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528 Hz carries six debated-or-debunked facts in this atlas, more than any other subject holds. Read by property rather than by count, they are two claims, not six: a debunked health use, told three ways, and a debunked origin story, told three ways.

Three Rows, One Health Claim

Contested-use carries three rows under one debunking. The specific mechanism usually claimed, that listening to a stated frequency repairs DNA, has no scientific basis, and the borrowing of scientific vocabulary to lend authority to claims of this kind is a documented strategy of modern esoteric movements rather than a finding about sound. The three values name what is actually being sold, streamed with claims of physical and psychological benefit, and this atlas's own stance: it records that the claims are made within a modern therapeutic movement and attributes them to it, it does not record them as facts.

Three Rows, One False Pedigree

Name-origin and the paired origin-period years, 1917 to 1975, argue the same conclusion from two directions. The name is taken from solfeggio, the medieval system of singing syllables Guido of Arezzo drew from the hymn Ut queant laxis, but Guido's syllables mark a position in a hexachord, not a number of vibrations, and nothing in the medieval system fixes any syllable to any frequency. The numeric period argues the same point from the other side: a named frequency in hertz cannot be older than an agreed reference pitch, and no such agreement existed before the twentieth century, so a chant sung in the eleventh century cannot have been sung at 528 Hz or at any other stated frequency, because nothing yet fixed what a pitch was a number of. This atlas's own description names where the number actually comes from, the American naturopath Dr. Joseph Puleo, who said in the 1990s he derived it and five companion tones numerologically from a table of Bible-verse numbers. Six facts, two debunkings: a health claim with no mechanism, and a medieval pedigree the history of pitch itself rules out.

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• 528 HzSix facts, two debunkings: the DNA-repair health claim and the false medieval pedigree of the name