Sounds That Can Heal

We all know how strongly sounds can affect us. Softly spoken words can melt our hearts, the jarring sound of a glass crashing on the floor or the sweetest of all: the trembling footsteps of a toddler..

The question is..

These sounds, and how they affect us, is it all in our heads? Are these sounds only as good or bad as we ascribe them to be, or are there objective measurements of how sound affects us?



This article will summarize my findings on beneficial music, sounds and frequencies. I hope that it will help you bring more beautiful sounds in your life because I personally know how big of a difference it can make: I have personally seen how the soft tones of this very website calms children and reduces hyper-activity very effectively.

Sounds That You Can't Hear

First of all, the idea that sounds affect us through us hearing them, mentally processing them into thoughts which then affects us is something we must lay to rest.

Let me recount some examples of the contrary for you..

We can start with a recent study^[1] which showed that human breast cancer cells, which obviously are not equipped for auditory processing, significantly changed behavior and hormone activity based on sounds.

Another good example are infrasounds; the human ear can hear everything from 20 Hz to 20 000 Hz so the word infrasound refers to everything below 20 Hz.

If humans could only be affected by our subjective experience of sounds, we should not be affected by infrasound.

"There is no reliable evidence that infrasounds below the hearing threshold produce physiological or psychological effects"
- World Health Organization

If you're like me, you naturally assume that the truth is the absolute opposite of what the WHO says, and indeed that rule seems to be accurate here.. Take a look at the image below, which depicts human brain activation from 12 Hz^[2]



Some of the zones being activated in the brain scan above are involved in auditory processing, others with emotional control and the autonomic nervous system.

There are plenty of animal studies on infrasound, with some really grim effects such as reduced learning capability and down-regulated protein expression in rats from 16 Hz^[3] and significantly lowered testosterone & libido^[4] but the worst study is probably the one where they showed that infrasound induced vascular fibrosis^[5]

There are few studies proving the safety of infrasound, most of the controversy centers around the most egregious offendor, wind power plants. Our best shot at a fair evaluation of the safety of wind power plants is a grassroots organization formed by people living next to wind farms, who is conducting a large study, check it out at WindFarmStudy.com

It would upset the status quo greatly if it were accepted that infrasound can be unhealthy, yet there is plenty of evidence that supports this. If you prefer studies with large human data sets, there was a British double concert where they tried adding 17 Hz and people felt significant discomfort^[7]

I always find it amusing how the academic scientists are obsessed with reducing matters, to a comical degree. When they see behavioral changes in people from infrasound, their instinct is to look for hidden mechanisms in the ear which could theoretically react to infrasound.. I believe our time is better spent looking in the opposite direction, where we assume that a direct interaction from the sound upon any cell is the mechanism.

As a sidenote, the psychological effects of infrasound are sometimes cited as a possible mechanism for paranormal phenomenon. There is a chapter on Wikipedia about how infrasound can cause ghost sightings something I have also seen mentioned in the police investigations of the infamous Dyatlov Pass incident

Testosterone

This might surprise you, but music lowers Testosterone in men while increasing it in women which seems to be true no matter which genre of music you play^[8]





As you can see, the least detrimental music in both genders were Gregorian Chants and this is typically the case: spiritual and religious music is the most healthy.

Perhaps music can be considered as a way to defuse and regulate social tension in society rather than something that inherently makes everything better with its unceasing presence.

However, we must always remember that any study can just give us a tiny speck of the big picture, and I would be sad if anyone read this and concluded that music is bad! For instance, in this study the participants were *asked* to play music - it may not be the same thing when you spontaneously get and urge to do it on your own accord.

The point is that music CAN be bad.

It doesn't have to be! Music can be good. The purpose of this article isn't to scare you, it's to help you improve the quality of the sounds in your life. Which brings us to our next subject..

440 vs. 432

You have probably heard about the 'conspiracy theory' that 'the powers that be' changed the tuning of music from A=432Hz to A=440Hz around 100 years ago to deliberately make it worse. I will not speculate about whether this change was purposefully made to harm us or not, but it does seem to be factual that music tuned to 432Hz is better. There are double-blinded studies showing that 432 Hz music lowers heart rate, respiration rate^[9,10] and stress level^[11]

Another study^[12] shows that sleep quality improves with 432Hz music, without affecting time-to-fall-asleep which together with EEG scans implies that the mechanism is a direct calming on your brainwaves.

Silence

So, music can be both good and bad..

What do we know about silence?

The answer is that it depends on what you compare it to.

If the comparison is between silence and the anthropogenic sounds of modern society: five cars driving by, a dishwasher, the neighbours laundry machine, the subtle buzz of the light switch dimmer..

