The History of Sound Healing

When researching sound healing and its beginnings, it doesn’t take long to discover that ancient cultures thought of sound as a healing component linked to the creation of the Universe. Along with the healing aspect, many of these same cultures believed sound’s capabilities in creating almost impossible feats. It was believed and is to this day (by many cultures), considered to be a language of the Divine.

What we are left with from Pythagoras’ work is that the whole of creation is thought of in terms of numbers and pure musical tones. Though many of these musical tones cannot be heard with our normal hearing range, they can be felt. For instance many of the planets’ natural frequencies are impossible to hear, but the vibrations are felt and influence the core of who we are. The sounds of the planets that affect us were labeled “The Music of the Spheres.”  Hence, many believe that the Universe is constructed according to a musical scale. In addition, the word harmony means “connected” while the word “cosmos” means “the beautiful order of things.”

Many have followed and expanded on Pythagoras’ work, but modern day science is doing exciting and I believe supportive work that can eventually confirm these ancient beliefs –that is – the work being done in String Theory.

Currently, many fields of science are converging on theories that are telling us the same as the ancients. For example, Brian Greene, theoretical physicist, best known for his work on Einstein’s Unified Field Theory, along with others, took up where Einstein’s work left off. String Theory may be the Unified Theory that Einstein was looking for. If you take any piece of material, cut it in half, cut it in half again to ever smaller pieces, the basic question is what’s the smallest piece that you get to? What is the finest uncuttable constituent? If you cut small enough you get molecules, if you cut them up, you get atoms, if you cut them up you get particles – electrons going around the nucleus with neutrons and protons, even though the neutrons and protons are smaller entities called quarks. The conventional idea stopped there. String Theory comes along and says “There may be one more layer of structure: inside an electron, inside a quark, inside any particle – a tiny little string, that’s why it’s called String Theory, where each string is vibrating in different patterns.”

According to this theory an electron can be a string vibrating in one pattern. You can call it a middle C if you want, by the musical analogy, a quark could be a string vibrating at a different pattern like an A. So the difference between one particle and another is simply the note that its string is playing. This is the unified description that this theory puts forward: everything can be reduced to the notes these fundamental strings are playing. There’s math behind this, that allows us to see all of the key elements of physics finding a home in this description, but in a nutshell that’s what this theory says.

If this is true, then the very basics of who we are, is vibration or frequency between two strings. And if you are willing to make the leap that when these frequencies are disrupted, it is possible, to “calm” or “restore” to the original frequency given the correct tone, then you can believe that the right kind of sound is essentially a part of who we are which gives it a powerful resonance when moving through the healing process.