Crown chakra frequency: why the sources disagree

What frequency is the crown chakra?

Most often 963 Hz, though the answer depends on whose chart you read, and the text the seven chakras come from gives the crown no frequency at all. 963 Hz is the highest of the nine Solfeggio tones, and charts that set those tones against the chakras give the highest tone to the highest centre: the crown, called sahasrara in Sanskrit, the thousand-petalled lotus. Harmonance's 963 Hz page plays it.

A second chart gives the crown a different note. Hans Cousto, who worked out tones from the cycles of the Earth and the planets, gives it the tone of the Platonic year, 172.06 Hz, which Harmonance plays on its Platonic year page. Harmonance's own videos gave the crown four numbers within two weeks in 2023: 963, 172.06, 183.58 and 216 Hz.

The Sanskrit text of 1577 that the popular seven chakras come from describes six chakras, and sets the crown above them as something else: a lotus of a thousand petals, with no pitch. This guide follows each number back to where it started, reads what the old text says about the crown, measures the sound Harmonance plays for it, and looks at what research there is.

Why do the sources disagree about the crown?

Because each answer was made a different way, centuries after the 1577 text, and none by measuring the body. The Solfeggio chart pairs tones and chakras by counting, Cousto's chart pairs them by cycles in the sky, and the Western picture of the chakras gathered its colours and glands from different writers over a century.

The Solfeggio numbers began as six, in a 1999 book by Leonard Horowitz. The publisher's press release from 1999 announced "a series of six electromagnetic sound frequencies", and 963 was not one of them. All nine numbers appear together in a US trademark application filed in 2007, "396, 417, 528, 639, 741, 852, 963, 174, and 285", with 963 straight after 852. The guide to 963 Hz follows that history in full.

The chakras arrived with the tuning forks, and at first the crown was left out. In 2012 SomaEnergetics sold the six original tones as forks that, in its words, "have been anodized with the corresponding color for each of the 1st Six Chakras", with LA, 852 Hz, in purple. The seventh chakra got no fork: the page sends buyers to a course to learn how "we address the 7th chakra". Later charts gave the crown 963 Hz by the same counting, the highest of nine tones for the highest centre. Who first made that pairing, and when, is not in any record we read.

Cousto's chart pairs each chakra with a cycle in the sky, and the crown takes the slowest: the Platonic year, the time the Earth's axis takes to trace one full circle against the stars, which Cousto takes as 25,920 years. Doubled 47 times, that cycle becomes 172.06 Hz. Planetware, the site that publishes his work, calls the tone "die 48. Oktave der Erdachsenpräzession", counting the cycle itself as the first, and its page for the tone gives its chakra as Sahasrara, the crown. Its chakra page says the pairings rest on long practical experience, and quotes Cousto's own booklet on how sure he is of them:

Für die Erdtöne kann die Zuordnung als gesichert gelten (Tageston = Wurzelchakra, Jahreston = Herzchakra und der Ton des Platonischen Jahres = Scheitelchakra), da diese oft überprüft und verifiziert wurde.

In English: for the Earth tones the pairing can be taken as certain, the day tone with the root chakra, the year tone with the heart and the tone of the Platonic year with the crown, because these have often been checked and verified. Checked, here, means by the experience of practitioners; the page names no study. The guide to 172.06 Hz works through the arithmetic, and the guide to spiritual awakening frequencies sets 963 and 172.06 Hz side by side.

The crown's colour and gland came from the West, piece by piece. Kurt Leland's history of the Western chakra system dates them. Glands were matched to the chakras in the 1920s, "with minor variations from system to system, especially with regard to the pituitary and pineal glands". Colours followed in the 1930s, "either seven colors, including indigo, or six colors plus white", so the crown came out violet on some charts and white on others. A diagram from Johann Georg Gichtel's Theosophia practica of 1701, which Leland reproduces, puts "Saturn, at the crown, with orgueil", pride. The familiar list of qualities, ending in "enlightenment in the seventh", met the rainbow colours in print only in 1977, in Ken Dychtwald's book Bodymind.

Harmonance's own videos added to the list. Within two weeks in 2023, four of its videos gave the crown 216 Hz with its octaves at 432 and 864 Hz, from the 432 series; the Platonic year tone with its octaves; the Jupiter tone, 183.58 Hz, which one video shared between the sacral and crown chakras; and 963 Hz. Each description names the crown, and none says where the pairing comes from.

