Be Careful When You Speak To Me Of Vibration
It frosts my cake when people tell me that low vibrational energy is no good. Please: be careful when you speak to me – or anyone – of vibration!
Where shall we draw the line?
As a piano player, I’d like to know where to draw the line on this. Musicians need those low vibrations – music needs all the audible notes – to give you a satisfying and harmonious experience. Shall I drop off all the vibrations below 432Hz, for example? Taking out about about half of the audible range of vibration would be a huge hit for music: no more bass, kick drum, and lots of mid-range sounds that include a few of the Solfeggio tones. Limiting vibrations to 432Hz and above also means the 40Hz vibration, which has been show to have benefits for inhibiting brain plaque development, would no longer be a part of the music I can make.
Gongs, singing bowls, and a great deal of the FX we experience in movies would also go by the wayside if we eliminated low-frequency vibrations. Doesn’t make sense to me; does this make sense to you?
Vibration as a metaphor for energy?
“Ah Bill!” I hear you say, “we’re speaking metaphorically. It’s not the physical vibrations we want to eliminate; it’s the energetic ones, such as fear and anger, that vibrate in ways we don’t like or want.” OK then: shall I stop playing music that evokes fear and anger? Perhaps music isn’t important to you in that way, however it’s a well-supported fact that we musicians can make fear and anger with a wide range of vibrations – frequencies – depending on how they are assembled in actual music. The shrieking violins in the sound track for the movie Psycho are high vibrations, right? And yet they evoke terror, which isn’t a “vibration” that supposedly-enlightened listeners want to hear. I respect that choice; find another movie that works for you!
Also, let’s not forget that low vibrations – say 40Hz – have overtones (musicians call them “harmonics”). Mathematically, there’s much to say about that and I won’t bore you with it here (take a deep dive at this site) except to observe that harmonics are part of the richness in organic (not digital!) sounds and help our ears as well as our entire human physiology respond to music. You can demonstrate that easily with any of the online tone generators available here: compare a pure frequency you generate with the same frequency created by a musical instrument and decide which representation of energy you prefer.
Physical or not?
It’s easy to get entrained to vibration – happens all the time. In fact, entrainment is fundamental to sound healing. The idea is that if our human systems vibrate in sync with a particular frequency, that’s a good – healing – thing. Sounds right to me, but I have a question. Which is better: isolating one specific frequency with which to entrain or allowing a wide range of frequencies in motion to support health?
Humans aren’t single-celled organisms, nor are we crystalline structures. At an organic level, we have possibly billions of micro-organisms living within our bodies, each vibrating over a variety of frequencies specific to its purpose, in combination with our more macro-structural skeleton, organs and processes. The notion that we can somehow bring all of this into alignment with one specific frequency for some beneficent purpose (healing, relaxation, up-regulation) is, first of all, physically impossible. A favorite musician, producer, and neuroscientist puts it this way:
“Today, some sound healing therapists, meditation headphones, and relaxation music apps use tones of particular frequencies, or music that contains those frequencies, to achieve goals for healing and self care. Although the ancient Greeks knew or intuited things that took years for science to catch up with, they were also wrong about many things, as science has borne out. For example, there is no scientific evidence that music’s ability to heal or to cause changes in mood or any other cellular effects derives primarily from the specific frequencies of tones used. This has been exhaustively studied.
“The notion also doesn’t make logical sense, for much shamanistic healing was conducted by singers who would have had no way to calibrate their precise frequencies from one occasion to the next, or from one tribe to another.
“The power of music, then probably comes not from specific frequencies, but from trance-inducing rhythms, or a combination of musical elements as they stand in relation to one another, elements including harmonic structure, melody, tonality (major or minor), rhythm, and tempo. In other words, whatever effect a piece of music or sequence of sounds has on you, it’s unlikely that it would stop having that effect if it were shifted by a few Hertz (cycles per second) in one direction or the other.”
Daniel J Levitin: “I Heard There Was A Secret Chord – Music As Medicine” – W. W. Norton & Company, August 27, 2024
‘Nuff said: Science has spoken. Or at least a current understanding has entered the conversation. But that’s not all.
Power or force?
(Tip of the hat to David Hawkins for this concept.)
In my humble experience growing music as self-care for the last 30+ years, people regularly observe that “music is powerful.” Dr Levitin isn’t the first scientist to explore music’s power and, within the constraints of medical and clinical effects, he has joined in the centuries heroic work of observing and documenting how our human physiology operates under music’s influence.
Also, during these last 30 years, technology has evolved from a powerful tool to a force of its own. By this, I mean that the former “art” of technology has been co-opted by technology’s abilities to make things bigger, better, and faster than they ever have been. For example, in spite of the fact that Levitin and others have substantiated the evidence that the most powerful music for anyone is music they already know and love, technological applications for music are based on amorphous frequency-associated sound collages that no one has ever heard before which can be marketed as apps or supported by “ancient” notions that may or may not be borne out by science, and which nevertheless attract huge and devoted followings. I’m thinking here of all of those relaxation and guided meditation apps.
It’s much easier to take a pill or launch an app than to do your own work, isn’t it? Why bother understanding how the music you love works on you if the very convincing marketing for a particular app or frequency makes it appear that you won’t have to do the work so long as you can engage the app or tune to the right vibration? This also applies to live music, from stadium concerts to sound baths to symphonic performances: if I’m “in the room” who cares if I’m not in love with the music?
