Planet gongs explained

Take the Earth’s year as the example.

1. Step 1 · Measure the cycle

   One trip around the Sun takes 365.2422 days. In seconds that is 31,556,926.

2. Step 2 · Turn it into a frequency

   Frequency is how often something happens each second: one divided by the time it takes. 1 ÷ 31,556,926 is 3.17 × 10⁻⁸ Hz. Far too slow to hear.

3. Step 3 · Double it until you can hear it

   Doubling a frequency raises it by one octave: the same note, higher. Double this one 32 times and you reach 136.10 Hz. That is a C♯, about 31 cents below the C♯ on a piano. A cent is one hundredth of the step between two neighboring piano keys.

Every planet gong is worked out the same way, from a different cycle. Musicians call notes an octave apart “the same note”. The whole method rests on that idea.

Paiste, the Swiss maker, tunes its planet gongs to these tones. Paiste names each gong by a note one octave lower than the figure here, which is half the frequency.

The play buttons sound a plain tone at each pitch. For a gong-like sound, use the Gong Lab.

The Sun. For the Sun, Cousto does not use an orbit. He builds a tone from an imagined one: a circle 1.476 km from the Sun’s center, travelled at the speed of light, which comes to 32,312.52 Hz. Eight octaves down is 126.22 Hz. It is a construction, not a measurement of anything the Sun does.

The Platonic Year. This is the slow wobble of the Earth’s axis. Cousto uses the traditional figure for its length, 25,920 years, which is 360 times 72. The measured rate of the wobble gives about 25,772 years, which would put the tone about 10 cents higher.

Pluto. There are two figures. Cousto’s 1984 book gave 140.25 Hz. His current table gives 140.64 Hz, from a newer value for Pluto’s orbit. Paiste still tunes its Pluto gong to 140.25 Hz. The two are about 5 cents apart.

Chiron. Paiste’s Chiron gong is tuned to 151.27 Hz. That is not what the method gives. Chiron takes a little over 50 years to go around the Sun, and doubling that comes to about 172 Hz, which is what Cousto’s own table lists. This site could not find out where 151.27 Hz comes from.

Traditional: from gong practice

In planetary gong practice each gong carries the qualities that astrology gives its planet. Players choose and combine gongs by those associations.

• Earth. Grounding, centering and calm. Cousto identifies its tone with OM.
• Moon (Synodic). Emotion, intuition and cycles.
• Sun. Vitality and self-confidence.
• Mercury. Communication and mental clarity.
• Venus. Love, harmony and receptivity.
• Mars. Energy, willpower and courage.
• Jupiter. Expansion, generosity and wisdom.
• Saturn. Structure, discipline and focus.
• Uranus. Sudden insight, disruption and freedom.
• Neptune. Dreaming, intuition and the loosening of boundaries.
• Pluto. Transformation, and with endings that make room for beginnings.
• Platonic Year. A long view of time.
• Moon (Sidereal). Reflection.

These are what players say, written down as what players say. This site does not claim that any gong has an effect on the body or the mind.

The tunings on this site are reproduced from Hans Cousto’s tables, published by Planetware under the license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Values are reproduced from Cousto’s tables. Tempo, pendulum length and interval tables are calculated by this site from those values.

Cousto’s tables use the orbital periods he had when he made them. For Saturn and Pluto, NASA now lists slightly different periods. The difference in pitch is under 2 cents.