18 
The Healing Power of Voice
ONE OF the things I enjoy most about my work is the opportunity it gives me to see the way singing changes people. A session of vocal and breathing exercises might not sound like a ticket to nirvana, yet day after day I notice that my students may walk into the room feeling down or disconnected from themselves, but after a half hour of vocalizing, they’re calm and happy, even laughing. I’d like to chalk that transformation up to my sparkling personality, but I believe that what’s happening is a daily demonstration of the healing power of sound.
For years I’ve been telling students that singing is good for the body, and I’ve discovered that I’m not alone in that belief. Researchers and therapists are using sound to heal the body, mind, and spirit, and are offering insights into why it feels so great to make those joyful googs, gugs, and flights of notes. I’ve been dipping into some work in the fields of sound healing, music therapy, and meditational sound, and I’d like to share a bit of it with you. You may find the ideas far-fetched, but if you’re like me, perhaps they’ll spark your imagination and make you want to explore further and begin to play with the healing possibilities of your own voice.
A Sound Path to Health
Webster’s dictionary defines the verb heal as “to make sound,” a use of words that I find particularly apt. Webster wasn’t talking about making music—he was talking about making the body whole and healthy. But practitioners of two specialties, sound healing and vibrational medicine, believe that sound helps make the body sound.
I had an illuminating discussion about sound healing with David Gordon, an Oakland, California, sound healer who’s been a singer and musician for many decades. David began his explorations of sound healing when, after a lifetime of singing, he found he could no longer connect with the joy of making sound. Searching for a way back to the power of music and song, he practiced yoga and meditation, finally discovering the work of sound healers, including the pioneering sound healer Don Campbell (author of The Mozart Effect). David combines these elements, along with his grounding in voice and music structure, in the program he teaches today.
Central to this work is the belief that the greatest healing comes from the work we do ourselves, from the inside. In a typical session, David observes his clients, paying attention to their breathing, the way they move their bodies, the tensions he notices in them. Then he gently guides them toward making whatever sounds come out of their bodies freely and easily. Though he’s also a voice teacher, he chooses not to label this work as singing. He calls it “vibrating the breath”—which is actually a good technical description of what we’re doing anytime we speak or sing. Any sounds the clients make are fine, and as David hears them, he “mirrors” them, repeating the sound back. In that process, a musical interplay develops between the student and the teacher.
The goal of this work is not to make the voice better. It’s not about “How do I sound?” The focus is on “How do I feel?” And in the course of a session, clients are encouraged to make sounds that, pretty or ugly, they feel they need to make. There can be a wonderful sense of release in a sound-healing session, and when people work with sound in this way, the result can be a stronger sense of what’s going on in their bodies and minds, as well as a shift in painful feelings and a greater understanding of how to relax and release pressure.
As well as sound work, David and other sound healers use a variety of techniques—breath work, movement, relaxation, exercises to center and clear the mind. They may work with something called toning, which involves singing prolonged vocal sounds on a single vowel. The sound-healing session becomes a safe, protected environment for the authentic, restorative sounds of the body and soul.
There are no extravagant claims in all of this. If you went to a sound healer with a stomachache, he or she would probably recommend that you see a doctor about the pain but would work with you to help put your body into a receptive state for healing. You might find, at the end of a session, that a stomachache that was sparked by unexpressed or unacknowledged fear or tension subsides when the work with sound allows you to relax. Or you might find that your stomach still hurts but you feel calmer about the pain and able to work more easily with your doctor to address it. Sound healing, David explains, is more about balancing your body and mind than curing anything.
I know this technique may sound a little abstract, but actually you’ve experienced something quite similar in doing the vocal exercises I’ve given you. When you’re singing your googs and gugs and mums, in just a few seconds your brain puts the pronunciation of the words on autopilot and begins to home in on your overall sound and the feelings in your body. In a typical session, my students stop at least three or four times to ask, “What sound were we on?” It’s not that they weren’t concentrating. It’s just that the mind and body have moved into a free place where they can make sounds and enjoy them without being encumbered by words.
That’s the place that sound healers try to help their clients find.
Tuning In to the Body’s Frequencies
Vibrational medicine practitioners believe that all parts of the body transmit and receive frequencies and are therefore influenced by them. (It’s not as far-fetched as it may sound. Ear specialists have found that the ear, primarily thought of as an instrument of sound reception, is also a transmitter.) Different cells, bodily systems, and organs each vibrate at their own frequencies, these practitioners believe, and by learning the particular vibrational frequencies for specific body parts, we can learn to heal them with sounds.
The basic concept of vibrational medicine goes something like this: When we are in a state of perfect health, the parts of our body are like a great choir, each voice so finely tuned and in sync that it would make the angels smile. However, if a part of the body falls out of alignment and begins to vibrate incorrectly, we experience the discord as disease. It’s as if one of the singers suddenly became tone deaf and were singing loudly, way off pitch. The aim of vibrational medicine is to get the “off-key” organ or system back to the right notes, restoring health to our bodies.
