The Power of Sound

How to Be Healthy and Productive Using Music and Sound

Joshua Leeds

• Publisher: Healing Arts Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781594773501
• eBook ISBN: 9781594778995
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Alternative & Complementary Medicine

Customize your sound environment for a better quality of life • Shows how to use music and sound to reduce stress, enhance learning, and improve performance • Provides detailed guidelines for musicians and health care professionals • Includes a new 75-minute CD of psychoacoustically designed classical music What we hear, and how we process it, has a far greater impact on our daily living than we realize. From the womb to the moment we die we are surrounded by sound, and what we hear can either energize or deplete our nervous systems. It is no exaggeration to say that what goes into our ears can harm us or heal us. Joshua Leeds--a pioneer in the application of music for health, learning, and productivity--explains how sound can be a powerful ally. He explores chronic sensory overload and how auditory dysfunction often results in difficulties with learning and social interactions. He offers innovative techniques designed to invigorate auditory skills and provide balanced sonic environments. In this revised and updated edition of The Power of Sound, Leeds includes current research, extensive resources, analysis of the maturing field of soundwork and a look at the effect of sound on animals. He also provides a new 75-minute CD of psycho­acoustically designed classical music for a direct experience of the effect of simplified sound on the nervous system. With new information on how to use music and sound for enhanced health and productivity, The Power of Sound provides readers with practical solutions for vital and sustained well-being.

P A R T O N E

Sound

CHAPTER 1

WHAT IS SOUND?

Sound is vibratory energy. Sound touches us and influences our emotions like no other source of input or expression. It is the stuff of tone and timbre, silence and noise. It is a frequency of vibration that we audibly hear between 20 and 20,000 Hz. Traveling through the air at 770 miles per hour (its exact speed depends on temperature, humidity, and wind), sound moves almost a million times slower than the speed of light.¹ We perceive it primarily through our ears, where it is transformed into electrochemical impulses sent to the brain. It is also perceived through the skin. Like air and water, sound is ubiquitous. It can be a great thing . . . or it can really be a problem.

Ancient cultures knew about the power of sound long before the term science was coined. The spiritually wise men of India knew that the world is sound. From India’s Vedic scriptures comes the term nada brahman, “the primal sound of being” or “being itself.” Even four thousand years ago, India’s scholars and religious leaders understood that we live in a state of vibration from which sound derives and on which sound has profound influences.²

Philosophers and prophets of old shared a common belief in the divine origin and nature of sound. In ancient philosophies and religions, sound (vibration) is the lead character in creation myths. The genesis of the universe—or, thinking locally, our planet Earth—is ascribed to the “Word” or the “One Sound.” Cutting across historical, religious, and political lines, Egyptians, Hebrews, Native Americans, Celts, Chinese, and Christians all have spoken of sound as a divine principle.³

The roots of this belief in the power of sound can be found in the ancient cultures of the Ethiopians, Hopi, and Aborigines, as well as the temples of Greece and Rome. Many of the musical philosophies of Pythagoras have withstood the test of time. In The Secret Power of Music, however, David Tame states, “Almost three thousand years before the birth of Christ, at a time when the music of European man may have amounted to no more than the beating of bones on hollow logs, the people of China were already in possession of the most complex and fascinating philosophy of music of which we know today.”

The Chinese dynasties compared music with a force of nature and held it in that level of awe. “The Chinese understood the power within music to be a free energy, which man could use or misuse according to his own free will, Tame states.”⁴ The rulers and their philosophers believed that in order for their citizens not to misuse music—and for all to benefit from its optimally beneficent use—only the “correct” music could be played. Beyond entertainment, Chinese emperors believed moral influence was the major effect of music that they needed to control. And revere and harness the power of sound they did, for four and a half millennia, until the Ch’ing dynasty (1644–1912).⁵

Worldwide, powerful shamans cured disease and mental anguish by coaxing evil spirits into leaving their victims through the power of chanting. Today entire villages, from Africa to Alabama to the Arctic, continue to drum, sing, or dance themselves into states of spiritual ecstasy.

The entire planet vibrates to the rhythms and sounds of music. No matter how primitive or advanced, music plays an inclusive and vital role in every nation. It is an inescapable part of life: of spiritual ceremonies, social celebrations, child rearing, armies marching off to war, initiations, funerals, harvests, and feast days.

