Angel frequency: what the numbers mean

What are the angel frequencies?

They are nine tones, one for each angel number from 111 to 999, and each is its number read as a frequency: 111 Hz is air vibrating 111 times a second. Harmonance plays all nine. Each has its own page and a name taken from what its number stands for in numerology, offered as something to listen with, never as an effect.

The nine angel frequencies, each with the name its page on Harmonance gives it

Tone	Name on Harmonance
111 Hz	New Beginnings
222 Hz	Balance and Harmony
333 Hz	Self Expression
444 Hz	Steadiness and Order
555 Hz	Change and Openness
666 Hz	Grounded Balance
777 Hz	Reflection and Intuition
888 Hz	Balance and Possibility
999 Hz	Completion and Integration

A name such as Completion and Integration says what 999 stands for as a number. It is a prompt for the mind while you listen, not a finding about what the tone does to anyone.

Where do angel numbers come from?

From numerology, and in their modern form from one writer. Most sources trace the idea that a repeated number is a message from angels to Doreen Virtue, whose 2005 book Angel Numbers gave the practice its name. Its subtitle, as the Internet Archive's catalogue records it, promised that "the angels explain the meaning of 111, 444, and other numbers in your life".

The readings are short and hopeful. In the summaries Dictionary.com gives, 111 is "said to represent opportunity, good luck, and achievement", 222 stands for harmony, balance and collaboration, 333 for creativity and growth, 444 for clarity and stability, and 555 for change and freedom.

Virtue later turned away from them. In 2019 she posted on her own website that angel numbers are not biblical, and wrote:

Numerology was one of the false teachings I got involved in within the new age, and unfortunately passed along to others.

The numbers stayed popular all the same, and the 888 Hz guide follows her books in more detail.

The pull of numbers is far older than angels. Writing about the Pythagoreans, Aristotle said they saw that "the modifications and the ratios of the musical scales were expressible in numbers", and came to suppose "the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number". An angel frequency borrows that old instinct: a number that means something, heard as a sound.

Why do you keep seeing repeating numbers?

Partly because clocks show them often, and partly because noticing them makes them easier to notice. The linguist Arnold Zwicky named the second effect the frequency illusion: "once you've noticed a phenomenon, you think it happens a whole lot". The first is plain arithmetic.

Between 7:00 and 23:00, a 12-hour clock reads 11:11 in the morning and 1:11, 2:22, 3:33, 4:44 and 5:55 in the afternoon: 6 of the 960 minutes in a waking day. A 24-hour clock has only two, 11:11 and 22:22. That sounds rare until you count how often you look. When researchers logged 23 people's smartphones for two weeks, they used their phones a mean of 84.68 times a day, more than twice as often as they guessed (Andrews and colleagues, 2015).

Suppose you see the time about 85 times a day, at random moments between 7:00 and 23:00. The chance that at least one look lands on a repeating time is then about 41% each day on a 12-hour clock, and about 98% over a week. On a 24-hour clock it is about 16% a day and 71% over a week.

The numbers behind the chart, at 85 looks a day

Clock	Repeating minutes, 7:00 to 23:00	Chance of seeing one
12-hour	6 of 960	41% a day, 98% a week
24-hour	2 of 960	16% a day, 71% a week

Download the chart's numbers (CSV)

Real looks are not random, so these are round figures, but the point holds: with a clock in your pocket, a repeating time is an ordinary sight. That says nothing about what one means to you. The meaning stays where it always was, with the person who notices, and some people take the moment as a cue to pause.

How does a number become a frequency?

By counting it per second. The hertz is the international unit of frequency, one per second, and the International System of Units keeps it for things that repeat: "The hertz shall only be used for periodic phenomena". So 111 Hz is air pushed to and fro 111 times a second.

The second does the choosing. Count the same 111 vibrations per minute and you get 1.85 Hz, far too slow to hear as a tone. Nothing in the tradition picked these pitches: the numbers came first, and reading them per second is what turns 111 into a low hum and 999 into a bright, high note. The 888 Hz guide follows the same arithmetic down to the atom that defines the second.

What do the nine angel tones have in common?

They are one family. Every angel tone is a whole multiple of 111 Hz, so the nine are the first nine harmonics of 111 Hz, the overtones a string tuned to 111 Hz rings with above its lowest note. In the words of UNSW's music acoustics pages, "the nth harmonic is the one with frequency nf".

Played one after another, the steps between them do not sound equal. Each angel tone is 111 Hz above the last, but the musical interval between two notes depends on the ratio of their frequencies, not on the difference. From 111 to 222 Hz the ratio is 2:1, an octave of 1,200 cents. From 888 to 999 Hz it is only 9:8, a whole tone of 204 cents, about a sixth as wide. In between come a fifth (3:2), a fourth (4:3), a major third (5:4), a minor third (6:5) and two steps, 7:6 and 8:7, that fall between the keys of a piano.

Each angel tone against the one below it

Tone	Step from the tone below	Size of the step
222 Hz	2:1, an octave	1,200 cents
333 Hz	3:2, a fifth	702 cents
444 Hz	4:3, a fourth	498 cents
555 Hz	5:4, a major third	386 cents
666 Hz	6:5, a minor third	316 cents
777 Hz	7:6, near a minor third	267 cents
888 Hz	8:7, near a whole tone	231 cents
999 Hz	9:8, a whole tone	204 cents

The first three steps are the oldest in music theory. The link between "the central musical concords of the octave, fifth, and fourth" and the ratios 2:1, 3:2 and 4:3 was probably already known to Pythagoras, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's account. Read as tones, the angel numbers walk through those three concords first, then on into steps no keyboard has.

