How sound effects and heal?

How sound effects and heal?

This is the first article I will be writing in a series devoted to the growing field of sound healing. Before going into the science, technique, theories and practices surrounding the therapeutic use of sound in the series, it’s important to introduce the basic principles of sound healing, name a few pioneers in the field and more important address how sound and music (i.e. organized sound and silence) affects people. Lastly, I’ll start to discuss how you can become more conscious in your own process as an artist, producer and/or composer.

Vibration and Frequency

Everything around us is vibrating. It’s easy to forget that any objects we perceive as solid or not ‘alive’ are actually vibrating. It may be at a very slow pace, beyond our sense of movement, but the atoms and molecules that make up rocks and trees and man-made goods are moving energy. Nothing is at rest.

Low to High Frequency Sweep.

Everything has a frequency. We attract and repel people with our energy or individual frequency. We can think of our individual frequency as a tone or a harmony of tones unique to us. Inside our bodies, our organs, bones and cells vibrate at their natural frequencies. Frequencies are measured in Hertz, just like we see in our equalizer controls whether they be hardware or software based. The longer and more spread out the wave, the lower the sound and the closer together the waves are, the higher the sound.  

Dr. Peter Guy Manners completed extensive clinical research with the help of medical doctors and clinical researchers starting in 1940 to pinpoint the natural resonant frequencies or ‘biosignatures’ of our healthy tissues organ systems. Since then, tools and instruments have to been developed to help feed the body with these frequencies to help balance the body.

Dr Tomatis Listening and Evaluation device.

Dr. Tomatis a French physician and auditory neurophysiologist believed our ear drives and affects our entire nervous system and depending what we are listening to, music or otherwise, will dictate our energy level and sense of well-being. He experimented with different music including high frequencies, and/or low frequencies to see how they affect the brain and the patient overall. By studying Benedictine monks in France, he observed how important the monk’s chanting was to their overall health and well-being. When the daily chanting ritual was taken away from them for a short time, most fell ill before the singing was reintroduced to their full recovery. Don Campbell, in his book ‘The Mozart Effect,’ studied how listening to Mozart boosted the brain capacity, focus and spatial reasoning of the listener while they were studying or answer questions. More and more evidence and study is coming out all the time about the power of sound and music to well-being.

The study of the visible representations of vibrational sound is called Cymatics. This research was pioneered by Dr. Hans Jenny who played tones at different frequencies through a vibrating plate filled with sand. As he swept through tones and frequencies, you could see the sound arrange itself into distinct geometrical patterns, or mandalas, showing the unique visual imprint of each tone. Every sound we hear has an imprint.  

Dr. Hans Jenny Experiments with Cymatics.

Noise Kills and Music Heals

With this in mind there are certain sounds, when heard and visualized, that can harm and also heal. Distorted, irregular cymatic patterns of loud noise and harmful electro-magnetic energies can disrupt the healthy vibrational patterns of our bodies causing disease. The patterns of these harmful sounds even look jagged and irregular while soothing, pure sound have beautiful geometric shapes, like snowflakes.

Every snowflake is unique.

Hearing is the first sense to develop in the womb. The vagus nerve connects our ear to every organ and muscle system in our body. Many believe what we hear is processed and carried throughout our body affecting it in a positive or negative manner, even causing change at the cellular level and that this is why music and sound with the right intention can also heal us. Sound also permeates us quickly because 70% of our bodies are made of water.  

I had the pleasure of attending a workshop with Dr. Mitchell Gaynor, a well-known oncologist who works with his cancer patients combining traditional chemotherapy with chanting, singing, guided meditation, tibetan bowl and crystal bowl therapy. He has had great success with sound healing techniques and has seen people release a great amount of psychological and physiological blockages, facilitating their healing process and recovery. Music has the power to relieve anxiety and stress while releasing endorphins and boosting our immune systems. No drugs required!

Large Tibetan Bowl.

Funadmental principles of sound healing

Resonance may be the most important principle of sound healing and has various definitions. In the context of healing humans or animals it can be described as the frequency of vibration that is most natural to a specific organ or system such as the heart, liver or lungs. This innate frequency is known as the prime resonance.All cells emit sound as a consequence of their metabolic processes. There is an interaction between the cells own sounds and those imposed by the environment, including those applied by sound healing devices. The resonance principle relates to the cellular absorption of the healing sounds and/or their harmonics. In sound healing, resonance principles are employed to re-harmonize cells that have been (hypothetically) imprinted with disruptive frequencies. Such troublesome imprints may have been a result of toxic substances, emotional traumas, pathogens, or long-term exposure to noise pollution.

Another possible explanation of how sound is able to trigger the healing response relates to cellular ion channels. Situated within a cella membrane, ion channels are the means by which the cell receives nourishment and communicates with neighboring cells. In dysfunctional cells it is proposed that some of these vital channels are shut down causing cell senescence, so literally the cell is sleeping. In this hypothesis, sound opens the closed channels, supporting the cell to awaken and resume normal functioning and replication.

Dr James Gimzewski, of UCLA, California, has taken a revolutionary approach to studying cellular function. He uses an atomic force microscope, a kind of super-sensitive microphone, to listen to the sounds emitted by cells. The focus of this new science, called a sonocytology, is mapping the pulsations of the cella's outer membrane, thus identifying the song's of the cell. Gimzewski's work has revealed that every cell in our bodies has a unique sonic signature and 'sings' to its neighbors. Sonocytology is a potentially powerful, diagnostic tool for identifying the sounds of healthy cells versus those of injurious ones. But it introduces an even more exciting prospect: the ability to play the destructive sounds of rogue cells back to them greatly amplified, so that they implode and are destroyed. In this scenario there would be no collateral damage to surrounding tissue since healthy cells would not resonate with these frequencies.

Dr Gimzewski, himself a Nobel Prize winner, is one of a large number of innovative minds at work in our world that share the vision of creating modalities to assist the body to heal. Audible sound therapy may offer the greatest potential in non-invasive healing. In the years to come we may well see diagnostic and therapeutic beds that resemble a scene from the futuristic Star Trek sick bay. We will certainly see a proliferation in modalities in which sound is the governing principle. Sound heals life naturally.

It is now widely accepted that electromagnetic interactions are fundamental to the workings of biological tissues. The drawing below shows this effect diagrammatically, derived from the work of Allen & Cross 1963 and Sauer 1995. Even though the two protein molecules are not in direct contact, the oscillating electric component of the electromagnetic field (termed biophotons) causes the amino acid of protein 2 to oscillate in sympathy with the corresponding amino acid in protein 1. However, the important point to remember is that all electromagnetism is created as a direct result of sound collisions. Sound is always the precursor to electromagnetism.