What each source gives the crown

Source	What it gives the crown
The 1577 text, in Woodroffe's translation	A lotus of a thousand petals, whiter than the full Moon, carrying the fifty letters of the alphabet twenty times over. Not called a chakra, and no pitch.
Gichtel, Theosophia practica, 1701	Saturn, paired with pride
C. W. Leadbeater, quoted by Woodroffe	Exactly 960 petals, not a thousand
Western charts, 1920s and 1930s	The pineal or the pituitary gland, and violet or white
Ken Dychtwald, Bodymind, 1977	The last colour of the rainbow, and enlightenment
Hans Cousto's chart	172.06 Hz, the tone of the Platonic year, a pairing he counts as certain
The Solfeggio chart	963 Hz, the highest of nine tones. A 2012 set of the first six tones left the crown without one.
Harmonance's own videos, 2023	963, 172.06, 183.58 and 216 Hz, in four videos

What does the 1577 text say about the crown?

It describes a lotus, not a chakra, and gives it no number. As the scholar Christopher Wallis writes, "The seven-chakra system popular today derives not from an ancient scripture, but from a treatise written in 1577." That treatise, by Purnananda, reached English readers in 1918, translated by John Woodroffe under the pen name Arthur Avalon in The Serpent Power. Its title in his translation is "Description of the Six Centres, or Chakras": six, not seven.

The crown comes above the six. Verse 40, in Woodroffe's translation, sets "the Lotus of a thousand petals" above all of them: "This Lotus, lustrous and whiter than the full Moon, has its head turned downward." "Its clustered filaments are tinged with the colour of the young Sun", and "Its body is luminous with the letters beginning with A". Elsewhere Woodroffe notes that some call the lotus variegated rather than white, and that "the Sahasrara is not called a Chakra at all". Wallis gives the reason: the lotus on the crown "technically is not a chakra, since chakras by definition are pierced by Kuṇḍalinī in her ascent or descent, whereas the sahasrāra is her final destination and home". He also counts a centre "in or near the crown of the head" among the few found in every system, with the lower belly and the heart.

The only sound the text gives the crown is the alphabet. Each petal of the six chakras carries one letter, and Woodroffe counts them: "It will have been observed that there are fifty petals and fifty letters in the six Chakras." "These petals, further, bear subtile sound-powers", he writes; they are the sounds of speech, not pitches. The crown holds all of them at once. Its thousand petals carry the fifty letters twenty times over, "all the letters are here twenty fold (50 x 20 = 1,000)", and the summary of verses 41 to 49 says the letters "go round and round its thousand petals twenty times".

The sum needs one adjustment. Counted as fifty-one letters, as some readings have it, twenty rounds make 1,020, so one letter is left out to reach the thousand. Woodroffe remarks that "one of the letters is dropped in order to make 1,000 petals", and that the thousand "is, here, only symbolic of magnitude". The Theosophist C. W. Leadbeater, whom Woodroffe also quotes, counted the petals another way: "but exactly 960".

Our reading: where each of the six chakras holds a few sounds of speech, the crown holds every one of them, many times over. A chart that gives the crown a single tone is adding something new to the old picture, not recovering something lost from it.

What does Harmonance's crown sound play?

Harmonance's sound for the crown is 963 Hz in Harmonics: nine hours of 963 Hz over its own lower octaves, the same sound behind the 963 Hz guide. Choose Harmonics on the 963 Hz page and it plays there, free and with no ads, exactly as the long video does, starting only when you press play. The Harmonics collection gathers every tone made this way.

It is four pure tones, an octave apart: 963 Hz and the three octaves below it, 481.5, 240.75 and 120.375 Hz. The weight moves slowly between them. Each line rises 8 dB and falls again in its turn, from 963 Hz down to 120.375 Hz, 6 seconds apart, and every 24 seconds the turn begins again.

One turn of the crown sound, measured

Line	Peaks at	Share of the power
963 Hz	0 seconds	0.3%
481.5 Hz	6 seconds	0.8%
240.75 Hz	12 seconds	6.0%
120.375 Hz	18 seconds	92.9%

Download one measured turn (CSV)

Harmonance measured one turn from the middle of the nine hours, every quarter second, on the same samples the video is rendered from. Each line swings exactly 8 dB, and the peaks fall at 0, 6, 12 and 18 seconds into the turn. The levels look lopsided: 120.375 Hz carries 92.9% of the sound's power and 963 Hz just 0.3%, 24.4 dB less.

That is deliberate. Hearing is most sensitive between 2 and 5 kHz, as the equal-loudness curves of the standard ISO 226 show, and a low tone needs far more power to sound as loud as a higher one. On that model of an average ear, the four lines come out equally loud on their own, within a fifth of a phon of each other, and the four together stay between 38.77 and 39.25 phon however the weight moves. So the sound changes character without growing louder or quieter. Nobody listened for these figures: they are measurements, read through a model of the ear.

Does any research test a crown chakra frequency?

Harmonance found none. A search of PubMed, the US National Library of Medicine's index of medical research, for "sahasrara" returns no records, and one for "crown chakra" returns four, none of which plays a sound to anyone. A search for "963 Hz" returns 63 records, and none of them is about the tone.

