Free Online Player
396 Hz
396 Hz is one steady tone sitting a shade above G4, the highest and most present of the three solfeggio tones on this site. It's a single pitch with nothing over it and nothing moving. It carries further across a room than 174 or 285 Hz, which suits some listeners and tires others quickly. There's no file to download here: it plays in this browser, and the Slo app keeps a sound on your phone after you play it once.
Ready to play
Put this under rain or a fire, keep the blend you end up with, and play it through the night with your screen off. The Slo app does that on iOS, Android and Mac.
What 396 Hz sounds like
It's one tone at 396 Hz, the same in both ears, and it doesn't change while it plays. Standard concert tuning puts G4 at 392 Hz, so this one sounds like a slightly sharp G. Being higher, it feels closer than the other two tones here and you need less volume to hear it, so start lower than you think you need. It won't cover anything either: one pitch is too narrow for that, and the rest of the room stays as audible as it was. If you want to set the frequency yourself, the binaural beats generator has an adjustable tone; it needs headphones.
Why a medieval frequency is not possible
The claim that these pitches come from Gregorian chant runs into a measurement problem. Fixing pitch to a shared standard is modern — ISO 16:1975 is what puts A4 at 440 Hz — and measuring sound in hertz came centuries after the chant traditions the story invokes. A medieval frequency assignment could not have been made, because there was no shared frequency to assign. The tone is real and worth hearing; the history around it is not.
The other two pitches are on the 285 Hz tone and the 174 Hz tone, and every browser player is listed on the sound library index. If a bare pitch feels too exposed on its own, the 396 Hz and rain blend in the free sound mixer puts something moving around it.
Frequently asked questions
What musical note is 396 Hz?
It is a few cents above G4, which standard concert tuning fixes at 392 Hz.
Is 396 Hz linked to Gregorian chant?
No. Measuring pitch in hertz and settling A4 at 440 Hz are both modern conventions, so the chant traditions in that story had no frequency to assign.
Should I play 396 Hz loudly?
Start quiet. A higher pure tone is easy to hear at low levels and becomes fatiguing quickly when pushed.
Will a pure tone cover background noise?
Not usefully. It sits at one pitch only, so brown or pink noise is the better choice for covering a room.