a plan for sound

sound was designed to shift you.

tonos is not a meditation app and not a music app. it is a hand-built instrument. sound is the product, not the soundtrack — composed to move your nervous system, not to fill the air around it.

every bed in tonos sits on one fundamental frequency, anchored where possible in peer-reviewed work. nothing here is generative. nothing here is templated. each minute was scored for the principle it carries.

i.the premise

the body has a tone. it can be tuned. polyvagal theory (porges), cardiovascular research (bernardi), and resonance-frequency breathing (lehrer & gevirtz) all converge on the same finding: slow, rhythmic auditory stimulation, sub-200 Hz acoustic energy, choral harmony, and 6-breaths-per-minute pacing measurably modulate vagal tone — heart-rate variability, respiratory sinus arrhythmia, the quiet wiring of ventral-vagal safety.

tonos uses that. carefully. without claiming more than the literature supports.

ii.seven tunings, seven anchors

each of the seven hermetic principles is composed around a different carrier — a frequency chosen for its documented footprint, not for mysticism.

1. 256 Hz · 7.83 Hz

   mind — the mind tuning

   warm fundamental over a sub-audible schumann anchor; envelope modulated at 0.1 Hz, the cardiac-coherence rate. top-down cortical-vagal control.

2. 256 / 384 Hz · 7 Hz

   correspondence — the above-below tuning

   pythagorean perfect fifth with a 7 Hz binaural offset for cross-hemispheric coupling. the heart cell and the galaxy breathing on the same envelope.

3. 110 Hz · 6 Hz AM

   vibration — the pneuma tuning

   chest-cavity resonance — the bernardi cluster. low-frequency acoustic energy stimulates vagal afferents directly. you feel it before you hear it.

4. 256 ↔ 432 Hz

   polarity — the dichotomy tuning

   warm and cool carriers alternate every eight seconds; at the apex they harmonise into one held fifth. sympathetic-parasympathetic rebalancing made audible.

5. 192 Hz · 6 BPM

   rhythm — the cycle tuning

   resonance-frequency breathing — the gold standard for HRV training (lehrer & gevirtz, 2014). five seconds in, five seconds out, paced perfectly.

6. 396 Hz · 0.1 Hz

   causation — the chain tuning

   sparse plucks separated by widening silence. silence is the instrument here — the prefrontal cortex inhibits threat as the pattern resolves.

7. choir · 528 Hz upper voice

   generation — the logos spermatikos tuning

   rising perfect fifth resolution; the regulatory work is done by the 0.1 Hz envelope, not by the upper voice. ventral-vagal social engagement — the open state.

iii.the three constants

three things hold across every teaching. break any of them and the instrument stops working.

the 0.1 Hz envelope. every bed is amplitude-modulated at 0.1 Hz — the cardiac-coherence rate, six cycles per minute. this is the one piece of science we never break. it is the rate at which HRV peaks, at which the baroreflex resonates, at which the body rediscovers its own rhythm.

resonance breathing. wherever breath is invited, the cue runs at 6 BPM — five seconds in, five seconds out. a single, literal, evidence-based protocol, made tactile by the haptic engine and visible by the field.

silence as instrument. bernardi's 2006 heart paper found that the silence between musical phrases drove the largest physiological shifts — larger than the music itself. so we never fill it. silence is composed in, deliberate and timed.

iv.composition rules

one fundamental per teaching, anchored in research where possible (110 Hz chest resonance; 6 BPM resonance breathing; 0.1 Hz cardiac coherence). solfeggio numbers are used aesthetically — never claimed as therapeutic. intellectual honesty matters. tonos is not a frequency-mysticism app.

picardy resolution on closing chords — minor resolving to major where applicable — for ventral-vagal cueing. warm + dim instead of bright; the body trusts amber, not white.

no motion under six seconds. nothing — visual, harmonic, rhythmic — repeats fast enough for the eye or ear to lock the loop. slow drift, gentle bias, organic randomness over machined repetition.

v.the mastering chain

every bed is captured at 24-bit / 96 kHz where possible (24/48 minimum) and delivered as ALAC 24/48 in-bundle — apple-native, lossless, played natively by AVAudioPlayer. masters are written to −14 LUFS integrated with a −1.0 dBTP ceiling. no brick-wall mastering. the 0.1 Hz envelope is where the regulation happens; squashing it kills the instrument.

chain: izotope RX denoise → fabfilter pro-Q 3 (gentle, protecting 100–250 Hz chest band and 1–3 kHz presence) → fabfilter pro-MB (transparent multiband, ratio ≤ 1.5:1, slow attack) → slate VTM (analogue tape warmth, 30 ips, low drive) → fabfilter pro-L 2 limiter, true-peak on, max 1.5 dB gain reduction. two masters per teaching: a headphone master with binaural width preserved, and a mono-safe speaker master tested over AirPlay.

the symphony and the seven tunings are also rendered in apple spatial audio (dolby atmos) — but static binaural, never head-tracked. motion in micro-meditation breaks the vagal arc; the body needs spatial stability.

vi.the references

every bed is AB-tested against work that already sits where we want tonos to sit: sigur rós — ( ); jóhann jóhannsson — orphée; max richter — sleep; hildur guðnadóttir — saoirse. if a bed doesn't sit alongside these, it doesn't ship.

vii.the citation library

inside the app, the measurements traces every claim back to a paper. the spine of that library:

• polyvagal regulation · porges, s. (2011). the polyvagal theory. norton.
• music, silence & HRV · bernardi et al. (2006). heart 92(4) — cardiovascular and respiratory changes induced by different types of music.
• resonance-frequency breathing · lehrer p. & gevirtz r. (2014). frontiers in psychology — heart rate variability biofeedback.
• heart coherence · mccraty et al. (2003 onwards), heartmath institute research library.
• coherent breathing at scale · scientific reports (2025) — global study, 1.8M sessions.
• auditory entrainment · kraus & chandrasekaran (2010). nature reviews neuroscience.
• synchronised music & bonding · tarr, launay & dunbar (2014). frontiers in psychology.

viii.what we refuse

no generative AI in-session. no personalised mixes. no streaming. no analytics measuring what you listened to. no wellness language wrapped around science it can't carry. the hand of the composer is the product — that is the part that cannot be templated, and the part that does the work.

τόνος — the stoic word for the tension of the breath-spirit. the thing that, when right, makes you well.