Solar plexus chakra frequency: why the maps differ

What frequency is the solar plexus chakra?

Most often 528 Hz, though the maps disagree, and the text the seven chakras come from gives no frequency at all. 528 Hz is the third of the six Solfeggio tones, and charts that set those tones against the chakras give the third tone to the third chakra: the solar plexus, called manipura in Sanskrit. Harmonance's 528 Hz page plays it.

A second chart gives the same chakra a different note. Hans Cousto, who worked out tones from the movements of the Sun and planets, gives the solar plexus his Sun tone, 126.22 Hz, which Harmonance plays on its Sun page. Harmonance's own videos used four numbers for this one chakra in 2023: 528, 126.22, 144.72 and 182 Hz.

The Sanskrit text of 1577 that the popular seven chakras come from describes this centre closely, its petals, colour, element and syllable, and gives it no pitch. This guide follows each number back to where it started, sets the four sounds side by side on one scale of pitch, and reads the one study that has measured anything at this chakra.

Why do the maps disagree?

Because each map was made a different way, centuries after the 1577 text described the chakra, and none by measuring the body. The Solfeggio chart pairs tones and chakras by counting; Cousto's pairs them by planets.

The Solfeggio numbers come from a 1999 book by Leonard Horowitz, which drew six tones from the digits of verse numbers in the Bible and matched them to the old note names UT, RE, MI, FA, SOL and LA. The publisher's press release from 1999 says that "the third note, frequency 528, relates to the note "MI" on the scale". Neither it nor an early list of the six, from Soma Energetics in 2002, mentions a chakra.

The chakras arrive with the tuning forks. By 2012 SomaEnergetics sold the six tones as forks that, in its words, "have been anodized with the corresponding color for each of the 1st Six Chakras", and listed MI, 528 Hz, in gold. The page gives no reason beyond the order: third tone, third chakra. The guide to 528 Hz follows the number's other claims and the small studies that have played it to listeners.

Cousto's chart pairs each chakra with a body in the sky. He worked out the Sun tone in a text from 1982 as a thought experiment: a point-sized planet circling a point-sized Sun at about 1.5 km, the distance physicists call the Sun's gravitational radius, would go round 32,312.52 times a second. Eight octaves lower, halving each time, that is 126.22 Hz, a B. Planetware, the site that publishes his work, says on its chakra page that the pairings rest on long practical experience, and quotes Cousto's own booklet, which rates them unevenly. Of the Sun tone and the solar plexus he writes that the match:

wird immer häufiger bestätigt und kann als ziemlich gesichert gelten

In English: it is confirmed more and more often and can be taken as fairly certain. In the same passage he calls the pairings for Mercury and Venus rather hypothetical. Confirmed, here, means by the experience of practitioners, not by a study. The guide to the Sun frequency works through the arithmetic in full.

The other two numbers come from a planet and a tuning. 144.72 Hz is Cousto's Mars tone: his tuning tables take the Mars year, 686.9798 days, and raise it 33 octaves, doubling it 33 times. NASA's Mars fact sheet gives the same year as 686.980 days, and the same doubling gives 144.72 Hz. The Planetware chakra page gives Mars no chakra; a Harmonance video of 2023 gave it to the root and the solar plexus together. 182 Hz sits 3.5 cents above F sharp in a scale tuned to A at 432 Hz, the tuning the guide to 432 Hz and the chakras looks at. The guide to the Mars frequency follows the Mars year further.

What does the 1577 text say about this chakra?

It gives the chakra a place, a shape, colours, an element and a syllable, and 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 verse 19, in Woodroffe's translation, places the chakra "at the root of the navel": a lotus of ten petals "of the colour of heavy-laden rain-clouds", with the region of fire inside it, "triangular in form and shining like the rising sun". The name manipura comes from mani, a gem: the lotus is "lustrous as a gem (Mani)" because of the fire within it.

The one sound the text gives this chakra is a syllable. Ram, the seed syllable of fire, belongs here, and Woodroffe explains that Ram "is said to be the expression in gross sound" of "the subtle sound produced by the forces constituting fire". That is a spoken syllable, not a pitch, and the verses give it no number. Wallis adds that the syllable and the downward red triangle belong to the element rather than the chakra: "RAM is the syllable for Fire".

The name solar plexus came later, from the West. Woodroffe's book quotes an account of the nerve centres that lists the navel centre as "corresponding to the solar plexus", and then warns that it must be a matter of opinion "whether the navel centre corresponds with the epigastric, solar, or lumbar" plexus. Anatomists now call the solar plexus the coeliac plexus. In the words of the US National Library of Medicine's subject headings, "The celiac plexus is the largest of the autonomic plexuses and is located in the abdomen surrounding the celiac and superior mesenteric arteries."

The qualities linked with this chakra today are newer still. Kurt Leland traced the familiar list of chakra qualities, with "empowerment in the third", and the rainbow colours, and found that the two "did not come together in print until 1977", in Ken Dychtwald's book Bodymind. The old texts give the chakras colours, he notes, "but there is no rainbow". Wallis is plainer: tying the manipura to willpower and self-esteem, or any chakra to a psychological state, "is a modern Western innovation that started with Carl Jung".

How many frequencies has Harmonance given the solar plexus?

Four, in four videos over two weeks of 2023, each with the solar plexus in its description: 182, 364 and 728 Hz, from the 432 series; the Mars tone, 144.72 Hz, with its octaves at 289.44 and 578.88 Hz; the Sun tone, 126.22 Hz, with 252.44 and 504.88 Hz; and 528 Hz. The first three each play a tone with its octaves, and the four numbers sit on four different notes.

