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Learn the science of sound

Short lessons on what sound does, where the old beliefs come from, and which is which. Every takeaway is labelled, so you always know what's established, what's mixed and what's belief.

Start here

What sound physically is, and why it's worth paying attention to.

Physics

Sound is a push

Why a drum can ripple a wall of sequins, and what that does and doesn't say about the power of words.

  • Established Sound is a pressure wave. It physically pushes whatever it reaches.
  • Established Repeating a statement makes it feel truer, and self-talk can improve performance. That works through attention and memory.
  • Belief Words or intentions reshaping matter the way sound moves a sequin has never been shown.
Read the full post · 6 min
Acoustics

What's inside a single note

One plucked string rings a whole stack of tones at once. That's why some notes sound right together.

  • Established A plucked string vibrates at many frequencies at once, called overtones.
  • Established Overtones follow directly from how a string or air column can vibrate while held at its ends.
  • Belief The popular line that Pythagoras called matter "solidified music" has no primary source.
Read the full post · 6 min
Cymatics

What sound looks like

How vibration arranges sand and water into patterns, and where the science stops.

  • Established Chladni's plates from 1787 show vibration sorting sand into patterns. It's been repeated for over two centuries.
  • Belief The jump to sound or words reorganizing the water in your body has never been shown under controlled conditions.
Read the full post · 6 min
Mantra

What AUM actually means

The real phonetics and tradition behind the sound this app is named after.

  • Belief Linking A, U, M and silence to waking, dreaming, sleep and beyond comes from Vedantic philosophy. It's a tradition, not a testable claim.
  • Mixed A small 2023 pilot found humming had the lowest stress index of the four activities it compared.
Read the full post · 5 min

The frequencies

The tones in AUM: where they come from and what's known about them.

Frequencies

Solfeggio frequencies

Where the 396–963 Hz scale came from, and where tradition ends and evidence begins.

  • Belief The specific effects linked to each tone, like releasing fear or repairing DNA, have no peer-reviewed clinical support.
  • Mixed Music reliably affects mood and stress. Whether that depends on these exact Hz values hasn't been separated out.
Read the full post · 7 min
Tuning

432 Hz vs 440 Hz

The real history of the tuning standard, and what listening tests show.

  • Established 440 Hz became standard through a long, multi-country effort so orchestras could play together.
  • Mixed Many people prefer 432 Hz, but no blinded research shows it has an effect 440 Hz doesn't.
Read the full post · 6 min
Neuroscience

Binaural beats

How two tones a few Hz apart create a beat that isn't really there.

  • Established The illusion itself is real and has been replicated for nearly two centuries.
  • Mixed Studies show a modest calming effect on self-reported mood and anxiety.
  • Mixed Effects on focus, memory and sleep are inconsistent across studies.
Read the full post · 6 min
Earth science

The Schumann resonance

The planet's 7.83 Hz signal, and what's known about its effect on you.

  • Established It's a real electromagnetic resonance driven by global lightning, monitored for decades.
  • Mixed Weak field effects are studied mostly in isolated cells and animals, not as a whole-body effect in people.
  • Belief Grounding studies exist but are small, early and not independently replicated at scale.
Read the full post · 6 min

Your body and mind

What sound can do once it reaches you, and what it can't.

The body

Humming, fascia and your face

A viral claim checked link by link, and the sound you make yourself.

  • Established In a small 2002 study, nitric oxide in the nose rose about 15-fold while humming.
  • Mixed Some cells in a dish respond to loud sound, but that hasn't been shown to carry over to a living body.
  • Belief Sound reshaping your fascia, your face or how you age hasn't been shown in people.
Read the full post · 7 min
Psychology

Do subliminals work?

The 1957 hoax that started it all, and the well-supported effect it gets confused with.

  • Belief The founding subliminal persuasion case was admitted by its own author to be fabricated.
  • Mixed In the best tape studies, the effect came from what people believed the tape did, not from hidden content.
  • Established Repetition is different: statements you consciously hear more often start to feel truer.
Read the full post · 8 min
Anatomy

Your body is an orchestra

A guided tour of the real anatomy behind the oldest metaphor in music.

  • Mixed Comparing your spine to a keyboard or ribs to a harp describes real shapes. It's a resemblance, not a mechanism.
  • Belief Boethius's idea that the body has its own inner harmony is a philosophical framework, not a measurement.
Read the full post · 7 min
Music theory

How music bends time

Seven real techniques that change how long a piece of music feels.

  • Established William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops is built around real tape decay.
  • Established John Cage's 4′33″, premiered in 1952, is an actual score of three timed silent movements.
Read the full post · 7 min

History and big ideas

Old beliefs worth knowing, labelled honestly.

Astronomy

The music of the spheres

Pythagoras said the planets sing. Astronomers found something stranger.

  • Belief The music of the spheres is a philosophical tradition about harmony, not a claim about audible sound in space.
  • Established Stars and the Sun really do oscillate, and telescopes measure it as a flicker in their brightness.
Read the full post · 7 min
History

Walter Russell's universe

One man's self-published cosmology, and why it still circulates.

  • Belief Russell's diagrams look like physics, but they were self-published and never went through peer review.
Read the full post · 6 min

Take it with you

These lessons live in the AUM app too, right next to the tones they explain.

Get AUM