Humming reference tone
Hum, slide your pitch until the wobble against the tone disappears, and hold it there. This player gives you the tone; the rest is your voice and a slow exhale.
Pick a pitch you can reach, press play, and hum with your mouth closed. When your hum is close to the tone you hear a slow wobble — two pitches a few hertz apart beating against each other. Slide your pitch until the wobble stops. That is the match. Hold it for a few minutes, breathing in through the nose and out on the hum, then stop humming and let a beat play on its own.
How to use it
- Set the tone. Start at 150 Hz. If it is above your comfortable range, drop to 130 or 110; if it feels low and muddy, go up to 180 or 220. The carrier slider goes anywhere in between.
- Find the match. Hum softly and slide your pitch up and down. Listen for the beating and steer toward the point where it disappears. It takes most people under a minute.
- Slow the breath. Roughly four seconds in through the nose, eight seconds out on the hum. You cannot hum on an in-breath, so the exhale lengthens on its own.
- Hold it. Two or three minutes at the matched pitch. Try closing and opening the mouth — closed, the vibration sits in the head; open into an “oo” or “ah”, it drops into the chest.
- Go silent. Stop humming, switch to the 10 Hz preset or any beat player, and listen for the last few minutes. A hum masks a binaural beat, so the silent stretch is where the beat gets heard.
Why a steady tone and not a beat
A binaural beat is two slightly different carriers, one per ear. Humming against that gives you two wobbles at once and nothing clean to lock onto. A single pure tone gives you one target. Match it first, then bring the beat in for the part of the session where you are only listening.
The range matters too. Most of the presets on this site use carriers from 100 to 300 Hz; a hum sits roughly between 80 and 250 Hz. If the carrier you want to practise with is above your voice, hum an octave below it — the beating cue is weaker but still there.
What the humming studies measured
The useful research is on humming as a breathing practice — Bhramari pranayama in the yoga literature — and it is small but consistent about one thing: the slow, long exhale raises heart rate variability.
- Woo and Kim, 2025 — 16 adults; five minutes of humming raised HRV above rest and matched paced slow breathing. The two did not differ.
- Kim, Lee and Woo, 2026 — 24 adults hummed with and without earphones blocking the sound of their own voice. The HRV gain was the same either way, and breathing settled near 0.1 Hz in both. The authors credit the breathing pattern, not the vibration.
- Trivedi and colleagues, 2023 — 118 people; HRV during humming peaked at breaths of 12 to 14 seconds, a little longer than the usual biofeedback target.
- Weitzberg and Lundberg, 2002 — ten volunteers; humming raised nasal nitric oxide about fifteen-fold by ventilating the sinuses. Real, and unrelated so far to any relaxation effect.
The “humming stimulates the vagus nerve” line comes from the anatomy — the larynx is supplied by vagal branches — but the one direct test above found the breath doing the work, not the vibration. Treat the vibration as what makes a long exhale easy to hold, and the matched pitch as your vocal tract’s resonance for the day, not a brain frequency. Brain rhythms run from about 1 to 100 Hz; a hum does not.
Where this came from
The practice is described in the first person — finding the tone, the closed- and open-mouth tuning, and why the silent minutes matter — in Humming Resonance on our older site. This page is the tone that essay assumes you have.
A relaxation practice, not a treatment. If you have epilepsy, a serious heart-rhythm disorder, or you get light-headed easily, ask a doctor first. If you feel dizzy, let the breath go back to normal and stop. Never force the exhale or hold the breath — see safety.
Questions
Does my matched pitch mean anything?
It is the pitch at which your throat, chest and sinuses vibrate most freely today. It shifts with fatigue, posture and time of day, which is why you find it fresh each session. It is not a brainwave and not a “personal frequency”.
Can I hum against a binaural beat directly?
You can, but there are two carriers to beat against, so the lock is harder to hear. Match a single tone first; the 10 Hz preset is there for the silent minutes afterwards.
Do I need headphones for this?
Not for the matching — a speaker works. The binaural preset at the end does need headphones, because each ear has to receive its own tone.
Running this on a phone? The Brainwave Generator app keeps playing with the screen off, works without a connection, and carries the same engine. Free on iOS and Android.