and device volume.
- Harmonance, Angel Number 888 Hz & Jupiter 183.58 Hz Fusion, on YouTube: the 2023 video that first paired the two tones.
Tones to play while you read
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Just be curious. This is not a medical device or medical advice. For any health concern, please speak to your doctor.