Music strikes a chord within that cannot be expressed easily in words. It soothes and excites us. We resonate with its rhythms, harmonies, and tones. It feels good. What is so deeply familiar about tone and rhythm that we can close our eyes and drift away, trusting we are safe in the timelessness of music’s embrace?

I believe the answer to this question lies with resonance and sympathetic vibration.

VIBRATION AND RESONANCE

Virtually everything on Earth vibrates. The planet itself vibrates. All matter consists of atomic material: molecules, atoms, electrons, protons, neutrons, and subatomic particles. Each atom consists of a nucleus surrounded by electrons, revolving at the speed of six hundred miles per second. It is an accepted construct of physics that motion creates frequency and frequency creates sound.

Whether we hear it, everything has a sound, a vibration all its own. The velocity (frequency) of the movement determines the specific sound. While we hear the sound of a fan moving the air, we cannot hear the sound of an electron. The speed of an electron is so fast that it creates a tone outside our human range of hearing. Nonetheless, the “sound” is there.

The fact that sound waves^*4 are everywhere is an important point of reference in building conscious sound awareness. And to help you reawaken awareness of sound and the role it can play in your life, add the phenomenon of resonance.

Resonance can be defined as “the frequency at which an object most naturally vibrates.” For example, a tuning fork that is tuned to 440 Hz (cycles per second) will, when physically struck, vibrate at 440 Hz. This frequency is known as its resonant frequency.

If you have two identical tuning forks manufactured to vibrate at 440 Hz, an interesting example of resonance occurs. Strike one of the forks to produce a sound and the second one, which has not been physically struck, will spontaneously vibrate, or sing along, with the first tuning fork. It acts as if it too were physically struck, and it was, by the sound waves from the first tuning fork. If a fork tuned to 100 Hz is struck nearby, however, the 440 Hz fork will not respond. Thus, when two or more objects have similar vibratory characteristics that allow them to resonate at the same frequency, they form a resonant system.

Resonance is a natural ability; substances such as metal, wood, air, and even living flesh and bone vibrate to a frequency imposed from another source. This aspect of resonance is known as sympathetic vibration.

SYMPATHETIC VIBRATION

Imagine that I have two violins tuned alike. I place the first violin on a table and leave it there; then I move to the other side of the room. I take the second violin and bow a single open string (say, the D string) ten feet away from the first violin. What happens? The soundbox of the first violin will begin to vibrate as the sound frequencies of the second violin resonate the nonplayed instrument’s D string. If I play the A string on the second violin, the first violin’s A string will correspondingly resonate. If I play all four open strings on the second violin, likewise all four open strings on the first violin will vibrate. As with the tuning forks, this is the resonant phenomenon of sympathetic vibration.

Everything has its resonant frequency—I think of it as a “resident,” or home, frequency—and we humans are no exception. That is why certain colors feel good to us and why we are attracted to certain instruments and sounds. The colors or sounds are within our resident frequency range and can make us vibrate from across the room. Our familiarity with their frequency has an effect on our mood.

Some people like the sound of the saxophone; for others, it is like fingernails on a chalkboard. Your teenager loves that electric guitar sound; it drives you to distraction because it grates on your nervous system: different people, different frequency perception. The connotation of sound varies.

The concept of sympathetic vibration—the way an outside vibration can sympathetically vibrate another vibration—holds true with people, too. When you are around someone with a vibrational rate similar to your own, you feel comfortable and familiar. Likewise, you instinctively know when someone’s energy field is totally different from yours.

So when it comes to music and sound, finding sources that resonate positively is a good and healthy thing. If you passively allow yourself to be surrounded by sounds that do not resonate well with you, however, you stand a good chance of creating nervous system friction, a loop of internal interference. Continued exposure over a long—or sometimes even a short—period can cause you to simply fall out of tune, out of harmony with your body’s inherent wisdom state. Secondhand tobacco smoke has been proved to have deleterious effects. What about secondhand sound? The phenomenon of sympathetic vibration is contingent not on volume but on pitch. This means that even quiet home or office sounds—the hum of a computer, fluorescent lights, a refrigerator, or a television—may be resonating you.