If that is the alternative, silence is golden.

However, think about where we came from, before we poured concrete all over it. We lived in nature, and is nature quiet? No. It's not even quiet when calmness peaks during the night.

There is one time when nature goes dead quiet.. when a predator arrives it spooks everyone. An eerie silence means looming danger, this is still coded intuitively in us, something often utilized in horror movies. Silence can breed anxiety. This is one of the biggest reasons why people listen to so much music nowadays, as a band-aid on their chronic stress levels.

Healing Frequencies

Let's sum up where we are. Sensitive people has been telling us since the dawn of music that certain frequencies are not just more agreeable, but has a direct healing effect on the body. As I detail throughout this article, science is clearly proving these people right.

In a grander context, that is how it typically looks in any given area. Science rarely, if ever breaks new ground in the sense of going beyond what intuitive people were saying all along. You might think that 'intuitive people' a narcissistic turn of phrase for me to self-insert as a winner, but that is not my intention: I refer to your great grandmother's wisdom, the teachings in Holy scripture and the habits of small children before they repress their natural self-expression. I am passionate in my belief that we must pay close attention when we observe something from such sources of innate knowledge.

This is a short list of some healing frequencies. They have different sources, some of them are reconstructed from Bible passages, others from audio researchers. Six of these are called Solfeggio frequencies which is a frequent misnomer for healing frequencies in general.

174 Hz reduces physical pain, migraine and stress.

285 Hz helps heal wounds, cuts and damaged cells.

396 Hz releases you from guilt and fear.

417 Hz removes negative energy, balances your sacral chakra.

528 Hz increases love, clarity of mind and deep inner peace.

639 Hz yields closeness, friendship, understanding & tolerance.

741 Hz cleanses toxins, protects against electromagnetism.

852 Hz dissolves energetic blockages and reduces overthinking.

963 Hz strengthens intuition and balances your crown chakra.

Only one of these frequencies has been studied scientifically, and the results are quite incredible..

528 Hz

When we say 528 Hz it can refer to two different things, either the specific frequency, or music tuned to C=528 Hz. This is commonly referred to as the frequency of love and there seems to be good reason for this! If there was a "chemical of love" then it would be Oxytocin and we have a study showing that 528 Hz music significantly increases oxytocin^[13]

Remember how I mentioned earlier how most people listen to music non-stop as a way to cope with stress? Let's have a look at how 528Hz music compares to the standard 440Hz music that most people listen to:



Wow, right? You want to know something cool? You're listening to 528 Hz music right now, as the background music of this very website. Don't you feel calm and serene?

I mentioned previously how music, even 'good' music such as Mozart and Gregorian chants, reliably suppressed testosterone. So, how does 528 Hz compare?

The study^[14] that examined the response to 528 Hz actually compared to neighbouring frequencies to see if there really was something special to that particular frequency.. and here are the results:





As you see the charts above, I want you to think back about what I said earlier about intuitive people being a reliable guide forward.

Another fun thing that has been studied in human cells is alcohol, as playing 528Hz to human cells^[15] protected them against alcohol as cell viability increased with +20% and reduced oxidative stress up to 100%

Finally, I want to recommend this Spotify playlist which I play on my phone every night when I sleep. You can save the playlist offline, so you can turn on airplane mode to minimize EMF during sleep.

320 Hz

There is one very interesting study where researchers used tuning forks with different frequencies to see if it affected snails completing a maze and the difference was dramatic! The most efficient frequency was 320 Hz which decreased the maze completion time from 16 minutes to 5 minutes and the researchers described the snails as extremely active and alert^[16]

Frequency Therapy

Using frequencies in a modern medical context dates back to the censored genius Dr. Royal Raymond Rife in the 1930s, but historically we can find countless examples of healing through sound. If you've ever set foot in a church then you know the profound effect of church organs playing their ethereal tones. By the way, isn't it curious that they call them organs?

Sounds of Nature

The natural soundtrack to our lives should be animals going about their day, the swirling of water, rain, thunder, the wind rustling the trees, and so on. Certain sounds are only heard in the morning, such as a rooster crowing in the morning, while some sounds are seasonal, like the many mating calls of spring.

It is actually quite easy for you to integrate some of this in our life, because science has shown us that an abstraction of nature is much better than nothing at all. For instance, if you do not have happy birds chirping outside your window, then it would be better for you to play an .mp3 file than simply living in silence.

Here we can see the effect on Anxiety by Nature Sounds compared to silence^[17]



It should come as no surprise that aniety is decreased, but did you expect it to be almost halved? This is how our environment is supposed to sound like, this is where we belong, and returning home is only a click away.

