Diane: Let's talk about how sound affects our emotions.

Tom: A good place to begin this discussion is with the cutting-edge work of Manfred Clyne, because his research is measurable and reproducible.

Clyne, a brilliant pianist from Australia, discovered he could make people cry by how he played the piano. It wasn't what he was playing that affected people, but how he played it. This realization led him to do research on what exactly was creating this effect.[1]

Clyne's research led to a his Sentic Form Theory,[2] which is basically the study of the relationship between pressure waves[3] and emotion.

Diane: And so it is the emotions produced by sound that have an effect upon our health?

Tom: Yes. Sound affects our emotions, and emotions have an effect upon the systems of the body — the immune and nervous systems. And the response can be a balancing, parasympathetic effect, or an activating, sympathetic effect.

Diane: Does this mean that everyone reacts the same? Would soothing music always be soothing to everyone?

Tom: Not always. When you look at music and sound as having a healing effect, it gets complex, because you are dealing with individuals.

In my psychotherapy practice I used to play Pachelbel's Canon as general relaxation music until one of my patients became very upset. His mother had died while that music was playing, and for him it was not relaxing.

Also, although most people have a sympathetic, fight-or-flight response to stress, it's not true of everyone. For example, I am someone who has a parasympathetic, relaxation response to stress. I put myself through school playing music in a rock band, and while everyone else was pacing around before going on stage, I could be found leaning against the back wall, hardly able to stay awake. The manager would come by and tell everyone, "Calm down, calm down," and then he'd come to me and say, "Calm up, Tom, calm up."

If someone goes into a parasympathetic response to stress, there is a tendency not to move — to hole up, sleep, or eat — whereas people who have a sympathetic nervous system response cannot eat during a stressful situation, and they may not be able to sleep. They become "hyper."

So while some people need to be stimulated in order to come into balance, others are already so stimulated and hyper that they need to come into a more parasympathetic response.

Does that make sense?

Diane: Yes, it does.

Tom: That said, most people do feel better when they are feeling appreciation, calmness, and peace — as opposed to the discordant emotions of anger, hostility, and fear.

And if you are unable in your current situation to access a positive emotion, you can experience that emotion through the effect of music or sound — putting on an evocative CD, or listening to a concert.

That's the power of sound and music to create an emotional response, which then creates a physiological response.

Diane: Can you relate any of this to the new information that's coming through about the heart's role in our consciousness?

Tom: When a person experiences a positive emotion like appreciation or gratitude, there is a type of rhythm produced by the heart muscle. And when a person experiences discordant emotions, there is a tendency for those rhythms in the heart to change.

When you analyze the heart rhythm with an EKG, you find there are immense complexities in its electromagnetic fields. When a person is experiencing what we might recognize as discordant emotions, those complex fields are distinctly different than when that same person is experiencing a coherent, positive emotion.

Emotions also affect brain processing, because the vagus nerve that goes into the heart then goes to the temporal lobes of the brain. And it's been found that when a person comes out of an incoherent emotion into a coherent emotion, the quality of their thinking actually changes.

Diane: So how might this show up behaviorally? Would it be like when someone gets explosively angry and then all of a sudden isn't upset any more and becomes lethargic?

Tom: Exactly. If you look at people who commit crimes of rage, many times — after the rage is over and they've done whatever they've done — they will say, "What was I doing? What was I thinking?" They are literally not the same person. They were thinking in an agitated state, and that's different from the normal way of thinking and feeling.

The HeartMath people[4] call it "freeze frame," where you stop an emotion dead in its tracks and counter it with appreciation.

I mention the HeartMath work in this context because it offers another piece of the research that shows how emotion affects our physiology and immune system, and supports what we were originally discussing with Manfred Clyne's work.

Diane: Tell me about how stress affects the immune system.

Tom: Well, there's a lot of research in this field, which is called psychoneuroimmunology — the study of the effects of mental and emotional experiences on the immune system.

I had a very interesting experience when my mother died, about 30 years ago now. I was in my teens and had suffered severe allergies prior to this time. But I had changed my diet and lifestyle, and my hay fever had gone away. Then my mother died, in the spring, and all of a sudden I had hayfever again.

Many years later, I was doing some inner work on this, and I made contact with that younger part of myself through creative visualization. I discovered he was bereft that his mother was not there and he could no longer talk to her.