We are constantly being vibrated, on a cellular level, by heard and unheard sound frequencies: electromagnetic fields of all kinds, microwaves, electricity, radar, jet planes, jackhammers, horns, sirens, and loud sounds of many kinds, including music. The increase in stress-related disease in modern society is of little wonder. Many things contribute to stress, which might be defined as “an overamping of the nervous system.” A jagged nervous system is a stressed nervous system. The food we eat, the people we are around, and the thoughts we think have a proven effect on our well-being. It is time to add sound to this list.

If you combine the universality of sound vibration with the idea that we can be affected by external frequency sources, you begin to glimpse the importance of sympathetic vibration.

The goal is to not become paranoid about every sound around you, wondering whether it is vibrating you into schizophrenia or cancer. While we do not have earlids to block incoming sound, the brain has a magnificent adaptive mechanism that allows us to shut down, closing out unwanted sounds; however, we pay a long-term price for doing so. I discuss this in chapter 5 when I look at the work of Dr. Alfred Tomatis and neurodevelopmental specialist Robert Doman, whose contributions to the field I discuss online at TPOS.com and again in parts 2 and 3 of this book.

As you develop a new sound awareness, the basic objective is to become conscious of the principles of sound so you can make informed and intentional choices about the frequency elements with which you surround yourself. In the following lighthearted chapter, I explore the medium of sound from a physics point of view.

C H A P T E R 2

THE PHYSICS OF SOUND

The horizons of physics, philosophy, and art have of late been too widely separated, and as a consequence, the language, the methods, and the aims of any one of these studies present a certain amount of difficulty for the student of any other of them.

HERMANN HELMHOLTZ

You might imagine that the complaint that heads this chapter resulted from recent trends toward specializing and compartmentalizing knowledge. The complainer, however—Hermann Helmholtz, a brilliant German physicist and philosopher and the author of On the Sensations of Tone—was in 1862 bemoaning the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between art and science that still exists today. Perhaps this fragmentation of knowledge explains why Helmholtz spent many years building and studying instruments, compiling all known sound data, applying intricate mathematics and physics formulas to harmony, and investigating the effects of tone on the nervous system.¹

As a scientist, philosopher, and psychoacoustician (long before the term was first enunciated), Helmholtz researched the human perception of sound. He attempted to bring together two diverging systems to bridge the gaps in human understanding. His work reflects a common desire to reunify mind and body, heart and soul, and most specifically, art and science.

In my undergraduate studies, I came across a wonderful text titled Conceptual Physics. In its author, Paul G. Hewitt, I found a lover of science who also possessed a sense of poetry and humor. Hewitt’s discussion of sound includes this delightful passage:

Many things in nature wiggle and jiggle.

We call a wiggle in time a vibration.

A vibration cannot exist in an instant,

but needs time to move to and fro.

We call a wiggle in space and time a wave.

A wave cannot exist in one place,

but must extend from one place to another. ²

Hewitt has skillfully refined the physics of sound into four concepts. Let’s take a closer look at what this poem says about the building blocks of sound.

“MANY THINGS IN NATURE WIGGLE AND JIGGLE.”

Frequency is one of the most important elements in any discussion of energy, be it molecular, light, or sound. The term frequency refers to how often any regularly repeated event occurs in an assumed unit of time. Therefore, we can refer to the frequency of atomic vibration, of planets around the sun, or even of a heartbeat. For each of these events, a scale of measurement has been devised. In sound and light, we refer to the frequency of vibrations. This unit of frequency is measured in hertz (Hz), the number of vibrations or cycles per second (cps).

“WE CALL A WIGGLE IN TIME A VIBRATION.”

Vibration is defined as a “rapid alternating motion to and fro, or up and down.” This vibrational...

Table of contents

• COVER IMAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• DEDICATION
• EPIGRAPH
• ABOUT THE COVER IMAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• PREFACE: 2010 AND MOVING FORWARD—THE DECADE OF SOUND!
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE: SOUND
• PART TWO: SOUND AWARENESS
• PART THREE: A GUIDE TO SOUNDWORK TECHNIQUES AND APPLICATIONS
• EPILOGUE
• GLOSSARY
• THEPOWEROFSOUND.COM
• SOUND REMEDIES CATALOG
• MUSIC FOR THE POWER OF SOUND
• FOOTNOTES
• ENDNOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• ABOUT INNER TRADITIONS • BEAR & COMPANY
• COPYRIGHT & PERMISSIONS