​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. 

In collaboration with Acupuncturists Without Borders, headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Laurie offers free Acutonics to veterans and their immediate families every first and third Thursdays of the month.  The clinics are held at The Source, 1111 Carlisle Blvd. in Albuquerque, at 5:15 in the Blue Room.  Acupuncturist Terrie Harris inserts five needles in each participant's ear, using a stress protocol, and Laurie applies sound intervals to acupuncture points and meridians with tuning forks.  Participants sit quietly for 45 minutes and listen to relaxing music.

In December of 2016, Laurie and Terrie were awarded a grant from the Santa Fe Community Foundation to start a free clinic at the Veterans Resource Center at Santa Fe Community College.  All veterans and their immediate families are welcome and encouraged to take advantage of these free services.
​

https://acutonics.com/news/profile-laurie-mcdonald/

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      Cure: A Journey Into the Science of Mind and Body by Jo Marchant may be an important new addition to the literature of the mind-body connection.  In a Wall Street Journal article from Tuesday, February 16, 2016, she writes about a 75-year-old woman, formerly an avid golfer, who slipped in her kitchen, damaged a vertebra, and in desperation volunteered for an experimental surgery.  She was soon back on the golf course, but what she didn't know when she took part in the trial was that the surgery was a sham, and what she experienced is known in conventional medicine as a placebo effect.
      "Ms. Marchant's Cure is a cautious, scrupulous investigation of how the brain can help heal our bodies.  It is also an important look at the flip side of this coin, which is how brains damaged by stress may make bodies succumb to physical illness or accelerated aging."
     One of her studies investigates the relationship between income and well-being.  "Poverty and lack of control leads to chronic stress, which damages the cardiovascular system and hinders the immune system.  Chronic stress even effects our ability to maintain the integrity of our chromosomes.  According to Ms. Marchant, 'feeling stressed doesn't just make us ill.  It ages us.'"
      Although some mainstream medical practitioners may question the effectiveness of complementary/alternative approaches,"... patients may turn to alternative therapies because conventional physicians sometimes do a lousy job of providing attention and empathy.  But Cure points a way toward a future in which the two camps might work together.  After all, any medicine that makes a patient better, whether conventional, alternative, or placebo, is simply medicine."

from The Wall Street Journal
Friday, February 12, 2016

Clash of black holes helps team confirm unproven portion
of relativity theory
by Robert Lee Hotz

      “After decades of searching, scientists on Thursday announced they have directly detected gravitational waves for the first time, caused by a cosmic clash of black holes so violent, its shock waves rippled the ethereal fabric of space and time across a billion light years of distance…  As they travel, gravitational waves stretch and compress space, encoding the physics of the event that produced them.  They can be translated into sounds.
      ‘Not only can we explore the universe with neutrinos and cosmic rays, see it with light across a huge range of wavelengths, but we can now hear it, too, with gravitational waves,’ said Caltech physicist Chiara M. F. Mingarelli, who studies them.  ‘Imagine hearing the universe for the first time.’”

Not mentioned in the article is the pitch at which the universe vibrates, so I held my Korg chromatic tuner up to a speaker as the tone played on the BBC’s report of the discovery.  The pitch registered as an “A”.

Greek philosopher Pythagoras (c. 570 – c. 495 BCE) proposed that the Sun, the Moon, and the planets in our solar system all emit their own unique “hum” or orbital resonance in relation to each other, creating mathematical ratios that correlate to musical intervals.  Pythagoras called it Musica Universalis, or the Music of the Spheres.  Credit is due for his insight, and to the many unconventional thinkers/experimenters interested in visualizing and audiating waveforms of all types.  