To reinforce this point, I have attached a recording of Inakahama Beach in Japan. Listen to it for a few moments and take the feeling in. It costs you $0 to auditorily live there, or anywhere else for that matter.

It is a disgrace that our streets are not covered with speakers playing recordings of natural sounds. There is a study which shows that adding nature sounds such as bird song attenuated the negative effects from urban noise pollution such as traffic^[18]

I recommend NatureRadio.org but you can always find unlimited amounts of good material on YouTube, Spotify, SoundCloud, whatever you prefer and remember that old phones are excellent ways to play nature recordings 24/7. The ideal way is to compose a 24 hour long playlist with appropriate sounds for day and night. If you know of such a thing, please contact me immediately.

There will come a time where urban people are playing livestream audio from some nearby nature sanctuary. Perhaps a sheltered area, else you'd be scared to death when you suddenly heard a bear roaring in your living room one day..

Noise Reduction

There are two dimensions to this, the sounds being created and the environment in which the sounds resonate.

So far, we have only discussed the actual soundwaves, but the truth is that you have larger control over your environment. Ugly sounds cannot exist in nature. Try to produce an ugly sound in a forest, it won't work. To achieve something similar in your home, you want to have as many plants at home as possible, lots of wood, real wood and not synthetic glued-together crap, rugs of natural fabric, and so on.

This is a very underrated aspect of your cozy your home is. Imagine that you are a kid in a crowded school cafeteria, a typical example of sensory overload. Can you hear the horrible cacophony of clinking metal and glass, a hundred voices that echoes around the cold walls?

Contrast this against nature. Is there even such a thing as sensory overload in nature? I think we would rather experience it as pure bliss.

Cymatics

Applying a wave movement to a dish of fluid will modulate the gravity and inertia inside the fluid. If this effect is strong enough, the normally flat state of the fluid will be too unstable to remain, and a patterned shape will emerge. Depending on the frequency, the shape will be different.



This has been know since at least the 17th century^[23] follows the same principle as a specific frequency shattering a glass, or how soldiers marching in rhythm over a bridge can collapse it.

Dr. Hans Jenny is probably the person who has uncovered most in the area of cymatics^[24] and you can read a collection of his findings here.

The same thing can be illustrated with sand, which is cool since it retains the shape after the sound ceases, unlike fluids.



Consider that your entire body is made from water. Very high volume sounds will create patterns like this inside your cells, but even low volume sounds will have the same effect, it's just not visible. For instance, if the standing wave pattern in your cell water would be shaped like a wave, it would be slightly higher or lower gravity & inertia depending on where in the wave pattern the cell would be. It is ridiculous that mainstream academia considers it far-fetched that disrupting the physical parameters inside your cells have no effect upon them!

This is an emerging science, but it is clear that there is plenty of secrets to uncover. Let's take a look at a couple of cool examples.

Just as sound is made from frequency, light does, too. If you observe the planets through a telescope, you can measure the frequencies, and you can illustrate the frequency patterns by playing them as sounds to water to create cymaglyphs and you can also listen to the planetary frequencies as music.



The colors in the cymaglyphs above are added in post-production to give a better "feel" for the planets vibe. This color is visible to the naked eye when you look at the planet in a telescope. Below you can see cymaglyphs for the tones of the first octave in a piano.



Since your cells have movement inside of them, they produce sounds. These sounds can be measured, and the cymatic patterns were photographed with something called a Cymascope^[26] and there is a very interesting study^[27] where they cymatically illustrated the sounds recorded from cancer cells, compared to healthy cells:



The image above does not prove much in itself, but the fact that every cancer cell cymaglyph looks ugly and every healthy cell produces something intricate, symmetrical and beautiful does. I invite you to see the full set of photos.

Sounds of Electricity

There is something called Mains Hum which is basically the sound that electricity in your home makes. Depending on where you live, the electrical current alternates at 50Hz or 60Hz. This generates a sound at either 100Hz or 120Hz.

It's a really annoying sound, and if you have ever heard a dimmer or light switch "buzz" then you know what I am talking about: you are literally hearing the sound of the electricity.

You can use this to your advantage, because it means that even if you do not have an EMF meter (I recommend this one) you can identify many strong EMF fields in your home.

PS. Don't use Bluetooth headphones, they are very bad for you. Please do not put anything that emits strong electric fields inside your cranium. Thank you. DS.

Discuss in Forum

Go to the /sound/ forum to learn more, ask questions and to share your thoughts and ideas.

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