​The word “healing”, from the Old English, means to restore to sound health. In our Western medical tradition, healing is often thought of as a cure, an eradication—that we hope will be permanent—of an unwanted condition that compromises our health. Some of us believe that healing is the successful, inalienable outcome of treating a condition, injury, disease, or mental challenge; a finality that returns us to a state of being we enjoyed prior to the compromise of our body or mind. But this is not what healing is about.

Healing is an adaptation or an amelioration: a response of the body to a disruption (injury, disease, trauma) of its normal, reliable, and predictable functionality. Healing processes challenge and change the body in ways that allow it to continue to function—positively and in ways benefiting the body (and mind)—but never returns the offended body-part to its original condition. At best, an injury healed is an altered, temporary condition, like all things in life. An art conservator attempts to arrest the decay of a painting at a moment in time, protecting it from further damage and the aging effects of time by mitigating stresses on the painting, like fluctuations of temperature, exposure to pollutants, and even the humid breathing of museum visitors, but ultimately these efforts fail sometime in the future. The human body, with its amazing ability to fight disease and repair breaches in its functioning, acts as a conservator of our material selves; however, when we are treated for an injury or disease, the repair does not restore the body to its original condition. When breached by a cut, our skin makes a scar. We break the fifth metatarsal bone of our foot and discover that when it’s healed, our little toe will no longer touch the ground because, in the process of healing, the metatarsal bone has shortened. Surviving a liver transplant may result in the need for tri-weekly dialysis treatments for the rest of the patient’s life. A cancer survivor may have lost a body part during the course of treatment, but lives to an old age.

I encourage you to think of Sound Therapy as a healing experience in these terms. Sound Therapy will not restore you to an earlier self devoid of pain, injury, and free of emotional trauma. But what it does do is improve your functionality in the present and may, over the course of a few sessions, result in a positive shift in the experience of pain, trauma, and even mental functioning. As a Sound Therapy recipient, you must participate in the healing of yourself, just as you would if you had a broken bone or a cancer diagnosis. Ultimately, the work is yours and the desire to heal—whatever that means to you—is your responsibility. Sound Therapy is a tool among many that will guide you in that process. 

​“Touch is a very powerful rewarding stimulus — just like your chocolate that you find in your cupboard at home." —Matt Hertenstein, experimental psychologist at DePauw University in Indiana.
 
In 1734, Johann Wilhelm Albrecht explained the effect of sound on the body as happening quite independently of the ear, though the actual physiological effect described by Albrecht was not discovered until the nineteenth century. Pacinian corpuscles, named after its discoverer, Italian anatomist Filippo Pacini (1812-1883), are mechanoreceptors located in the skin—the body’s largest organ—and are responsible for sensitivity to pressure, touch, and vibrations. Pacinian corpuscles are composed of concentric rings, kind of like an onion or a tree, and pressure from vibrations causes the rings to deform. Outer layers start to spin and sodium ion channels open, allowing an influx of sodium ions. A buildup of sodium sends signals, via nerves that connect to our central nervous system, to the nerve bundle deep in the brain called the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve branches to the lungs, heart, upper digestive tract, and other organs of the chest and abdomen; when we faint, an over-active vagus nerve has lowered our heart rate and blood pressure too much and we lose consciousness. The vagus nerve communicates with the diaphragm, so with deep breaths, a person will feel more relaxed. The vagus nerve also sends anti-inflammatory signals to parts of the body and helps manage fear, stress, and anxiety. When you know something “in your gut,” the vagus nerve is talking to you.
     In my sound therapy practice, I use Acutonics tuning forks not only to stimulate acupuncture points and meridians with sound, but also to convey soothing signals to the brain wherever sound touches the skin. (Interestingly, a Pacinian corpuscle’s optimal sensitivity is 250 Hz, approximately a B in the Western musical system, the tone of the Acutonics Sun fork.) Additional “transmitters,” such as Tibetan bowls, can produce their own palliative effects. So sound therapy is also touch therapy. It is well-known that supportive touch can produce positive outcomes, and the stimulation of Pacinian corpuscles is the main player in this transformation. In addition to reducing our stress response, vibrational sound therapy may trigger the release of oxytocin (as demonstrated in touch therapy research), and oxytocin influences trust behaviors, among other things. A region of the brain called the orbital frontal cortex—the area that responds to sweet tastes and pleasant smells—activates in response to (friendly) touch; thus, touch is a powerful rewarding stimulus, “just like your chocolate that you find in your cupboard at home."
     The tiny Pacinian corpuscle, and its function in interpreting vibration, points to the mystery and profundity of sound as a therapeutic tool. My hope is that more and more researchers will acknowledge these connections between vibrations and the functioning of the body and be inspired to study the effects initiated by the touch of a simple sound wave. 

The structures of A, B and Z-DNA.
Content is available under Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 3.0

Twentieth Century astrophysicists must have intuited this connection between emotion, biology, and the cosmic harmonies when the “Golden Record” accompanied a Voyager launch sent into space in 1977.  This circular gold disc, made to resemble an LP vinyl recording, included a collection of natural sounds, spoken greetings in 55 different languages, and compositions by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Navajo Indians, “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry, Indian classical vocalist Kesarbai Kerkar, and others.  The implication is that music is more than the universal language; it’s the inter-galactic language.  And sound is the primordial constant that connects us all.

For more information about the geometries of DNA, see “Nucleic Acid Double Helix”:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleic_acid_double_helix#


1 Wakefield, Mary Elizabeth. “Facial Soundscapes: Harmonic RenewalTM”.
2 von Franz, Marie-Louise. Number and Time: Reflections Leading Towards a Unification of Psychology and Physics. Rider & Company, London, 1974, page 19 and 303.
3 Radio Lab.  http://www.radiolab.org/2007/sep/24/

On a trip to Brasil in January of 2014, my daughter Alaine and I hiked the Atlantic Rainforest surrounding Paranapiacaba, a tiny railroad town near São Paulo that has seen better days.  Per State Park regulations, no one can enter the rainforest without a monitor ambiental (environmental monitor), and ours was a big, loquacious, adventuresome man named Marcos Vital.  During our hike, Marcos asked what I “do” back in the United States, and Alaine explained some of the principles of sound therapy with tuning forks.  We were standing near a cachoeira (waterfall) that emptied into a small stream when Marcos walked to the edge of the stream and picked up two river rocks, each rock having one rather flat side.  Then he told us this story.

Where I come from in Brasil, we use vibrations to tell us where we have problems in our bodies.  We wade into a stream or pond holding two rocks like these, one in each hand.  When the water covers most of our body, we strike the two rocks together in the water, and this creates vibrations that the body absorbs where a problem exists.  The vibrations go straight to those areas and you can feel them being taken in.  I have problems with my legs from an old injury, and that’s where the vibrations go when I strike the rocks.  The vibrations help heal the parts of the body that are weak.