Vibrational medicine relies on the principle of resonance, which involves reinforcing or prolonging a particular vibration in one location by the use of a similar vibration in another location. You can see resonation in action if you turn up your stereo while playing, say, Beethoven’s Fifth. Particular notes, passages, and frequencies make the lamps shake. Vibrational medicine practitioners might use a pair of tuning forks, or electrical instruments, or—most likely—the human voice to create certain sounds and set up particular frequencies in the body. And in doing so, they’re trying to use sound to alter the shape, form, and function of cells in order to help them promote healing. The aim of research in this field is to develop ways to use resonance as a medical doctor uses antibiotics.
In my research, I kept running across references to the work of a doctor named Hans Jenny, a Swiss medical scientist who spent ten years of his life examining the effects that sound had on the shape and formation of substances. For his book Cymatics, Jenny photographed plastics, pastes, liquids, and powders, as they were being vibrated by sound. The results showed organic shapes being created from inorganic substances that were exposed to different sound frequencies—they look like starfish, human cells, and microscopic life. In vibrational medicine, these experiments are taken as evidence that sound has the ability to affect and change molecular structure.
There’s no diagnostic manual yet that says, “To treat liver trouble, sing this note to create a vibration in the tissue at this frequency,” but perhaps someday there will be. Researchers have found data that support the idea that particular sounds can change the shape and formation of white blood cells, and it’s possible that such research will lead them to isolate sounds that can help enhance the immune system. Today’s state of the art in the world of vibrational medicine is fairly intuitive. A practitioner most often uses a sense of guided direction, and experience, to determine what sounds a client should make or be exposed to—and many people have reported immediate therapeutic benefits. Other times, as with sound healing, the measurable effect of a treatment might simply be relaxation and a calm, receptive state that enhances healing. Or there may be effects that aren’t quantifiable today but will be in years to come.
In both sound healing and vibrational medicine, there’s frequent discussion of harmonics. No sound is made up of just one frequency. Instead, it’s a mixture of a primary tone as well as overtones—harmonics—that create an entire spectrum of sound. Some believe that it’s possible to use your voice to mold these harmonics into specific sound frequencies, and it’s postulated that harmonics affect the nervous system and the brain, and that high-frequency sounds may actually charge the brain. Through the use of harmonics, it might someday be possible to open up new levels of sound awareness and to resonate portions of the body that have never been stimulated in this manner before. It may even be possible that vocal harmonics actually vibrate portions of the brain and create new neurological connections.
My sense of all this is that as long as you’re not creating physical pressure or strain to produce sounds, it’s safe and interesting to play with the way sound affects the way you feel. It may even be transformative. You may want to pay attention to places in your vocal exercises that seem to cheer you up, and repeat them. Or you may want to venture into your own exploration of sound healing and vibrational medicine. Maybe you’ll want to expose yourself to harmonics and see what happens. If it makes you feel better, feel free to try it.
Meditational Sound
One of my students, a former monk, often broke into laughter during his lessons. He explained to me that the exercises somehow brought him to a very happy place and said he believed that the singing sounds we used were acting as a mantra—a trigger to bring him into a meditative state. When we combined particular sounds with diaphragmatic breathing, which is also used in meditation, his whole demeanor changed, becoming calm and centered.
Through the centuries, many people have been interested in calming the mind for various purposes. Chanting and singing have long been part of spiritual practice in a host of traditions, and in some systems the use of sound is central to achieving meditative states of consciousness. I was intrigued by the theories about sound and healing I encountered in the Ayurvedic tradition, which has been used in India for five thousand years. You may have run across some of these ideas in the work of Deepak Chopra, or through contact with the popular system of transcendental meditation, or TM, which has Indian roots.
In TM, you sit comfortably for fifteen or twenty minutes with the goal of allowing the body to relax and the mind to abandon its normal activity, experiencing deepened self-awareness. I have to admit that my basic mental picture of TM involved sitting on the floor in the lotus position chanting the sound ommmm. Actually, in this system practitioners are given a personal mantra, or chanting sound, but interestingly enough, that sound is not chanted aloud. It’s invoked in thought—you “think the sound.” And by doing so, one creates a state of restful alertness.
The idea of chanting silently is interesting because it’s true, to some degree, that when you think of making a sound, your vocal cords vibrate—just as they do when you speak in your dreams. It seems reasonable to me, then, that internal sounds might work the same way external ones do.
Why allow—or encourage—sound to take you into a meditative state? By now it’s widely accepted that meditation produces a wide range of benefits, including increased happiness; reduced stress; increased intelligence, creativity, memory, and health; lower blood pressure; better sleep; increased energy; and improved relationships. So every day, as you do your general warm-up, be open to the possibility that you’re not only improving your voice but creating sounds that have the power to calm and heal. Any melody or sound that you sustain and repeat can be classified as a mantra—om is not the only game in town. Gug or mum might just transport you into a quiet, meditative realm.
