Sound Healing, East to West-Part I

An overview of sound healing modalities and history

Healing properties of Sound and the modalities used….a three (maybe four) part series. This will eventually be an ebook as well as an audiobook with sound files. I’m making this preview available to my Substack subscribers.

The history of healing by means of sound is older than the history of music. It begins with the human voice–think of the sounds humans instinctively make to alleviate physical pain, release an emotional burden, comfort a sick child, dispel fear and summon courage, or provide inspiration for religious expression. 

Our information about the music and sound from antiquity comes from a cornucopia of pictorial and literary evidence. The history of both Chinese and Egyptian music, for instance, dates back at least 4,000 years. These cultures were probably the first to develop a science of acoustics and a theory of music. About 2,000 years later began the development of European music.

By the time of the 8th century before Christ, music was firmly established as part of daily life in ancient Greece. Egyptian music strongly influenced that of the Greeks, Hebrews and early Christians. The cultures of the African continent and the indigenous Americans also have a longstanding tradition of using sound for healing and ritual.

Maybe the Big Bang was just…..a sound

 Many people are familiar with the opening sentence of the Gospel According to Saint John: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Occultists and mystics agree that this phrase refers to the first manifestation of the Divine creative force. According to the mystic tradition, sound was the first thing that ever existed. 

Indeed, sound figures prominently in the creation stories of most of the world’s religions. Sound has also been used as a focal point for meditation, prayer, ritual and healing throughout the history of the world. Unfortunately, Western culture seems to have lost touch with the nature of sound as a healing force. In so-called primitive societies, however, sound remains an integral part of the healing system. Sounds are often used as a type of exorcism, to dispel evil entities that are believed to be causing illness. Sir James Frazer, in his seminal volume The Golden Bough, originally published in 1922, describes the ways in which many ‘primitive’ societies deal with sickness and epidemics in the village. “When cholera has broken out in a Burmese village, the able-bodied men scramble on the roofs and lay about them with bamboos and billets of wood, while all the rest of the population, old and young, stand below and thump drums, blow trumpets, yell, scream, beat floors, walls, tin pans, everything to make a din. This uproar, repeated on three successive nights, is thought to be very effective in driving away the cholera demons.” 

Other cultures focus on the creative, rather than the destructive or repellent properties of sound. Countries such as India, Persia, and China developed music based on scales other than the diatonic scale on which our Western music is based. In India, there are countless ragas, each one having a specific function, even down to the season or the time of day it may be played. In the East, music and sound-making was an integral part of daily life. It wasn’t separated from daily life the way it is in the West.

The Sufi Master and musician Inayat Khan explains the origins of the Indian ragas. He says: “Wind instruments, instruments with gut or steel strings, and instruments of percussion, such as drums and cymbals, have each a distinct effect on the physical body. There was a time when thinkers knew this and used sound for healing and for spiritual purposes. It was on that principle that the music of India was based. The different ragas and the notes which these ragas contain were supposed to produce a certain healing or elevating effect.” 

"When one hears an artist, a singer of Hindu music, the first thing he will do is to tune his tambura, to give one chord; and while he tunes his tambura he tunes his own soul, and this has such an influence on his hearers that they can wait patiently, often for a considerable time. Once he finds he is in tune with his instrument, with that chord, his soul, mind and body all seem to be one with the instrument. Not only has he tuned the instrument, but he has felt the need of every soul in the audience and the demands of their souls, what they want at that time. Not every musician can do this, but the best can."

Years ago I spoke with the avant garde percussionist Milford Graves, who assured me that he made no set list for his performances; instead he “dug the vibe” of the audience, and based on that, he spontaneously knew what he would play.

The influence of Pythagoras

The Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras is said to have been an initiate in the Eastern wisdom. This is the same tradition from which the 4,000-or-so Indian ragas descend. Although the various schools of Eastern mysticism differ in many details, they all emphasize the basic unity of the universe which is at the core of their teachings. Whether Hindus, Buddhists or Taoists, their highest aim is to become aware of the unity and interrelation of all things. This awareness enables one to transcend the notion of an isolated, individual self, and identify oneself with the cosmic reality. 

We have heard the phrase “Music of the Spheres” in connection with the theories of Pythagoras and Johannes Kepler, who related the motions and arrangement of the planets to musical harmony. Kepler, an outstanding figure in the history of science, published his third law of planetary motion in 1619. He called this paper Harmonice Mundi, or The Harmony of the World. In Kepler’s day, music was considered to be one of the four mathematical sciences, along with arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. Kepler emphasized that the “music” he was referring to was not audible to the ear, but rather to the soul.

Kepler’s insistence that God had made the universe according to a mathematical plan is found in the works of Plato, who was in turn influenced by the theories and experiments of Pythagoras, who demonstrated the mathematical basis of acoustic phenomena. Pythagoras is said to have unfolded the musical and numerical nature of the universe within a geometric figure known as the Tetraktys, whose structure reveals the intervals of the musical octave and its divisions. This information was utilized to create what the Pythagoreans called ‘musical medicine’, which were songs accompanied by the lyre, an instrument with origins in ancient Greece. The lyre itself was considered to be a mystical symbol representing the human constitution. The body of the lyre represented our physical form. The strings represented our nervous system. The musician himself represented the spirit. The Pythagoreans were known for their ability to cure many physical, psychological and spiritual ailments through the use of this special music.

The Pythagoreans also used the ancient concept of Sacred Sound which could be used to either create or destroy. Some historians have noted that the Ancient Greeks used the frequency of a particular organism, body, or substance to cause it to disintegrate. 

