Can Music Heal?

Remembering an ancient medicine

I was driving down the coastline of Big Sur, CA with my brother and partner, Thorald, as we shared our experience of a weekend leading a workshop on the healing voice. We were faculty for a four-day weekend retreat at the Esalen Institute, a privilege we don’t take lightly. The sun was lighting the Pacific Ocean with a shimmery silver fire and we began the delightful task of unpacking and digesting what had just occurred.

We facilitated and had the honor of witnessing a small group of people begin to set new ways of being with the experience of their own voice, with the intention of creating the conditions for the possibility of healing, an inner sense of wholeness made safe and sound.

We were curious what might occur and if there is a tendency for the voice to return us human instruments to a state of inner equilibrium. Our experience was that intentional vocal toning naturally calms the nervous system, expresses undigested emotion and triggers a natural healing response, so the body can repair and renew itself at the cellular, emotional and energetic level.

Every day, all day long, we witness music as a remarkably healing phenomenon. We see, across cultures, that It truly is more than a language, it is a way of being. It is our human rite to be musical. It is our distinct and curious relationship with the muse, perhaps, that makes us homo sapien, our relationship to music, movement and voice.

What is healing? For me, it is a lived experience of wholeness, integration, peace, clarity, joy, vitality…even through the pain, suffering, brokenness of our human lives. Can we ever be truly healed, because was there ever anything broken? I see Healing as an invitation for the soul to come home and dwell in the body.

What is music? Ahhh m u s I c…“The breathing of statues”, wrote Rilke. Music is an invitation to an experience that integrates, soothes and makes whole our mental, emotional and physical experience, even if temporarily. To be musical is, perhaps, our opportunity to be with the muses, the architects of harmony, beauty and pleasure in an otherwise unknowable universe.

Over twenty years ago, I discovered a book in an old bookstore in Cambridge MA, called The Harmony of The Spheres, by Jocelyn Godwin. It is a collection of research conducted over thousands of years on the harmonics of space and time. This book opened my mind to the myriad of ways that music has been thought of in the past, particularly in regard to the alchemical properties of sound. What struck me was how inextricably linked music is with life itself and yet how far we have strayed from that basic understanding. In Godwin’s book I discovered a rich body of knowledge known as the Music of the Spheres, a metaphysical study of how music can be expressed and understood as mathematical relationships, simple ratios, and symmetrical shapes. I realized that countless thinkers, from Plato and Pythagoras to Johannes Kepler, to Carl Sagan and beyond.

The great Sufi master, Hazrat Inayat Khan, went so far as to say:  “What makes us feel drawn to music is that our whole being is music; our mind and body, the nature in which we live, the nature which has made us, all that is beneath and around us, it is all music.”

For complex vocal learners like us, sound functions as the fuel of our subtle body. Sound nourishes our energy bodies, particularly when we are singing and moving to songs that we love. Not only does our voice heal us with sound, it renews our cells with infra-red light. Music speaks the language of our soul and gives us a rare permission to reside in our feelings and express what it feels like to be alive.

My intention for this article is to identify some of the many ways in which music can be healing for the human being. There are three main dimensions of healing that I wish to address. The first is the biological, cellular level. The second is the emotional and mental health benefits of music. And lastly, the benefits of music on our subtle energetic body, how music reaches the soul and connects us to the eternal. I must first declare my bias. I am on the ‘front lines’ of the war we wage on our voices and on other people’s voices, often unwittingly. I am excited to be co-leading a live course on this starting in January 2023 with the Shift Network. Please join me for the real thing. For now, we shall dig around in the research and the poetry of it all.

SOUND BODIES

Many have studied the effects of sound on the human biological system and yet it is still very much early days for the field of Music Medicine and Sound Healing. Jonathan Goldman wrote a wonderful book called ‘Healing Sounds’ and the power of vocal harmonics in 1992, that brought together some of the researchers of sound healing at the time. Since then, there has been a proliferation of the idea that sound triggers a healing response in the body.

In the last seven years, my brother and I have journeyed with hundreds of individuals and groups to find consistent evidence that music and singing improves physical health. Within weeks of listening to the music they loved and giving themselves permission to sing in their life again, they often found their vitals improved, particularly cardio vascular, mood, energy levels and oxygenation of the blood. We noticed that people would regain color in their faces, shed inflammation in their face and upper bodies, have a clear and bright disposition and enthusiasm for life. We became ever more curious about the science behind what we were seeing.

We recently had the pleasure of speaking with John Stuart Reid, who created the Cymascope, which reveals the symmetrical crystalline patterns that music imprints on matter in space and time. Given that the human body is made up mostly of water, sound has an immediate effect on us at the cellular level. John confirmed our suspicions that music has the greatest effects on our biology when we are listening to music we truly love with speakers, so we are fully immersed in the sound. He also found evidence to suggest that singing with a healing intention multiplies the positive results.