If you’re interested in diving into a less well known use of sound, Gandharva Veda music, another Ayurvedic system, claims to be the ancient science of getting in tune with nature. Thousands of years ago, it’s believed, seers capable of hearing and understanding the rhythms of nature played melodies at specific times of the day and night to invoke peace, harmony, and perfect health in the people. Every time of day, season, and event in nature has its own distinct sound or vibration, and Gandharva Veda melodies, experienced at the proper time, are supposed to bring your body into sync, harmony, and alignment with all of nature.
Making an Emotional Connection
A more down-to-earth method of healing with sound—music therapy—uses music to help people deal more effectively with disabilities, illnesses, and behavioral problems. It came to the public’s attention after World War I and World War II when musicians went to veterans’ hospitals around the country to play for patients suffering physical and emotional trauma from their experience in battle. Music seemed to reach and soothe these people in remarkable ways, and therapists began to investigate and develop techniques for using it with their clients.
Degrees in music therapy have been offered since 1944, and the American Music Therapy Association, which promotes research in the field, was founded in the late nineties. Today music therapy is used to reduce stress, elevate patients’ moods and counteract depression, help promote movement for physical exercise rehabilitation, induce sleep, and reduce fear. Most of us, I think, use music for similar purposes almost without thinking. It’s hard to imagine going to an aerobics class, or even doing yoga, and not having any music—we’re accustomed to drawing on its power to get maximum energy from our bodies. Conversely, when my daughter, Madison, was younger, like many children and adults she would never think to go to sleep without calmly listening to her favorite relaxing music.
In music therapy, the driving, uplifting, soothing, and comforting properties of sound take fascinating forms. My friend and student Judy Nelson, a music therapist in southern California, described, for example, how autistic children who have become severely isolated can be reached by the simplest song. The therapist might sing “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream.” Every time she sings the word “boat,” she might point to a picture of a boat, and after a few times, the child might begin to make some specific nonword sound when the therapist sang and pointed. Instead of singing “boat,” the child might make a sound like ee.
At that point, a good therapist might just change the song to “Row, row, row your ee, gently down the stream.” Soon the child and therapist would be saying ee together regardless of the song. With a patient so lost in his or her own world, the therapist would consider this a real connection, and it could be the first of many building blocks that lead to more social interactions. It’s part of the magic of music that children who might not communicate in any other circumstances often respond, eventually, to interactions that are built around songs.
With psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia and manic depression, often the goal of the music therapist is “reality orientation”—bringing a person into the present moment. Singing a song with positive sentiments, perhaps something like “You’ve Got a Friend,” with lyrics such as “Just call out my name / And you know wherever I am / I’ll come running to see you again / You’ve got a friend,” can, therapists say, achieve dramatic results. Patients seem to be transported, if only for a few moments of the song, to a place where you can have and be a friend to someone who needs you.
This type of emotional connection to lyrics is no surprise to me. Over and over I’ve seen my students singing sad songs, only to break into tears. I’ve also seen them dance around the room and laugh during particularly high-energy songs. For my own part, I’ve noticed for years that whenever I am upset or angry in public and I can’t just break into song, I start to whistle. It’s instantaneous. I whistle and my mind immediately moves into a more peaceful place.
Music seems to reach a part of the brain that words alone can’t, and as you engage your voice in exercises and songs, you have the opportunity to experiment with the way music affects you. It may be that you develop an emotional first-aid kit of songs that pick you up or calm you down. Or you may want to tap into the power of music and song to aid learning and concentration. Music therapists often set concepts to music to ease the learning process for children with learning disabilities (isn’t that, after all, how you learned your ABCs?), and as you practice speak-singing, you might find that as well as improving your voice, singing a speech actually helps you remember it. Researchers have found, too, that baroque music (think J. S. Bach and the Brandenburg Concertos) seems to stimulate the logical, information-processing parts of the brain to aid concentration. Sound healer Don Campbell observes that such music played at a tempo of sixty beats per minute, the speed of a resting heartbeat, can create relaxation as well as produce mental and physical benefits. Skeptical? Try your own experiments. I know you’ll benefit if you stay curious and observant about how sound and music affect you, and enjoy their positive effects.
Just Let It Happen
In this book I’ve walked you through the process of improving the sound of your voice and helped you bring your true character and emotions into the words you speak and sing. In changing the way you sound and letting it reflect exactly who you are, you’re changing the way people perceive you and feeling the power and ease that come from a voice that flows freely and musically. I know that’s a healing process in itself. I believe it’s also possible—even likely—that the benefits of sound and music can penetrate your body and life in ways that are just beginning to be understood. Singing and speaking are good for you. Let it start by making you smile, then let it make you happy. Everything else will flow from that place.