Why Sound Therapy Could Be The Cure-All To The Modern Mental Health Crisis
Modern sound therapy — from baths to app to binaural beats — has exploded in popularity, promising everything from better sleep to reduced road rage. Why are we tuning in now?
The term 'nervous breakdown' is no longer used – 'mental-health crisis' is the
nomenclature du jour – but I think I had one two years ago. My journey into the
psychological night was precipitated by a propensity for clinical depression and
catalysed by the death of my father, the loss of two friends to suicide, and my husband's
transition into a wheelchair after years of chronic illness.
I don't believe that sound therapy cured me. I gradually escaped the darkness
through medical intervention from a brilliant Russian psychiatrist who was well worth
his exorbitant fee. But throughout my odyssey, I relied on sound-healing tools for
comfort. I regularly attended in-person sound baths with a Los Angeles sound-bowl
practitioner, Devon Cunningham, which helped me return to the world by lying on a
mat in public, surrounded by strangers. At home, I soothed anxiety using a YouTube
video with a very long title: 'Sleep Release [Insomnia Healing] Deeply Relaxing Sleep
Music * Binaural Beats.'
The 'Sleep Release' audio that accompanied me through what Emily Dickinson would call 'a funeral in my brain' was created by a musician from the Netherlands who, like Prince, is simply named Zac. Zac's YouTube channel, @SleepTube, offers a seemingly infinite collection of audio tracks with subtitles like 'Binaural Delta Brainwaves @2.0Hz' to alleviate worry and foster sleep. He has nearly a million subscribers, including one video ('The Deepest Healing Sleep | 3.2Hz Delta Brain Waves | REM Sleep Music – Binaural Beats') that has more than 45 million views.
But Zac's free YouTube channel is only the tip of the contemporary sound-healing iceberg. International media music and intellectual-property giant Cutting Edge has launched a wellness division, Myndstream, and is currently partnering on wellness music with producer and rapper Timbaland, as well as on an album with Sigur Rós's Jónsi. In a 2023 interview with Harper's Bazaar, Reese Witherspoon espoused the benefits of falling asleep to binaural beats, and on a recent episode of Amy Poehler's Good Hang podcast, actress Rashida Jones discussed using sound-wave technology to manage road rage.
So why has sound healing, which has a 2,000-year history rooted in the singing bowls of Nepal, Tibet, and India, become so popular? What exactly is a binaural beat? And what does it do to our brains?
Manuela Kogon, a clinical professor and integrative-medicine internist at the Stanford Center for Integrative Medicine, describes binaural beats as an 'auditory illusion.' 'If you give the brain two different sounds that have different frequencies but are close together – within 30 hertz of each other – the brain is like, 'What the heck? There are two sounds. What am I supposed to do?'' she explains. 'The brain can't differentiate that. It can't say that it's two; it also can't say it's one. It just averages the difference and hallucinates a new sound. It's kind of funny.'
The binaural beat may be newly viral, but Manuela points out that they've been around for more than a hundred years. A German scientist named Heinrich Wilhelm Dove discovered them and published a paper about his findings in 1839. Manuela, a self-described 'brain junkie,' has been studying them for decades; she digs out one of her papers from the '90s for me where she states that 'binaural beats have been purported to induce mood alterations, contingent on the beat frequency. Claims range from entraining the whole brain to altering states of consciousness.'
Modern sound healing is not limited to binaural beats alone. Modalities include sound baths, guided meditation, tuning fork therapy, vibroacoustic therapy, audiovisual technology, and music therapy, and the espoused results range from mood enhancement, sleep improvement, stress reduction, and relaxation to wilder claims of destroying cancer cells and manifesting wealth.
A binaural beat or sound bath has not been proven to cure cancer or make you rich, but the beneficial effects of sound healing, according to Manuela, involve 'modulating physiology, including blood pressure, heart rate, respiration, EEG … altering immune and endocrine function, and improving pain, anxiety, fatigue, and depression and have been extensively studied.'
Like many alternative wellness treatments, sound therapy seems to have increased in popularity during Covid. 'We were all stuck at home,' says New York based practitioner Lavender Suarez, author of the book Transcendent Waves: How Listening Shapes Our Creative Lives. 'So how could we get these same healing tools?'
A sound-healing practitioner for 10 years and an experimental musician for 20, with an academic background in counselling and art therapy, Lavender uses physical instruments like gongs, often in repetitive patterns that function in similar brain-entraining ways to digital audio fi les. She's wary, though, of the claims tossed around related to sound frequencies.
'When people are prescriptive about sound frequencies, I'm like, hold on. Brain waves and sound waves are not in direct correlation,' she says. 'I think the interest in specific frequencies comes from our culture's obsession with data. We want that single-shot fix that's always been building in the wellness industry. How do we get to things quicker, faster? 'I only have X amount of time.''
The impact of sound on healing may be just as much about the recipient's goals as it is about the healer's design. 'It's more about the intentions you're putting behind these binaural beats when you're listening,' Lavender says. 'When people are listening to these essentially generic audio fi les online, they're taking what they're bringing into it. The creator is trying to steer the intention by saying, 432 Hz for self-love. You go into it thinking, 'Okay, self-love.' But you could listen to binaural beats for sleep and go for a jog.'
I spoke with Robert Koch, an official musical partner of the Monroe Institute, which bills itself as 'the world's leading education center for the study of human consciousness' and has extensive programming around sound technology to 'empower the journey to self-discovery.' Robert, who goes by the stage name Robot Koch, is an L.A.-based composer, producer, and sonic innovator who began his career as a heavy-metal drummer. He now embeds signals produced by the Monroe Institute into his compositions.
