The Schumann resonance: what 7.83 Hz is, and what listening to it can and can't do

It is a real number, measured since 1960, and one of the most talked-about frequencies online. Here is what it is, what the research shows, and what the 7.83 Hz step in the app does for a body lying still.

Sophie Kazandjian
May 2026 · 7 min read

Part of: The Science →

Every few days someone tells me the Schumann resonance has spiked. There are websites that show the reading live, like a weather map, and a community that checks it in the morning the way other people check the pollen count. The app plays it as a binaural beat in the second step of the free routine and in several of the full ones, so I have some responsibility for the interest. So here is what the number is, what has been shown about it, and what a beat at that rate does.

What the Schumann resonance is

The Earth's surface and the ionosphere, the electrically charged layer sixty to a hundred kilometres up, form a cavity, and lightning, striking somewhere on the planet around fifty times a second, keeps it ringing. In 1952 the German physicist Winfried Schumann worked out that the cavity should have natural resonances, rather as a bell does, and estimated the lowest at about ten cycles a second. Two American researchers, Balser and Wagner, measured them in 1960 and found the fundamental at 7.83 Hz, with further peaks at roughly 14, 20, 26 and 33. The lower observed value comes from the losses in a real atmosphere that Schumann's idealised calculation left out.

The number is an average. The fundamental wanders by a few tenths of a hertz across the day and the year as the three great thunderstorm regions, in Africa, the Americas and south-east Asia, wax and wane, and solar activity shifts it a little further by changing the ionosphere. The "spikes" that circulate online are usually the instruments in Tomsk showing amplitude, not frequency; they track lightning activity and the state of the equipment rather than anything about people. The resonance is an electromagnetic phenomenon, not a sound; nothing on Earth is audibly humming at 7.83 Hz, and even if it were, the human ear stops somewhere around twenty.

The Andechs bunker experiments

The idea that the number has something to do with bodies rests on one remarkable series of experiments, and they are worth knowing properly. Through the 1960s and 70s the physiologist Rütger Wever kept volunteers, hundreds over the years, in underground apartments at Andechs in Bavaria with no clocks, no daylight and no contact, to study the body's own rhythm when it is left to run free. One of the two apartments was shielded from natural electric and magnetic fields; the other was not. People in the shielded room ran on a slightly longer day, around 25.3 hours against 24.9, and their rhythms fell apart more often, with sleep and body temperature drifting out of step. When Wever switched on a weak artificial electric field pulsing at 10 Hz in the shielded room, the day shortened and the rhythms held together.

That is the basis of the claim that the Earth's field keeps us in time. It is a real result from a serious laboratory and it deserves to be taken seriously. It also has limits: the experiment involved an electric field, not a sound; the field was at ten cycles a second, a round number chosen for convenience, not 7.83; the two rooms differed in other ways; the participants were not randomised; and no one has repeated it with modern methods. The version in which the Earth's heartbeat is 7.83 and our brains are tuned to it is a bigger claim than Wever made, and an open one rather than a settled one.

What listening to a 7.83 Hz binaural beat does

Since you cannot hear 7.83 Hz, an app cannot play it to you directly. Instead, the routine puts 108 Hz in your left ear and 115.83 in your right, and your brain, comparing the two, hears a pulse at the difference. That is a binaural beat at 7.83 Hz, and the noise and beats article explains why it needs headphones. It sits on the boundary between the alpha band, the brain rhythm of relaxed, eyes-closed wakefulness, and theta, the rhythm of drowsiness and the first minutes of sleep; the sleep-scoring manual draws the line between awake and stage one exactly there.

No study has yet tested a 7.83 Hz beat on its own, on sleep or on anxiety. What exists is the wider binaural literature, and it is encouraging: a 2019 meta-analysis of 22 studies across anxiety, attention, memory and pain with a medium overall effect, larger with longer listening; small pilots from 2007 in which two months of nightly delta-range beats lowered trait anxiety in eight people, while thirty minutes of a 7 Hz beat did nothing measurable in four, too few to read either way; and a three-night Thai study in which a 3 Hz beat lengthened deep sleep. The frequency I use sits in the band those results cover. I chose it because it is in the right band for the job, because the number carries meaning for the people who use the app, and because it gives the second step of the routine a story.

There is one trial of the resonance as a treatment, and it is not about sound either. In Taiwan in 2022, forty insomnia patients were given, double-blind, four weeks of a bedside device emitting a 7.83 Hz electromagnetic field, or a placebo. The real device improved measured time to fall asleep and total sleep; the placebo improved only how people felt they had slept, which more than half of them did. It is a single small study, one of the authors holds the patent on the device, and it needs an independent repeat. It is also the first controlled evidence that the number does something for sleep, which is more than most frequencies can say.

How to use the 7.83 Hz step

Headphones, lying down, low volume; the beat is gone through a speaker. Three minutes in the free routine, longer in the full ones, and always after a settling step, because the transition into alpha is easier from a body that has already stopped moving. If the Schumann step is the one you sink into, as many people do, that is a slow beat working on a still body, and it will do the same tomorrow night whatever the Tomsk instruments read.

I keep the name on the step because it is accurate about the number, and because I like it. The planet does ring at 7.83 Hz, and a beat at that rate, played to a person lying in a bedroom in the Gard with headphones on, does the good work that slow beats have been shown to do.

Try it free →

If you would like to fall asleep to this beat tonight, there is a one-hour version on the Skin Resonance channel. It opens at 7.83 Hz and slows to theta and then delta as you go down.

ON YOUTUBE · 1 HOUR

7.83 Hz sleep track: Schumann, then theta, then delta

An hour for bedtime. Fifteen minutes at 7.83 Hz, twenty at 4 Hz theta, twenty-five at 2 Hz delta, over a quiet bed of brown noise, the app's own sound engine. The screen dims after five minutes.

Watch on YouTube →