Can you picture anyone fighting to the gentle tune of “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” or any other ballad of love?
I noticed many years ago that something wonderful happened when our choir sang in school. In those days music was a required subject, so we had quite a variety of students singing with us. Some were the macho guys who could be pretty rough. But when they sang, their countenances changed and the feeling around them became more genteel. I noticed something else. The students who tended to be difficult to get along with or the ones who were mad at each other would, after singing together, become renewed. The anger was gone.
In choir there was no intolerance or prejudice. We sang in harmony and we were as one harmonious chord, as people as well as musically. Music brought us together in a brotherly spirit. The right music, more than anything else, has the power to heal wounds, uplift us from this physical plane to the spiritual one. The human nervous system is so attuned to sound that our response is immediate.
Each person has a keynote. Max Heindel tells us in the Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception that the medulla oblongata acts like a tuning fork when the right sympathetic tone is played. At that point it will vibrate along with the tone.
The medulla oblongata is the hindmost and lowest part of the brain, narrowing down into the spinal cord. It has a direct influence on breathing, for it controls the heartbeat. This explains why music has such influence on us. Some music can soothe and heal, while music that is antagonistic to our own vibratory nature makes us tense, uneasy, and even angry or ill.
In music therapy, a person can be healed by soothing sounds of his own keynote, for the medulla oblongata will then vibrate in sympathy with the keynote and immediately get the heartbeat to normal and, like a relay station, the entire body will respond and adjust itself.
There are healthy and unhealthy sounds, and we take them in the same as food. Our minds learn to adjust to different sounds but our bodies cannot. Musical passages have an effect on our muscles. To quote from Sound Health by Steven Halpern and Louis Savaryl:
One of the problems with much of rock and pop music is its standard rhythm called the “stopped anapestic rhythm”—a short-short-long-pause pattern. This rhythm tends to confuse the body and weaken the muscles. Among hundreds of persons tested by behavioral kinesiologist FDR. John Diamond, ninety percent registered an almost instantaneous loss of two-thirds of their muscle strength when they heard this beat. Interestingly, this often happens even when the listener likes the music. The end result is that the body's system is confused, the heart response is irregular, and the body gets weakened.
In the book, The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, an experiment is described in which plants, under controlled conditions, were tested in their reactions to different types of music. Beautiful music, both popular and classical, was beneficial to the plants. They grew toward the sound and tried to reach the speaker it came from. Where there was no sound at all, the plants grew straight up. But where there was abrasive music, the plants tried to move away from the sound and then died. Loud, dissonant music that makes repeated frictional air waves is carried to the stems of the plants and kills them. Gentle songs like “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” are healthy for plants and promote kind feelings among people.
Number underlies form, and number guides sound. Number lies at the root of the manifested universe . . .
—H. P. Blavatsky
Every rate of vibration forms a different geometric figure. Ernst Florens Friedrish Chladni (1756–1828), a German physicist who analyzed sound waves mathematically, proved that sound can shape matter into forms. Because of this he became known as the “Father of Acoustics.”
He formed sound pictures by placing sand over a thin metal plate. He changed the pitch by varying the position of his finger on the plate as though it was a violin's fingerboard. By doing so, the sand took on different geometric shapes according to pitch vibration that made the sound patterns visible. No two were alike unless their rate of vibration was the same. This was the forerunner to the eidophone.
Pictures have been taken of music with a device called a tonoscope where the vibrations make forms in a layer of fluid and are then photographed. Even a polygraph machine (lie detector) shows graphically the effect that music has.
But centuries before these machines existed, Pythagoras knew that form came about through vibration; that the world came into being out of chaos by sound and the intervals produced by that sound. Music was an important part of his school's curriculum.
This is one secret I had been searching for regarding the accuracy of numbers: everything that exists has vibration. The vibrational field of sound, music, color, matter, our words, thoughts, and names, all show form. All are vibrations. All vibrations are measurable. To measure vibration, we need numbers. Numbers are the basis of it all. Numbers are the keys to all mysteries.