To work with this, I created an environment, using sound, music, and creative visualization, where my mother was back and that younger part of myself could talk to her and be with her again.

Of course, my mother was still dead. But in my mind, she was there with this younger part of myself. I came out of this visualization — and the allergies stopped!

That is an example of how my immune system was tuned to a higher level of functioning. I created an experience where part of me could contact the grief of losing my mother. And listening to the music that reinforced those emotions literally changed how my immune system was functioning.

Diane: I get it. It reminds me of the Disney rides where the images capture your peripheral vision, and as you fly over the Grand Canyon you think you're really there. You experience all the emotions and sensations as if you were flying or falling, or whatever. I know I always feel nauseous, and yet it isn't even real!

Tom: It's the same thing. Sound and music masterfully orchestrated can create changes in emotional response. And if the change is to a positive feeling, it can generate a healing effect in the immune system.

Diane: So why aren't they using this more in hospitals?

Tom: More and more hospitals are using it. But the truth is, until someone can find a way to make a buck out of it, sound healing won't be used as extensively as pharmaceuticals are. But some hospitals and clinics are using it, and we'll begin to see a lot more sound healing under what is called "adjunctive therapies."

Diane: Finally.

Tom: Yes, finally. I had a couple of friends in the field, and they said what actually happens is, patients are demanding it, and are leaving the hospitals to get alternative therapy. So the hospitals are deciding they need to incorporate sound healing to please their patients. So although there is a small recognition of the validity of what we might call "soft therapies," most of the progress is driven by economics.

In the meantime, the readers of the Spirit of Ma'at can actually use this information to their own benefit without having to go to a clinician. They can find music that for them elicits a positive emotional response, and listen to that music.

Diane: What are the effects of sacred sounds and chanting?

Tom: There is an interesting story about that. It concerns a French MD named Tomatis who made a radical shift early in his career to focusing on sound — its effect on the inner ear and its ultimate effect on brain function and health.

The shift happened when the abbot of a monastery outside Paris called Dr. Tomatis to find out why the monks were all depressed and were not eating or sleeping.

When Dr. Tomatis got to the monastery, he learned that the abbot had recently forbidden the monks' practice of chanting, feeling that it was too Medieval — a thing of the past.

Well, this was a silent order — so now there was no auditory stimulation at all! Until then, the only auditory stimulation had been the high-frequency sounds that occur in Gregorian chanting. When that disappeared, the monks got depressed.

When, upon Dr. Tomatis's suggestion, the monks began to sing again, their depression lifted. This led him to question whether there was something about higher-pitched music that might account for these experiences. He then discovered an entire body of knowledge based on the inner ear and the fine hairs inside it. Each of these hairs has a different frequency band it responds to. He discovered that high-frequency music thus stimulates the ear, and therefore the brain, in very precise ways.

Diane: Would you comment about how the sounds of nature affect us?

Tom: There are several things that are interesting about that. I was in a psychoimmunology program once for professionals, and there was a patient who'd had a stress disorder. He'd tried many different therapies and nothing seemed to work.

He told us about how he had gone to the country for two weeks just to get away from everything. It was spring, and the crickets were singing. He would sit outside at twilight and listen for hours at a time to these crickets, and again in the morning. When he left, his stress disorder was gone. He said the crickets healed him.

From a scientific viewpoint, this was due to the effect of super-high frequencies. Recently, someone sent me a recording of crickets, and if you play it at the regular speed you recognize them as regular crickets. But if you slow it down, the recording sounds like a choir of angels singing. So the harmonics within the cricket sounds are extremely complex.

Diane: I'm remembering a program I watched recently on the low-frequency sounds that elephants make — ones that are so low humans can't hear them.

Tom: Yes, and when you bring up that low tone it actually sounds like crickets.

Diane: Wow, that's wild!

Tom: Yes, it is. It shows the wide frequency of sound in nature and how those natural sounds can speak to us.

I think that's why the nature sound recordings are so popular. Because we've become disconnected with nature in our large cities. We don't hear the rhythms and sounds quite so easily there. So when we buy recordings, we are trying to connect with that "something" we are so deeply a part of. And there is scientific basis for the effects of these sounds on the brain and thus for their effects on our well-being.

Diane: What about the effects of the human speaking voice?

Tom: If you lowered human speech or sped it up, you'd probably hear interesting sounds, as you do with the crickets or the elephants. Our voices have overtones that we do not consciously hear, but which still have an effect.

