The first thing I would like to share is about sound healing in general.
As long as we’re watching John Cage and questioning the definition of music, I would like to share an ancient practice of sound healing. Much like the new emergence of music therapy, this is an art of healing through the vibrational frequencies of music.
Medicine and music are meeting once again to marry art and science. One of the interesting things Darren Hall says is that sound healing is mostly a standard patient/practitioner relationship, BUT it doesn’t have to be! The beautiful thing about it is that anyone can create the sounds. This means that a few friends could get together and play sounds to promote a balancing and healing energy through the vibrations. I’m assuming if you’re reading this, you’re a musician at SCSU. Well, guess what? You’re a doctor too!
There are certain notes that work with the chakras in our bodies. Chakras are like centers of energy and within the body there are 7 that relate to different aspects of our self, such as sense of security, sense of confidence, love, communication, intuition, and overall sense of connectedness. The chakra system is like an Eastern psychology/biology/spirituality all encompassed in one ancient teaching.
So the diatonic scale can be used to open certain blocks in your body, re-balance ourselves, and help us address the problems in our lives. The quartz crystal singing bowls play at a perfect tone, so the idea is that playing them will remind your body of the perfect pitch when we get out of balance.
How can music and compositions open up realms of consciousness? Darren says when we open up the conversation about music, we start to realize the extent that music really touches us emotionally and helps us to dive deeper within ourselves. With one note or one musical composition, he says you can truly change someone’s life, and from a physics point of view, the vibrations do affect our bodies.
Yes, it could be a bit spiritual, but when music provokes an emotion beyond the physical vibration of the air, what else could music be but a spiritual practice?
2. (Last week’s blog)
Living Structures Sound Chamber Dome
This project is a sound chamber called the Living Earth Dome. The group that made it is called Living Earth Structures and they make all kinds of buildings, ovens, hot tubs, and benches all out of natural materials like cob, adobe, clay and bamboo.
One of the creators says “This is going to change the world. We’ll have wellness centers in the future and not just regular [pharmaceutical] medicine.”
This chamber structure is made of bamboo, bent to create a tipi with a rounded top, then the whole solid portion of the wall is made of cob and adobe clay. The acoustics inside the dome are the main feature of the structure, and it is going to be used by a sound healing practitioner and his/her patient.
This sounds more like architecture.. how does it relate to music? The acoustics of the sound chamber are perfect for encapsulating one’s self inside the sound. At 13:13 in the video, you can see them use a quartz crystal singing bowl and their voices. The whole point for sound healing is to focus all intention on the sound, and for this reason it’s important to have complete isolation from other sounds (street noises, dogs barking, etc.). In the same way that an orchestra hall is created to direct sound in the most beautiful way at the audience in the seats, the sound chamber is meant for a small group of people to come together in a tight spacious space to experience fully the healing sounds of the human voice, singing bowls, zen chimes, shaman drumming, or any number of sacred sounds and instruments that have been used since humans first became spiritually “in tune” on this planet.
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