'I'm my own guinea pig,' says Robert. 'I try these things on myself, and I can tell when something works on my nervous system because I get more relaxed.'
Robert sent me a Spotify link to one of his Monroe Institute collaborations, titled Ocean Consciousness. I found the track relaxing and sleep-inducing, though the sirenic voices peppered throughout the piece made me melancholic. Maybe that's the point. 'It's powerful when people write to me about experiences they've had with my music helping them move through something emotional,' says Robert. 'Music isn't just entertainment. It's a language that speaks to the subconscious.'
Virginia-based sound therapist and musician Guy Blakeslee works with clients on everything from alleviating anxiety and increasing physical energy to manifesting love and assisting with fertility issues.
Guy interviews his clients and then creates personalised 'sonic talismans' using custom blends of sounds, including Mellotron and Nord synthesizer tones, dolphin and whale sounds, honeybee sounds and a heartbeat.
'Have you ever gotten anyone pregnant?' I ask him.
'I have met the baby,' he says.
Guy always believed in the healing properties of music, but it wasn't until he was hit by a car and suff ered a traumatic brain injury that he began pursuing music as therapy.
'It was March 13th 2020, and I was unconscious in the hospital when lockdown took effect,' he says. 'I woke up in the pandemic with this brain injury and spent most of my time using music and sound to guide myself through the recovery process. I found that long, sustaining tones were healing and soothing. I went on to get certifi ed through an online course. What I learned was what I'd intuitively discovered in my own recovery.' Musician, heal thyself.
My sound practitioner, Devon Cunningham, who has played her singing bowls for Hermès and Dartmouth College and in outreach programs for Los Angeles County, also describes her trajectory from a job in real estate to sound-bowl practitioner as healing.
Devon went on a plant-medicine retreat in Ecuador with her 80-something-year-old mother, and it was there that she first began playing the singing bowls. She found that sound healing provided additional benefits for her chronic lung disease. 'The bowls saved my life,' she says.
When Devon ordered new quartz-crystal bowls for a residency at Colgate University, she discovered that 432 Hz, had a heightened impact on healing. 'I witnessed people having experiences with these new 432 bowls that I hadn't seen with my 440 Hz bowls. Ever since then, I've been on the 432, and I've seen miracle after miracle.'
While Devon's results with the god frequency are experiential, a 2022 study by researchers at University of Florence and Careggi University Hospital that was published in the journal Acto Biomedica concluded, 'Listening to music at 432 Hz is a low cost and short intervention that can be a useful resource to manage anxiety and stress.'
Robert Koch composes music with a frequency called the Schumann resonance: a natural phenomenon, also known as the Earth's heartbeat, that has a fundamental frequency of 7.83 Hz. He's also pursuing vibroacoustics, where listeners feel sounds in their bodies. 'Einstein said that music is the medicine of the future,' he notes. 'Vibration. And I think we're just scratching the surface.' I, myself, am no Einstein. Maybe this is why I find Brainwaves – the most popular binaural-beats app in the Apple App Store – overwhelming.
Upon downloading the app, I'm asked which goals I hope to achieve, and I'm given an abundance of choices: Body Wellness, Binaural Sleep, Relax and Calm, Spiritual Awakening.
Who doesn't want all of these things?
I go with Spiritual Awakening and am brought to another page, where my path to enlightenment is broken down into still more categories: Connection with a Higher Power, Fulfillment and Meaning, Self- Understanding and Clarity. As an existentially challenged person, I choose Fulfillment and Meaning, but then I get FOMO and go back to the beginning. Rather than soothing my nervous system, the choices give me more anxiety.
This choose-your-own-adventure approach is unsurprising, given that some of the latest sound-healing tools emerged from gaming. SoundSelf, an interactive audiovisual therapeutic, uses video-game technology, vocal-toning biofeedback, and generative soundscapes to induce drug-free psychedelic states.
On Zoom, I meet with the audio director for the digital therapeutics company SoundSelf, Lorna Dune, a Milwaukee-based sound designer and electronic musician. Lorna walks me through several experiments with immersive audiovisual tech.
First, we tinker with bilateral light signals: a visual version of binaural beats purported to induce brainwave states like theta (associated with relaxation) and delta (emitted during deep sleep). The light signals make me anxious. But to be fair, a lot of things make me anxious.
We then play with binaural beats at varying frequencies, and this experiment is much more successful. As we transition from an alpha (alert but relaxed) to theta, I feel a palpable shift to a more serene physiological state. Maybe this is the power of suggestion, but I could stay here all afternoon.
'Just like with binaural beats, you can look at dance music and how when we're all moving together to one rhythm, we synchronise,' says Lorna.
She adds, 'Our brain wants to synchronise. It's normal behaviour that we've been displaced from in modern society. But we find it again through festivals and in pop culture. We say, 'Oh, it's something new.' No, it's actually just who we are.'
Of course, we can't always be at a rave. Or in a sound bath. 'I'm happy for people to receive care in whatever way they can, as long as it's not detrimental,' says Manuela. 'I'm not like, 'No, don't listen to the YouTube audio.' If that's what's working for you, go for it.'
The takeaway, says Robert, is that 'acoustic therapies make people feel better, and it might be as simple as that the relaxation happens through focusing on sound, or associated imagery, rather than stressful thoughts, which most of us have too many of these days.'
Two years later, I am still listening to the same YouTube audio from Zac's channel. Sometimes I even sleep soundly.
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