For instance, some people have a voice that is inherently soothing, and there are other people's voices that rub us the wrong way. It doesn't matter what that person says, the tonality will make us cringe.

Diane: Yes, I know what you mean. So you're saying it's an individual response?

Tom: Yes. And the same is true with nature sounds. One person might listen to crickets and have a miraculous healing, and another person might be driven crazy. Different qualities of sound have varying effects depending on the individual response.

Diane: Let's talk about subliminal sound — those sounds that are inaudible.

Tom: Subliminal sounds are sounds that occur just below the threshold of hearing — but we still respond to them.

Diane: So we actually do hear subliminal sound?

Tom: We don't hear it consciously, but we respond to it.

There are two types of subliminal auditory signals: sounds and messages. Subliminal sounds are used sometimes in psychoacoustic recordings. You don't actually hear the sound, but it creates a response in, the RAS (reticular activating system) of the brain, because when anything new comes in the RAS is alerted and that creates a physiological response.

Subliminal messages are spoken words recorded just below the level of hearing. But even this is a general explanation, because some people have better acuity of hearing and can actually hear the subliminal messages where others cannot.

Back in the 1980s, when I had the Psychoacoustic Brain Research company, I was asked to replicate a Canadian study that was done on subliminal messages. A university here in the United States wanted to know if the Canadian study could be reproduced, because it showed that subliminal messages do have a measurable effect.

We were not able to replicate the study's results, and this told us that auditory messages played subliminally do not create the desired effect or change in behavior. That's why I don't use subliminal messages in my recordings now.

But there are companies that make subliminal recordings on CDs that are used by regular people, on topics like "how to grow hair," or "how to become a genius."

And there are companies that are actually making and marketing auditory subliminal messages used by department stores to lessen the amount of shoplifting. I haven't seen the data on these, but I've heard that some of the stores report a decrease in shoplifting since playing these tapes.

Diane: I thought those tapes were illegal.

Tom: It is illegal to use subliminals in visual advertising. But there is no law about doing it auditorily. That's my understanding, anyway.

Diane: If a subliminal message is inaudible, what is receiving the message?

Tom: It's not inaudible. You do hear it, but you're not consciously hearing it.

Diane: You mean that our senses are so acute, we can perceive sounds below the level of consciousness? Is this what you're saying?

Tom: Yes. But the nature of this "something" that is actually perceiving these sounds is still being discovered in the world of science. The jury is still out.

Diane: What do you think it means?

Tom: I think there is a part of our consciousness that is nonlocal, and is aware of many more things than we consciously allow ourselves to experience at any one given moment.

You see this a lot in indigenous peoples. They are more aware of their nonlocal aspects of self, and are able to receive information from many areas of their lives. They seem to have a better way to listen to the environment. For most westernized, postindustrial people, this awareness has been bred out of us because we don't need it in our environment to survive.

When you're in the city type of jungle, you need different kinds of cues than you do in an environmental jungle. When you experience survival as a very moment-to-moment endeavor, I think you develop a strong ability to sense the nonlocal aspects of consciousness and to receive cues from many more areas than you normally would. Like guys living on the street, the survival of indigenous people depends on what they do or don't do in the moment.

Diane: And soldiers in wartime as well. . .?

Tom: Yes, they'd have to develop that ability if they were in the front lines. So I think those abilities develop or stay dormant depending on one's environment.

Diane: So now let's move on to talk about the planets and the sounds they make.

Tom: My first experience with the sounds of the planets was at the University of North Carolina planetarium. They did a live broadcast from the Voyager satellite. We were able to see the images of the planets and hear their electromagnetic sounds.

It was extraordinary! Each planet had a distinctly different signature or song. So the Music of the Spheres, from the standpoint of science, is very clear. Planets are literally emitting electromagnetic vibrations that can become audible sound simply by stepping down the frequencies.

The Ancients refer to the Music of the Spheres as celestial music. But their access was through intuition rather than modern electronic equipment. They would delve into a place within themselves that was connected to the celestial and would experience the sounds and the music.

Diane: Did someone take the space sounds and transpose them into music?

Tom: Yes, they used an electromagnetic microphone, recorded the planets, then stepped the recordings down into the audible sound range. The electromagnetic vibration was up in the higher keys, above our range of hearing, but when they halved the frequency, and did so again, it came down into audible ranges. The ratios are the same, they're just at a lower frequency.

