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Schumann Fundamental
The Schumann resonances are electromagnetic waves that ring in the gap between the Earth’s surface and the upper atmosphere, and the lowest of them sits near 7.83 Hz, far below anything a human ear can hear. This file is a stand-in you can actually hear: two steady tones, 200 Hz in one ear and about 208 Hz in the other. You'll need headphones. 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 you are actually hearing
The two tones are roughly eight hertz apart, so the difference between them lands close to the 7.83 Hz figure the file is named for. Because each tone goes to a different ear, the slow pulse you notice is a binaural beat made inside your hearing rather than a sound that is in the room — over speakers both ears get both tones and the pulse mostly disappears. This is not a recording of the Earth. The real resonances are electromagnetic rather than acoustic, and at 7.83 Hz they sit far under the roughly 20 Hz lower limit of human hearing, so no microphone would capture them and no speaker could reproduce them.
What the research supports
Not much, and it's worth saying plainly. Researchers who gathered up the brainwave studies of binaural beats found the results pointing in every direction, and they called the evidence inconclusive at best. So take this as a low, pulsing tone you may or may not enjoy listening to, and nothing past that.
For a plain pitch with no beat in it, try the 174 Hz tone or the 396 Hz tone, and see the rest of the catalogue on the sound library index. If the bare beat feels thin, the Schumann tone under brown noise in the free sound mixer gives it something to rest against — though the beat still needs headphones to be heard as intended.
Frequently asked questions
Is this the actual Schumann resonance?
No. The real resonances are electromagnetic waves in the gap between the Earth and the upper atmosphere, the lowest of them near 7.83 Hz. That isn't sound at all, and it sits far below the roughly 20 Hz where human hearing starts. This file stands in for it with two tones you can hear.
Why do I need headphones?
The two tones are split between the ears, and the pulse only forms when each ear receives one of them. Over speakers both ears hear both tones, so the binaural beat does not reliably occur.
Does it change brainwaves?
There's no dependable evidence that it does. When researchers pulled together the brainwave studies of binaural beats, the results conflicted, and they called the evidence inconclusive at best.
Why 7.83 Hz?
It's the lowest of a set of resonances that keep going in the gap between the Earth and the upper atmosphere. The number describes something measured out there, and it carries no settled meaning for listening.