The Heart Of Sound

Experience healing psychoacoustic sound and music

Soma-acoustic Techniques for Healing Vibrations and Sound

– heal•ing / verb

: to make sound or whole

– so•ma / noun

: the physical body of an organism

– vi•bra•tion / noun

: a periodic motion/oscillation of the particles of an elastic body

– heal•ing soma•acous•tic vi•bra•tions / amazing physiological experience

tonal patterns that vibrate the physical aspects of the entire body in order to invoke your natural healing mechanisms and restore balance and wholeness.

One of your most extensive and pervasive senses is your sense of touch. The skin is the single largest sense perception organ of your body. It houses nerve endings that are specifically designed to respond to a variety of stimuli, such as temperature, pain, changes in pressure and... vibrations. These vibrational experiences are then relayed along the central nervous system and up the spinal column tracts to your brain. Consequently, these vibrations can make profound changes in your physiological state resulting in balance, health and well-being.

Traveling at the Speed of Sound

Sound, or vibrational patterns, need a medium through which to travel. We are accustomed to experiencing vibrational changes in pressure (i.e., sound) as they travel through air. However, sound travels five times more effectively through water than air (ever wonder why the pet store owners don't want us tapping on the glass of the fish tanks? :) and five times more effectively than that through a solid. Thus, sound travels through a solid twenty-five times better than it does through air.

In addition to this, low frequency vibrations travel through solids better than high frequencies. Consider the following example.

The top of the graph depicts a very slow, low level hum of 20Hz. This is just at the threshold of human hearing. These are the frequencies that you tend to feel more than hear. The bottom of the graph depicts a higher level frequency of 440Hz (or, A440 -- the most popular tone for tuning forks). Notice how many cycles there are in this tone compared to the long, sonorous tone above it. These fast cycles are easier to block by solid material, whereas the slower waves are both harder to block, and can actually be amplified and carried farther distances through solid material. (Now you know why you hear only the bass tones from the stereo system in the apartment above you instead of all the high-end treble and vocals. :)

Now, consider that the human body is 75% water and the rest is solid material. It is the perfect medium to transmit sound -- especially low level vibrations. We can use this to our advantage by vibrating the solid material of some structure, such as a sound therapy table. These vibrations are then transmitted through the fluids and solid mass of our body. By using recordings that are specifically designed with deep vibrational acoustic material, we can bath our bodies in a vibrational soundscape which, aside from health benefits, is extremely pleasurable and relaxing!

Deep Vibration Therapy - Sound/Vibration Table

sound table

As stated above, we have receptors in our skin that specifically convey vibrations through our nervous system. The table I use is equipped with high fidelity acoustic transducers. These are simliar to speakers except that they are designed to vibrate low frequency acoustic sound information. This is not the same type of vibration that you will find in other retail market "massage chairs" that vibrate. These chairs tend to vibrate at a fixed frequency, or "hum". You can speed up or slow down the rate at which the motor hums, but can not change the pitch of that hum, nor play music and vibrational patterns through the chair. This is a crucial and important difference in regard to a high-fidelity sound therapy table or chair.

By using psychoacoustic recordings that have been specifically designed to resonate your tissues with low frequency patterns that engage your parasympathetic relaxation response, your body can move from a state of imbalance, or "dis-ease" and be brought back into a state of balance and ease.

sound table underside

Pictured to the right is the underbelly of the sound therapy table I use. Four transducers are connected to the stereo system with bilateral left/right separation. The compositions I compose make use of this left/right separation by panning certain sound frequencies left-to-right and right-to-left, resulting in a balancing response from your body. This is just one of the techniques I use that are encoded in my recordings and have been found to be extremely effective in restoring a sense of balance to your body/mind.

Kinesthetic Tissue Resonance

Sound, as experienced kinesthetically, can have profound effects on your neurological and cellular soft tissue systems. All of your organs, tissues, and even cells, vibrate at various complex frequencies. Fabien Maman, a French composer and bio-energeticist explored and documented the influence of sound waves on the cells of the body. He found that sustained pure tones had the ability to fully disrupt cancerous cells while invigorating healthy cells. He says, "the cancer cells show evidence of cell nuclei incapable of maintaining their structure as the sound wave frequencies attack the cytoplasmic and nuclear membranes." (Fabien, 1997)

Another way of understanding your physiological response to sound is sympathetic resonance. Briefly stated, whenever two or more objects vibrate at the same or similar frequency, they form a resonant system, similar to Christian Huygen's pendulum clocks. Thus, your cellular structures and soft tissues will begin to resonate with the vibrations coursing through the sound therapy table. When those vibrations match your own unique frequency signature, your cells and soft tissue structures begin to vibrate in response and resonate your parasympathetic (relaxation) aspect of the autonomic nervous system, and thus initiate and tonify your own internal healing resources.