The Music of the Spheres is not just those of the planets. Sounds are emitted by every atom. Everything that vibrates has sound. There is an ancient yoga of sound which is called Nada Yoga. There is also a term called "Nada Brahma" which means "the world is sound"; sound being understood to mean vibration.

Diane: So everything is sound.

Tom: Everything that exists has a sound or vibration, yes. The scientific way of looking at this is to understand that sound occurs only in a medium that can carry it — like air, for instance. If I were to talk to you in a vacuum, you wouldn't be able to hear. There would be no sound, even though my vocal cords would be vibrating. So to clarify this again, the scientific definition of sound is vibration with a medium that carries it. But you can have a vibration without sound.

Diane: So if someone were hearing-impaired, would there be sound?

Tom: There would be vibration. I have worked with a few hearing- impaired people, and if they get up very close and feel the vibration, it has an effect that is very positive for them. But they don't "hear" anything.

When we go back to the ancient state of Nada Brahma, "the world is sound," the actually meaning was "vibration." So everything that exists is vibration — otherwise it wouldn't exist.

The atomic and subatomic particles that make up every object or animal are vibration, and all are creating sound. Intuitive people, if they attune their senses, can actually feel or sense or hear these vibrations. This is what is called clairaudience or "inner hearing."

Diane: Do you think that each of us has our own signature sound, as well?

Tom: Oh, yes.

Diane: And how would we know what it was?

Tom: There are a couple of ways to talk about that.

In the study of cymatics, which was Hans Jenny's[5] work, he did ground-breaking research on how sound creates standing wave patterns in different mediums like powders and sand. It is very interesting work.

Basically, what cymatics demonstrated beyond a doubt was that there were standing wave patterns created in all types of materials just from the effect of sound or vibration.

The water in our cells has standing wave patterns, and so do all the liquids and fluids in the body. We have organs that are each constantly emitting sounds. The heart is beating, emitting complex rhythms. The lungs, the fluids moving through the body — the blood and the lymph — all are creating sounds that are distinct to the person. In addition, there are sounds created from molecules.

Part of cymatic medicine, which came out of Hans Jenny's work and is used a lot in England, says that each of the body's organs emits specific sounds that have a specific auditory signature (see also Cymatics Today).

A well-known persons who has done some amazing research in this area is Sharri Edwards. Her work involved measuring the human voice to see if there were missing frequencies. When those missing frequencies were played back to the person, in many instances that person enjoyed renewed health.

There is another researcher by the name of Jeffrey Thompson who has done some major work in the area of missing auditory frequencies and its effect on intelligence and well being. There are many different people, each working on a slice of the puzzle.

Diane: So what would you suggest as a beginning practice for us to increase our sense of well being and health?

Tom: One approach is to self-determine when you are under stress, then unwind those emotions through your voice. This technique can be very helpful. When you are really upset and don't know how to deal with it, you simply focus on the feeling as fully as possible. Instead of trying to avoid the feeling, breathe into it; then let sound come out through your voice. Keep breathing into the feeling, then breathing out sound. The sound will change, and as it does you will feel the stress dissipating.

Here's an example of the effects of this technique. I was teaching my workshop in Alaska, and a woman had just gotten off kidney dialysis and was preparing to have her name put on a list for a kidney transplant. She came to the workshop with kidney pain, and asked to be the subject for my demonstration.

When she started, her voice became like that of a child — crying, then moaning.

When she was done, her kidney pain was gone.

What was interesting was that she had gone back to a childhood memory in which her stepfather had to baby-sit her. He didn't like her, and instead of feeding her, he threw food at her. This created a fear of him which went into her kidneys. She felt that this was when the whole issue of her kidney disease began.

By using her voice to unwind the emotions she was experiencing, she was able to neutralize those feelings and bring herself back to a place of calm. What was interesting from the physical standpoint was that her physical pain disappeared.

Now I don't know what happened to her after that. But the actual pain she was feeling at that moment was completely gone, and she felt it was miraculous. This is the power we hold in our voice.

We can express emotion either by moving or making sound or both. The best thing is to combine both movement and sound if possible. I've found that good time to do the voice work is while driving, because no one can hear us.

Diane: Terrific. Thanks Tom.

For information on the work of Tom Kenyon, look up his website at TomKenyon.com.

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