What one study looked at. In 2023 researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bengaluru tested Nada Yoga, which they describe as "union through sound", in 15 healthy volunteers (Veerabrahmachar and others, Advances in Mind-Body Medicine). Each did 45 minutes of Nada Yoga meditation on one day and 45 minutes of lying at rest on the other, in random order, and a device using electro-photonic imaging gave each of the seven chakras an energy reading just before and just after each session.

What it found. After the meditation the readings rose more than after rest at four chakras, the root, navel, heart and throat, most clearly at the throat: "vishuddha chakra energy (P = .001)", in the abstract's words. The crown is not among the four the abstract reports.

What it does not prove. It was a pilot with 15 people and one session of each kind, measured within minutes. It tested a practice, not a frequency, and a device's reading, not how anyone felt. Nothing in it says what 963 Hz, 172.06 Hz or any other tone does at the crown.

Why it matters for listening. The one study Harmonance could find that measured all seven chakras around a practice of sound does not list the crown among its changes, and it tested no single tone. If you use a crown tone, use it as a cue to sit and listen, not as a dose.

Two small studies have played 963 Hz itself to listeners, and the guide to 963 Hz reads them. The US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health sums up music research plainly:

However, because much of the research on music-based interventions is preliminary, few definite conclusions about their effects have been reached.

The guide to the science of sound healing sets out what research on sound has and has not found more widely.

How do you listen to the crown chakra frequency?

Choose the number whose story means most to you and press play on its page; nothing plays until you do, and no account is needed. The 963 Hz page plays the Solfeggio tone on its own, with strings tuned to its octaves, or in Harmonics, the slow turn through its octaves measured above. The Platonic year page plays Cousto's tone, with a Strings mode too.

At the same setting a pure 963 Hz tone sounds louder to most ears than 172.06 Hz, because hearing grows more sensitive with pitch across this range, so set the volume by ear and keep it 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.

To hear several tones at once, open Harmonance Studio, which mixes them after a free sign-in. No study sets a length or promises a result, so listen for a few minutes and notice what you notice.

The guide to chakra frequencies sets all seven chakras side by side on both charts, and the guide to the solar plexus chakra frequency follows the third chakra's numbers the same way. The Solfeggio collection plays 963 Hz beside the other Solfeggio tones. For the quiet listening people most often bring to the crown, the guide to frequencies for meditation looks at what sound can and cannot do.

Sources and limits

The history rests on primary records: the 1577 text in Woodroffe's translation, Planetware's pages for Cousto's tones, the 1999 press release and the 2012 tuning fork page in the Internet Archive's copies, a US trademark record, and the descriptions of Harmonance's own videos. The crown's later Western history follows two scholars, Christopher Wallis and Kurt Leland. Who first paired 963 Hz with the crown, and when, we could not find. Harmonance found no study that has tested 963 Hz, 172.06 Hz or any other tone on the crown chakra; the one study of sound and the seven chakras tested a meditation practice against a device's reading, in 15 people. The measurements of the Harmonics sound are Harmonance's own, made on the samples the nine-hour sound is rendered from; the loudness figures come from a model of an average ear, not from listeners.

1. Arthur Avalon (John Woodroffe), The Serpent Power, fourth edition, Internet Archive: verses 40 to 49 of the 1577 text, the fifty petals and letters, and the thousand as a symbol.
2. Christopher Wallis (2016), The Real Story on the Chakras: the 1577 treatise behind the seven chakras, and why the crown is technically not a chakra.
3. Kurt Leland (2017), The Rainbow Body: How the Western Chakra System Came to Be, Quest: the glands, colours and qualities, and when each arrived.
4. Planetware, Chakren und Töne (in German), quoting Hans Cousto: the Platonic year tone for the crown, and how sure he is of it.
5. Planetware, the tone of the Platonic year (in German): 25,920 years, the 48th octave, and the crown chakra.
6. Tetrahedron Publishing (1999), press release for the book that published the six tones, Internet Archive: six tones, without 963.
7. US Patent and Trademark Office, application 77099679: all nine Solfeggio numbers, filed in 2007.
8. SomaEnergetics (2012), Solfeggio tuning forks, Internet Archive: six forks for the first six chakras, and none for the seventh.
9. Veerabrahmachar and others (2023), Immediate Effect of Nada Yoga Meditation on Energy Levels and Alignment of Seven Chakras as Assessed by Electro-photonic Imaging, Advances in Mind-Body Medicine: the one study of sound and all seven chakras.
10. Wikipedia, Equal-loudness contour: how loud tones of different pitch sound at the same level.
11. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, Music and Health: What You Need To Know: the state of music research, and loud listening.
12. World Health Organization, Deafness and hearing loss: safe listening: safe levels and device volume.