Energy efficiency is a major concern in wireless sensor networks as the sensor nodes are battery-operated devices. For energy efficient data transmission, clustering based techniques are implemented through data aggregation so as to balance the energy consumption among the sensor nodes of the network. The existing clustering techniques make use of distinct Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH), Harmony Search Algorithm (HSA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithms. However, individually, these algorithms have exploration-exploitation tradeoff (PSO) and local search (HSA) constraint. In order to obtain a global search with faster convergence, a hybrid of HSA and PSO algorithm is proposed for energy efficient cluster head selection. The proposed algorithm exhibits high search efficiency of HSA and dynamic capability of PSO that improves the lifetime of sensor nodes. The performance of the hybrid algorithm is evaluated using the number of alive nodes, number of dead nodes, throughput and residual energy. The proposed hybrid HSA–PSO algorithm shows an improvement in residual energy and throughput by 83.89% and 29.00%, respectively, than the PSO algorithm. © 2016 Elsevier B.V.