The four sounds behind the chart

Sound	Where the number comes from	Nearest piano note
528 Hz	The Solfeggio chart: MI, the third tone	C, 15.6 cents sharp
126.22 Hz	Cousto's Sun tone	B, 38.1 cents sharp
144.72 Hz	The Mars year, raised 33 octaves	D, 25.1 cents flat
182 Hz	Near F sharp, with A tuned to 432 Hz	F sharp, 28.3 cents flat

Download the four sounds' tones (CSV)

On a piano tuned to A at 440 Hz, 528 Hz sits 15.6 cents above a C, where a cent is a hundredth of a semitone, and the Sun tone 38.1 cents above a B. They are the closest pair: the Sun tone's octave at 504.88 Hz lies 23.12 Hz below 528 Hz, 77.5 cents apart. The Mars tone falls 25.1 cents below a D, and 182 Hz 28.3 cents below an F sharp, which is 3.5 cents above F sharp in a scale tuned to A at 432 Hz.

Harmonance measured the three of these tones its pages play, from the site's own audio files, 16 seconds of each. Each is a single pure tone that sits on its number to within 0.01 Hz, with anything at twice or three times the tone at least 76 dB quieter. At the pages' shared level the three do not sound equally loud, because the ear is less sensitive to low pitches. On the equal-loudness model (ISO 226) that Harmonance uses for its own sound, 528 Hz comes out at 62.4 phon, the Mars tone at 47.3 phon and the Sun tone at 44.7 phon.

Does any research test a solar plexus frequency?

Harmonance found none. Searches of PubMed, the US National Library of Medicine's index of medical research, for the solar plexus chakra, for 528 Hz with the chakras and for the Solfeggio tones with the chakras return no studies. The one study the index holds on the manipura measured something else.

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 was measured just before and just after each session with electro-photonic imaging, a device that gives each chakra an energy reading.

What it found. After the meditation, the readings rose more than after rest at four of the seven chakras, the manipura among them: "manipura chakra energy (P = .008)", in the abstract's words.

What it does not prove. It was a pilot with 15 people and one session of each kind, measured within minutes. The abstract names no single tone, so the study tested a practice, not a frequency, and it measured a device's reading, not how anyone felt. It cannot say what 528 Hz, the Sun tone or any other number does.

Why it matters for listening. The study looked at a whole practice of sitting with sound, and that is as far as this research reaches. If you use a solar plexus tone, use it the same way: as a cue to sit and listen, not as a dose.

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 solar plexus 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 528 Hz page plays the Solfeggio tone and has a Strings mode, with strings tuned to octaves of 528 Hz and the tone quietly underneath. The Sun page plays Cousto's tone and the Mars page the Mars tone, each with a Strings mode too.

The Sun and Mars tones sound quieter than 528 Hz at the same setting, so you may want them a little higher, but keep everything 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 Solfeggio collection plays 528 Hz beside the other Solfeggio tones. For the feeling people most often bring to this chakra, the guide to frequencies for confidence looks at what sound can and cannot do, and the Low on energy? page plays the Sun and Mars tones beside the tone of the Earth day.

Sources and limits

The history rests on primary records: the 1577 text in Woodroffe's translation, Cousto's own text and tables for the Sun and Mars tones, NASA's Mars fact sheet, the 1999 press release and the 2002 and 2012 pages of the Solfeggio sellers in the Internet Archive's copies, and the descriptions of Harmonance's own videos. The chakra's later history follows two scholars, Christopher Wallis and Kurt Leland. Harmonance found no study that has tested 528 Hz, 126.22 Hz, 144.72 Hz or 182 Hz on the solar plexus chakra, and the one study of the manipura tested a meditation practice against a device's reading, in 15 people. The measurements of the three pages' sound are Harmonance's own, made from the site's audio files; 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: verse 19 of the 1577 text, the syllable Ram, and the solar plexus as a matter of opinion.
2. Christopher Wallis (2016), The Real Story on the Chakras: the 1577 treatise behind the seven chakras, the syllable of fire, and psychological meanings as a modern addition.
3. Kurt Leland (2017), The Rainbow Body: How the Western Chakra System Came to Be, Quest: the qualities and rainbow colours joined in print in 1977.
4. US National Library of Medicine, Medical Subject Headings: Celiac Plexus: the solar plexus in anatomy.
5. Planetware, Chakren und Töne (in German), quoting Hans Cousto: the Sun tone for the solar plexus, and how sure he is of each pairing.
6. Hans Cousto (1982), Berechnung des Sonnentones (in German): how the Sun tone, 126.22 Hz, is worked out.
7. Hans Cousto, tuning data for the planets, Planetware: the Mars year raised 33 octaves to 144.72 Hz.
8. NASA, Mars fact sheet: the sidereal orbit of Mars, 686.980 days.
9. Tetrahedron Publishing (1999), press release for the book that published the six tones, Internet Archive: 528 as the syllable MI.
10. Soma Energetics (2002), The Six Solfeggio Frequencies, Internet Archive: an early list of the six, with no chakras.
11. SomaEnergetics (2012), Solfeggio tuning forks, Internet Archive: the six tones coloured for six chakras, MI in gold.
12. 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 the manipura.
13. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, Music and Health: What You Need To Know: the state of music research, and loud listening.
14. World Health Organization, Deafness and hearing loss: safe listening: safe levels and device volume.