And, if everyone is doing it, it must have some value, yes?
I’d like to suggest, however, that what most people observe as the “power” of music really isn’t its real power.
It’s true that Levitin and many others have shown that even passive listening to music has profound effects, so why bother with a deeper engagement or understanding? The simple answer is that real power comes from a durable understanding of your particular music; any other application of music on you is forced, and force doesn’t heal. Sure: that ringing in your ears after the gong bath and the deep vibratory sensations you felt during it were force-full – we’re living in an age where subtlety is no longer valued – but the variety and multiplicity of the very musical nuances that resonate most deeply within us – that actually heal us – are completely gone in a force-based musical experience or app.
And, with no disrespect intended, the force of a single vibration pales within the pantheon of music’s real (and subtle) power, regardless of how forcefully that single vibration is made.
The temptation to use force to market power-based practices of music as self-care is likewise misguided. Why would I blitz the world with one kind of consciousness (force) in an attempt to locate those interested in a better kind of consciousness (power)? I’ve written about this before here and here.
The real power in music
There’s a collision happening in the music world right now. It’s based on the pseudo-scientific notion that music which meets a specific set of criteria for, say, vibration, has a corresponding set of healing properties, and that adding more of that vibration means more healing. That’s a vast over-simplification of the art of music and music-making. While it works pretty well for automating playlists, how we as listeners to those playlists actually respond to the music we hear varies as much as our fingerprints: we are, just in case no one has noticed recently, remarkably distinct individuals. When it comes to music, that evidence-based fact, and the way our musical preferences are reflected within it, matters more than anything.
That is, if you get off on 432Hz, that’s fine. If Beethoven or Pachabel or U2 or INXS works for you, great. If you want to sacrifice the only organic hearing equipment you have to music that’s too loud for any human to endure without damage, I won’t stop you. It’s your choice to immerse in whatever music does it for you.
On the other hand, if you yearn for something more that isn’t showing up in the playlists Spotify makes for you (for example), or the gong bath that totally rocks your partner, or the symphony that seems incomprehensible, and you still want to know why, you might be touching the power of music in a way that goes beyond mental, emotional, or physical health, and certainly exceeds forceful sound. You could be experiencing this power right now…except for the deficiencies in post-modern life that maximize STEM and minimize STEAM.
Just for a moment, imagine that you want to make something in the physical world. The thing you have in mind can be best constructed with specialized tools, which you don’t have, and yet, instead of investing in the proper equipment or hiring out for the job, you attempt to make it using the less-than-perfect tools you have at hand. To no one’s surprise, the project turns out poorly, and sits there as a reminder of what not to do next time. From scrapbooking to baking to carpentry to fine art, the right tools are essential.
Now suppose I suggested to you that powerful musical tools for any purpose are ready and waiting for you. That they work for non-musicians and musicians alike, without a therapist or clinical expert or certified shaman or anyone else using them on your behalf. That they’re well documented, and that you could do some heavy lifting to discover them on your own just as I did. Would that be of interest? You can learn how to scrapbook and bake and build cabinets and paint online, so why not learn about the actual musical power tools available to you the same way?
I know: it’s easier to go to a concert, and more fun, too…provided you can wait for healing until the concert happens.
On the other hand, the next time something that needs healing arrives in your space, what will you do? Instead of sound bathing and mono-frequencying on faith that it will help, you could take a course I’ve built where a ton of durable and self-evident elevated musical power tools are all revealed and taught in one place, together with practices for perfecting their use for your own good. Whoa! Easy there! I’m not going to change any of your beliefs about what sounds or which music works for you; what I can offer, though, are ways you can prove for yourself that everything I’ve written here is demonstrably true for you. Once you know, compare the Musimorphic practices you learn to what you were doing before, and simply use the tools that work best for you.
So, before you come at me with some new frequency or app based on the latest vibratory claim (“raise your vibration!”), take a moment to determine what that really means: make all our personal molecules sing the same note, knowing that there’s no scientific evidence that such a thing is even possible, and that research indicates that there are no benefits beyond what we believe (a classic placebo effect). Beliefs matter, believe me! On the other hand, scientific research differentiates mono-frequency beliefs from musical evidence; which would you rather trust with your health?
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Over the course of more than 40 years of paying attention to how music works on us, Bill Protzmann has rediscovered the fundamental nature and purpose of music and accumulated a vast awareness of anthropology and sociology, as well as the effects of music, the arts, and information technology on human beings. Bill has experimented with what he has learned through performing concerts, giving lectures, facilitating workshops, and teaching classes. He first published on the powerful extensibility of music into the business realm in 2006 (here and abstract here). Ten years later, in 2016, he consolidated his work into the Musimorphic Quest. In this guided, gamified, experiential environment, participants discover and remember their innate connection to this ancient transformative technology. Also, The National Council for Behavioral Healthcare recognized Bill in 2014 with an Inspiring Hope award for Artistic Expression, the industry equivalent of winning an Oscar.
In addition to individuals, Musimorphic programs support personal and professional development and wellness for businesses, NPOs and at-risk populations.