The Primordial Sound Wave:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA16881


Interpreting the “song” of a distant black hole, sung in b-flat:
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/universe/black_hole_sound.html

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2003/09sep_blackholesounds/


"Chorus" radio waves within Earth’s magnetosphere:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/rbsp/news/emfisis-chorus.html

Throughout history, musical intervals have been thought to express archetypal qualities and to create certain organizing effects by means of their numerical patterns.  The perfect fourth “touches the heart, but at the same time awakens feelings of being controlled, making people uneasy.  In the Medieval period, the perfect fourth was used in certain types of plainchant to reinforce the status quo, in which the Church had dominion over the hearts and souls of the populace.”  The perfect fifth “is opening and stimulates power and movement.  It can bring forth new life, creative ideas and rebirth.  The fifth is also the functional fulcrum within an octave, in that it can facilitate movement either to the upper tonic note or a return to the fundamental… to express openness, joy, and healing.” The octave, an interval of two notes of identical pitches with the second note twice the frequency of the first, “is restful, meditative, calming, and grounding, and represents harmonious union.”  Two notes in unison is the sound closest to “the primal cosmic union, and represents perfect serenity and peace.” 1   According to a Jungian analyst, "The pre-conscious aspect of natural numbers points to the idea of a numerical field in which individual numbers figure as energetic phenomena or rhythmical configurations…  These numbers illustrated some of the most primitive and basic forms of the spirit.  When we take into account the individual characteristics of natural numbers, we can actually demonstrate that they produce the same ordering effects in the physical and psychic realms; they therefore appear to constitute the most basic constants of nature expressing unitary psycho-physical reality."2

Without a doubt, certain intervals feel comfortable and pleasing and are perceived as unified rather than just a sum of their parts.  To demonstrate this idea physiologically, University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) lecturer and neurologist Mark Tramo performed an experiment in 1997 while at the Harvard Medical School.  Wanting to answer the question, “why does sound make us feel so strongly?” he devised a method for recording electrical impulses directly from the human auditory apparatus.  Pulsing and popping, the sound was discovered to have meter, similar to a metronome.  “When the meter of electricity is regular and even and rhythmic, it’s interpreted as a sound we like, like a perfect fifth.  When the meter is jagged or irregular, we hear it as a sound we generally don’t like, like a minor 2nd.  It feels chaotic and makes a person feel uncomfortable.  There is a relationship between the kind of electricity the sound produces and how we feel about the sound.”3

At the molecular level, a possible explanation regarding how we feel about and react to sound also could be linked to our DNA.  When we examine the structure of DNA, again the Tetractys and the sound intervals it represents is implied.  A strand of DNA (1) is a pair of molecules that intertwine to form the double helix (2), and although one geometry predominates, in nature the double helix can assume three slightly different geometries: A-DNA, B-DNA, and Z-DNA (3).  Nucleotides, which are subunits of DNA, contain four base chemicals represented by the letters A,T,C,G (4).  In the B-form of DNA, the one which is believed to predominate in our cells, the double helix makes a complete turn in just over ten nucleotide pairs.  Like in the Tetractys, the pattern 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10 emerges. 

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/

Please take the time to watch this important sixteen minute TED Talk about
the HPA Axis and the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study.  From the TED
Web site:

"Childhood trauma isn’t something you just get over as you grow up. Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris explains that the repeated stress of abuse, neglect and parents struggling with mental health or substance abuse issues
has real, tangible effects on the development of the brain.  This unfolds across a lifetime, to the point where those who’ve experienced high levels of trauma are at triple the risk for heart disease and lung cancer.  An impassioned plea
for pediatric medicine to confront the prevention and treatment of trauma, head-on."

http://www.ted.com/talks/nadine_burke_harris_how_childhood_trauma_affects_health_across_a_lifetime

Nadine Burke Harris, a prominent American pediatrician, explains the destructive role the HPA Axis plays in repetitive stress response, linking her findings with the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, one of the largest investigations ever conducted to assess associations between childhood maltreatment and later-life health issues.  The ACE is a collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente's Health Appraisal Clinic in San Diego.  For more information, or to access questionnaires used in the study, visit:

http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/acestudy/inc

On this Web site, please see "Sound & the Body" for more information about Vibrational Sound Healing and mitigating the HPA Axis stress response.

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.