Acutonics
Tuning forks tuned to planetary frequencies: how an orbit becomes a sound, what you actually hear and which parts of it are true.
Acutonics is a practice built on the sound of tuning forks tuned to the frequencies of the planets. A planetary tuning fork is placed on an acupuncture point or held close to the body: you hear the tone and sometimes feel the vibration. The frequencies are neither invented nor picked by ear. Each one is derived from an astronomical period — a planet's orbit around the Sun, the length of a day, a lunar month — carried up into the range we can hear.
The way of carrying a cycle into sound was worked out in 1978 by the Swiss mathematician and musicologist Hans Cousto, who called it “the law of the octave”. Every repeating cycle has a frequency: the Earth's year comes to roughly three hundred-millionths of a hertz. Nobody can hear that, but a frequency can be doubled — and in music, doubling a frequency is exactly one octave up. Double the Earth year thirty-two times and you get 136.10 Hz, the Om tone. Doubling does not change the note, only how high it sounds — like the same chord played with the left hand and then with the right.
The arithmetic can be checked, and we do check it: every number in this section is recalculated from its period rather than copied from someone else's table. The claim “this frequency heals an organ”, on the other hand, cannot be checked — controlled studies of planetary frequencies simply do not exist. That is why every line in the section carries a label saying what is arithmetic, what is tradition and what is myth.
Acutonics
Where these frequencies sit
Frequently asked questions
Do the planets really sound like this?
Do the planets really sound like this?
No, and it is worth saying plainly. There is no air in space, so there is no sound either — a planet makes no sound at all. The frequency is obtained mathematically: the orbital period is converted into a frequency and raised by octaves until it becomes audible. NASA's recordings of “planet sounds” are radio waves and plasma oscillations translated into the audible range, and they have nothing to do with Cousto's tuning forks.
How is Acutonics different from singing bowls and gongs?
How is Acutonics different from singing bowls and gongs?
In the instrument and in precision. A bowl gives a rich spectrum that is hard to reproduce exactly twice; a tuning fork gives one frequency, always the same one, and it can be placed on a specific point of the body. That makes Acutonics closer to acupuncture in the way the work is done — and in terms of evidence, it stands where everything else in this field stands.
Do I need to buy tuning forks to try it?
Do I need to buy tuning forks to try it?
No. A tone generator on a computer can produce the tone: what carries over without loss are the intervals and the beats, and both come from two pure sine waves. A tuning fork adds touch and vibration on the body — a different sensation, and that part only a real instrument can reproduce.
Can it do harm?
Can it do harm?
Quiet sound on its own — hardly at all, but contact vibration has real contraindications, and they are not there for show: the neck and blood vessels, implants, thrombosis, pregnancy, epilepsy. Most important of all, sound is no substitute for a medical examination. The most serious harm in this field is done not by sound but by a postponed visit to the doctor.