Here are just a few of the interesting findings in the field of sound healing:

1.     Vocalizing, or any form of singing, stimulates the Vegas nerve, which regulates the key organs of the body, firstly the heart and the lungs and the digestion. (E.g. John Stuart Reid)

2.     Directional vocal toning can resonate specific energy centers and organs, thereby using your voice as a Sonic Healing Tool to heal dissonance, tension and stress in particular areas or systems of the body. (E.g. A new collaborative research project by Eileen Day McKusick & The Brothers Koren, called Sing The Body Electric)

3.     Music and singing promotes stress reduction, lowered cortisol levels, lowered blood pressure and pain modulation by the activation of endogenous opioids. (E.g. John Stuart Reid)

4.     Full body sound immersion promotes the availability of oxygen in the blood, via the hemoglobin and the production of nitric oxide, thus aiding repair and pain modulation. (E.g. John Stuart Reid)

5.     Sound and vocal harmonics create new neuronal networks in the brain by stimulating the fascia, the gelatinous tissue that connects the synapses of the brain. (E.g. Susan Gallagher Borg)

So many more…(please add your research in the comments below).

It is my bias that singing causes an ‘harmonic equilibrium’ in the resonant centers of your body. I have attached a list of references and links to further reading below.

OF SOUND MIND

Humans are among a small group of sentient creatures on Earth who are ‘Complex Vocal Learners.’ Vocal Learning is the ability to use acoustics and sounds to communicate, mimic and form memories around sounds to learn. The bat, the dolphin, the elephant, the cetaceans, pinnipeds (seals and sea lions), songbirds, parrots and hummingbirds are among this esteemed group of rather sonic creatures.

Humans are loud and complex. We are constantly creating memories, with sound and storing them in our biofield as energetic information, as a subconscious record of emotional material. Some of these memories are stored in the body with harmonious feelings, that are pleasing to our senses and release positive neurochemicals. Some memories are traumatic and trigger a stress response in the nervous system, often suppressed or forgotten; unfelt. Music and sound give us immediate access to our memories and a safe space to feel unfelt feelings again, thereby processing, integrating and digesting stuck or unexpressed emotion. In Sing The Body Electric, we call it ‘Stuck Sound’ and we can give these emotions motion again through intentional sounding. Our next STBE workshop is in February. I Hope you can join us to explore sound in your own body.

More and more we are seeing evidence that talking and singing functions as a pressure valve to our human emotions and mental chatter. Our voice is an essential organ,  for us to express and beautify all experience and integrate trauma in the body. Where dogs and cats shake off trauma, humans are designed to talk it out and sing themselves back to equilibrium.

Throughout history numerous noted scholars have been interested in the relationship between a musician’s creative intention and the resulting composition’s affect on the emotional and spiritual state of the listener.  In Timaeus, Plato stated, “Man’s music is seen as a means of restoring the souls, rendered confused and discordant by bodily affliction, the harmonic proportions that it shares with the world soul of the cosmos.” 

Aristotle also concluded that, “Emotions of any kind are produced by melody and rhythm; therefore by music, a man becomes accustomed to feeling the right emotions; music has thus the power to form character, and the various kinds of music based on the various modes, may be distinguished by their effects on character- one, for example, working in the direction of melancholy, another of effeminacy; one encouraging abandonment, another self-control, another enthusiasm, and so on throughout the series.”

Can we harness the healing power of music to bring ourselves back to resonant equilibrium, such that we can add our intention to sound to heal our mental, emotional, physical and electrical health? Pythagoras believed that the philosophical principles of love, peace, wisdom, compassion, forgiveness, and joy were embodied in the harmonics of what he termed, “Music of the Spheres.” When we sing or speak we are creating sound bubbles. These sound spheres we create health in the body and express and balance emotional states.

Singing and conscious vocal toning may cause the following emotional and mental health responses:

1.     Humans are Complex Vocal Learners - that is, we have an innate ability to ATTACH MEMORY TO SOUND. Psychologically, this in turn, means that we ‘digest’ and process our memories, trauma, emotions, anxiety and stress through the complex processing of the voice. My brother and I are focused on serving the human Voice Complex, through our work. Many voices have been inhibited and silenced and many of us, if not all of us, seem to recognize the satisfaction and terror that comes with being heard.