What do the angel frequency pages play?

Exactly their numbers. Harmonance decoded the sound file behind each of the nine pages, a 20-second loop at 48,000 samples a second, and measured it: every tone sits at its number to within 0.01 Hz, and all nine are mastered to the same level. The chart draws four of them from their own samples, over one 111th of a second.

The numbers behind the chart

Tone	Waves in 1/111 of a second	Measured
111 Hz	1	111.00 Hz
333 Hz	3	333.00 Hz
666 Hz	6	666.00 Hz
999 Hz	9	999.00 Hz

Download the measurements (CSV)

Each file holds its tone alone, a single sine wave with no overtones above it, and nothing else in any of the nine files comes within 58.2 dB of its tone. So the 111 Hz page plays 111 Hz alone, not the 222 and 333 Hz that a string tuned to 111 Hz would ring with above it.

The same level does not read as the same loudness. A broadcast loudness meter, which weighs low pitches a little less, reads the nine from -23.6 LUFS at 111 Hz to -22.0 LUFS at 999 Hz, and the ear makes more of the difference than the meter: the 888 Hz guide works out how much quieter 111 Hz sounds than 888 Hz at the same level.

Why is 666 one of the angel numbers?

Because the set runs through every repeated digit, and 666 is the one with the oldest story. In the King James Bible, Revelation 13:18 reads "Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast", and gives that number as "Six hundred threescore and six".

Even the number was once in doubt. Late in the second century, Irenaeus of Lyon wrote about copies of Revelation that lowered the middle digit, "deducting the amount of fifty from it, so that instead of six decads they will have it that there is but one": 616 in place of 666. He put it down to the copyists, and 666 is the reading that stayed.

On Harmonance, 666 Hz is called Grounded Balance. As a sound it sits an octave above 333 Hz and a fifth above 444 Hz, two of the three concords the Pythagoreans counted.

Is there research on angel frequencies?

No published study has tested what the nine angel tones are said to do. The research that exists is about music in general, and even there the US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health is cautious:

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

An angel frequency gives a tone a meaning to listen with, and that meaning comes from the number, not from the sound. What the tone itself offers is simpler: a few minutes with one steady sound. If a repeating time catches your eye, you could play its tone quietly and notice what you notice.

How loud should you play the angel frequencies?

Low enough to talk over. Loud listening is the one risk that is well established: 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", and NCCIH adds that "listening to music at too high a volume can contribute to noise-induced hearing loss". A steady tone can seem quieter than it is, so set the volume once at a comfortable level and leave it there.

How do you listen to the angel frequencies on Harmonance?

Press play on the angel number collection, which holds all nine tones and starts with 111 Hz, or open any tone's own page from the table above. Each page has a Strings mode too: strings tuned to octaves of the tone, with the tone quietly underneath. Nothing plays until you press play, and no account is needed.

In Harmonance Studio you can set angel tones side by side: 111 and 222 Hz make an octave, 444 and 666 Hz a fifth. The Fresh start page gathers tones for beginnings, 111 Hz among them.

For one tone in depth, read the 111 Hz guide, with its ancient stone chambers, or the 888 Hz guide. The Solfeggio frequencies guide tells the story of another family of numbered tones, and what the science of sound healing shows sets out what research on sound and music has and has not found.

Sources and limits

The history of angel numbers rests on the catalogue record of Doreen Virtue's 2005 book, a dictionary's summaries of five readings, and her own post of 2019; the book's text could not be read, and no comparable summary for 666 to 999 could be opened, so those readings are not given. The clock arithmetic assumes looks spread at random across a waking day, which real looks are not: it shows how ordinary a repeating time is, not how often any one person sees one. No study has tested what the nine tones are said to do, so the research here is about music in general. The measurements are Harmonance's own, made from the nine pages' audio files.

1. Internet Archive, catalogue record of Doreen Virtue (2005), Angel Numbers, Hay House: 111 and 444 in the subtitle.
2. Dictionary.com, 111 angel number: the usual reading, and where angel numbers come from.
3. Dictionary.com, 222 angel number.
4. Dictionary.com, 333 angel number.
5. Dictionary.com, 444 angel number.
6. Dictionary.com, 555 angel number.
7. Doreen Virtue (2019), angel numbers aren't biblical, her own website, in the Internet Archive's copy.
8. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book 1, translated by W. D. Ross: the Pythagoreans and number.
9. Arnold Zwicky (2005), Language Log: the frequency illusion.
10. Andrews, Ellis, Shaw and Piwek (2015), beyond self-report: real-world smartphone use, in PLOS ONE: 84.68 uses a day.
11. Bureau International des Poids et Mesures, the International System of Units, 9th edition: the hertz.
12. UNSW Music Acoustics, the harmonic series: the nth harmonic is n times the fundamental.
13. UNSW Music Acoustics, note names and frequencies: intervals as ratios, and how to count cents.
14. Carl Huffman, Pythagoreanism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: the octave, fifth and fourth as 2:1, 3:2 and 4:3.
15. Revelation 13:18, King James Version: the number of the beast.
16. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, Book 5, chapter 30: the copies that read 616.
17. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, music and health: the state of music research, and loud listening.
18. World Health Organization, safe listening: weekly limits.