The Power of Chant

The chanting of a mantra is said to date back to the time of the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians. Mantras are words of power which have been passed down from the Egyptians, Gnostics, and Hebrews. In Hinduism and some types of Buddhism the chanting of a mantra is a tradition that has been carried on to the present day. Chanting the mantra and meditating upon it is said to clarify the mind and lead to enlightenment.

The West, too, has its own types of mantra. In the Middle Ages in Europe, a form of musical prayer developed called Gregorian Chant. These early Christian chants were initially borrowed from Byzantium, Syria, and Palestine. 

Modern day Benedictine Monks

These chants stayed within the bounds of the musical modes of the time, notably the dorian, phrygian, lydian and mixolydian. They were sung in unison by the monks, and have a peaceful, meditative quality. According to Dr. Alfred Tomatis, the French physician and ear specialist, the chants serve another purpose as well. In an interview with Canadian author Tim Wilson, Dr. Tomatis speaks of his recent visit to a monastery in southern France, which had been taken over by a new abbot. This abbot was a young man with revolutionary ideas, one of which being the elimination of the daily six to eight hours of Gregorian Chant. The abbot insisted that the chanting was useless, and that this time could be used for other things. As the days passed, the monks found themselves becoming quite fatigued and listless. Various medical specialists were called in, and solutions proposed, including sleeping more and eating more meat. None of these measures were able to restore the monks’ previous energy. Tomatis says in the interview: “I was called by the abbot in February of 1967, and I found that seventy of the ninety seven monks were slumping in their cells like wet dish rags. Over the next several months I examined them, installed some machines to electronically reawaken their ears, and reintroduced their chanting immediately. By November, almost all of them had gone back to their normal activities: that is, their prayer, their few hours of sleep, and the legendary Benedictine work schedule.” 

Chanting really is a universal component of sound healing and soul transformation. The Jewish tradition has chanting of the Torah as a central feature. Not to mention the Western Pagan traditions from Scotland to South America! Probably some type of chanting can be found in any culture.

 What is sound?

Any source of sound sends out vibrations or sound waves into the air. These funnel through the ear opening, down the ear canal, and strike the eardrum, causing it to vibrate. The vibrations are passed to the small bones of the middle ear, which transmit them to the hearing nerve in the inner ear. There, the vibrations become nerve impulses and go directly to the brain, which interprets the impulses as sound. If sound waves from a source hit another source that resonates with that frequency, or an overtone of it, it too will produce a sound. This phenomenon is known as “sympathetic vibration.” 

Sound has a frequency, or vibratory rate, just as light does. When the eye looks at light that has been divided by a prism, the natural series of vibration frequencies appears in its familiar rainbow pattern. Just as light consists of a series of colors in the spectrum, so does a musical tone consist of many partial tones. We call this sound spectrum the Overtone Series. A tone produced by a voice or a musical instrument contains within it a number of barely audible overtones. The order of these overtones is in accordance with a strict law of nature, and is just as immutable as the order of colors in the rainbow.

You can hear the overtone series sounding in a variety of ways: by striking a low note on a piano keyboard; by waving a long plastic flexible tube; even the wind passing through structures can sound the initial harmonics of the series. Today I was making cappuccino and heard distinctly the root and the fifth as the machine whirred its way toward the magical elixir.

Instruments and their timbres

Instruments and voices have a timbre [“TAMM-bur” – from the French], or collection of overtones, that characterizes their sound. We easily recognize the voice of a friend calling on the phone–even without Caller ID! Additionally, every kind of instrument has a unique timbre. One can easily distinguish the sound of the trumpet from the oboe, for example, because of their different timbres. Master musicians can influence the timbres of their instruments. If two violinists play, each violin sounds like a violin, yet has its own individual tone that allows each player to be identified by sound alone. 

Once I went to a concert where my friend Marion Brown, the saxophonist, was playing with violinist Billy Bang. There was a point where Marion made his saxophone sound like a violin, and Billy made his violin sound like a saxophone. Afterwards I asked Marion how he did that. He just smiled and said, “Oh, it’s just something I’ve been working on.”

Taking into account all the different systems of organizing sounds into music across the globe, is there any principle that we could say is universal? Yes, there is. Even though various cultures have many different scales upon which their music is based, all of them, almost without exception, group their notes within the space of an octave. 

When members of even the most primitive society hear the interval of an octave, they know that the upper note is a higher version of the lower. Similarly, the beat, or rhythmic pulse, in a song derives from the very first beat ever heard — the heartbeat. The heartbeat is found in the sound of the bass drum, the foundation of the percussion section. The tides of breathing are embodied over and over again in all music. Musicians call this “phrasing.” Many master musicians say that these most basic of life signs, heartbeat and breath, are the starting point for all music.

Octaves and triads

Humankind throughout history has demonstrated a natural inclination to collect musical sounds into ordered patterns, or songs, to be learned, and repeated over and over again. A culture is identified as much by its music as by its language, if not more so. There is some evidence that not only humans, but also animals show a desire for certain groupings of tones. In a 1975 lab experiment by researcher H. M. Borchgrevink, consonant triads could be obtained from two identical levers pressed by rats. The individually tested rats developed and maintained a lever- pressing, or “playing”, activity throughout the experimental period. The control group of rats also pressed levers, but did not obtain chords when their levers were pressed, and did not develop a propensity for pressing them as the first group did. No pre-training or award was given to the rats for pressing the levers. Their only reward was hearing the sound. Interestingly, the rats showed a preference for consonant rather than dissonant chords. “Play the triad again Sam.”

Stay tuned for Sound Healing East to West-Part II next week!