2.      Singing songs we truly love, that express how we feel in the moment, also known as the ‘Iso Principle’, can regulate our emotional and mental states effectively. Music that ‘meets us where we live’ can create a sense of empathy, safety, belonging and reduce feelings of anxiety, isolation and depression (plus heart rate and blood pressure effects were measured). (Davis, Gfeller, & Thaut, 2008)

3.   Vocal Harmonic and other high frequency sounds can activate memories and emotions located in the subconscious and the human bio field. (Eileen Day McKusick and BK)

4. Singing in groups is shown to boost the production of oxytocin and dopamine in the brain, giving us feelings of togetherness and belonging.

ELECTRIC SOUL

Music healed me. At the age of 19, I hit a rock bottom and was experiencing acute depression, which created the perfect biological conditions for me to contract acute liver disease. In the words of my friend and collaborator, Eileen McKusick, I was living with LOW VOLTAGE.

I was living alone, isolated from friends and family, and I had left music by the wayside to study business at university. I had put my joy and passion on the back burner, draining my vitality.

In one incredible moment, music began to turn my health around. It happened first at a subtle, energetic level. I had recently purchased an album by the Jazz vocalist, Cassandra Wilson, called ‘Blue Moon Daughter’. I was alone in my room and standing right next to the speakers when ‘You Don't Know What Love Is’ came on. Her deep resonant voice, the heart break that was encoded into it and her compassion for herself and her fellow man, all combined to meet me exactly where I was.

In that moment I felt, at a resonant level, I was being changed by the sound.

I felt understood and held. It brought with it an epiphany, I realized that my depression was being triggered by undigested grief from my parents’ divorce and from my own broken heart (teenage love can be brutal). I realized in that moment that the loves I had lost had deepened my heart, prepared me to love deeper. For the next three months I sang myself back to vitality. I healed an acute liver disease and depression in under three months using toning and sound therapy, (in combination with a good diet, sunlight and sleep).

I had raised my voltage and I never turned away from music again.

I realize now that I sang myself back to equilibrium, such that my body could heal itself. My improved mood and connection to self gave me the courage to apply for a scholarship to study philosophy and music at Northeastern University, in Boston. I wanted to know how and why music could have such a positive effect on my life.

More recently, I had the privilege of attending a week long sound healing summit in Monterey, CA and I witnessed many people use sound for profound positive effects. In particular, I witnessed about fifty voices raise their energetic pulse using vocal toning over three consecutive days of three hours each. People reported feeling euphoric, lighter, energized, illuminated, recharged, brighter and high.

French doctor and researcher, Dr. Tomatis, discovered that the ear serves to create an electrical charge in the brain. Certain sounds are shown to awaken and revitalize the body, “the ear accounts for from 90% to 95% of the body’s total charge.” Particularly high frequency sounds like, the ocean, bagpipes, high harmonics on voices and wind instruments in high registers are said to give the greatest electrical charge.

“The charge of energy obtained from the influx of nervous impulses reaches the cortex of the brain, which then distributed it throughout the body toning up the whole system and imparting greater dynamism to the human being” (Tomatis , 1978).

There is something beyond the physical, in music, that reaches our very soul. It seems to effect the human being on the electric, magnetic, etheric level - as if it feeds our soul.

CONCLUSIONS

From my direct working relationships with individuals using music and vocal toning to improve their life experience and human potential, there are a handful of benefits that keep being shared with me directly. Of the hundreds of music journeys I have had the privilege of co-leading, the following are the most common positive benefits of vocal toning and songwriting:

• Relieves anxiety & stress

• Promotes deep meditation

• Cultivates resilience, vitality, gratitude

• Creates higher quality sleep & less insomnia

• Heightens clarity, focus, productivity

• Develops engaged, deep listening skills

• Ignites creativity & flashes of insight

• Balances & rewires the nervous system

• Reduces depression, chronic pain, trauma

• Enhances intuition and subtle energy systems

I have seen people have lasting shifts in physical pain, mental anguish and spiritual discomfort in a matter of minutes, through the healing power of sound. I have seen people go from looking pale and aging to vital and energetic in a matter of weeks, once they invite themselves home into their voice and their full expression. My brother and I feel very fortunate to be at the edge of a new field of music medicine and creating new healing modalities to serve the human voice complex.

Science is still catching up to the quantum healing potential of sound, frequency and music. The ancients knew it well. Thank you for joining me in my effort to remember.

I appreciate you reading this post, commenting and sharing it.

FURTHER READING

John Hopkins on youthful brains and music: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/keep-your-brain-young-with-music

Music improves memory: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4197792/

Music and Alzheimer’s: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5267457/

Music for Schizophrenia: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28553702/

Music and mental health: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364661313000491

Music and trauma/PTSD: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468749922000199

Music and stroke rehab: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2095496422000528

Musical cosmology and oncology: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S209549642200005X

Improved speech in elderly: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2021.696240/full

Music and depression: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5500733/