Musical Vibrations as Medicine

In today’s society, we are all familiar with the mainstream modern medicine used today. When we’re sick we take drugs produced by pharmaceutical companies. In more drastic cases we need a surgeon to cut through our skin and fix us from the inside. We do these things because we have been taught that these are the best ways to fix a person who is unwell. What if I told you that sound and vibrations at the right frequency could also be used to help heal the body? It sounds absolutely crazy right? This idea wasn’t so crazy to great minds like Pythagoras and Nikola Tesla.

The great mathematician and philosopher, Pythagoras is known as the “father of philosophy”, “father of mathematics”, “father of geometry”, “father of music”, and the “father of harmonica” is the first Greek to discover and use sound vibration as a remedy for both the mind and body. According to 4th century scholar Iamblichus, Pythagoras’ theory on sound came about when he happened to pass a blacksmith who was hammering. The sound of the hammer was so harmonious to Pythagoras that he had to investigate the forge. He found that the hammers that were harmonious to one another had a simple mathematical relationship where the masses of the hammers were ratios of one another. He also found that hammers that did not have a simple mathematical relationship would have a disharmonious sound when hammered together. He used this discovery to create a musical performance that he called “soul-adjustments”. Pythagoras built instruments that could be tuned in order to produce sounds with harmonic intervals. These intervals of harmonic ratios were used as a medicine for the body and soul. Pythagoras believed that music should never be used as just entertainment, but as an expression of harmonia. If music is used correctly it can “bring the faculties of the Soul into harmony, compose and purify the mind, heal the physical body, thus restoring and maintaining perfect health”(HISTORY OF SOUND HEALING).

Music as a way to heal the body sounds crazy to most people in the 21st century, but you have to remember that Pythagoras is one of the greatest minds of humankind and we still use a lot of his principles in today's society. As crazy as his musical findings may be, his work cannot be ignored. These days people say that they want to see the science behind pretty much anything. The phrase, “follow the science”, has become very popular in the last couple of years. So what exactly is the science behind Pythagoras’ “soul-adjustments”? Is there any science being worked on right now that can tie together sound wave frequencies and the human body? Actually, there is a theory that is being worked on right now that does just that called String Theory.

In the last 50 years physicists have been researching String Theory. String Theory explains that everything at a subatomic level is made up of tiny one dimensional vibrating strings. How did the concept of String Theory first come to be? As early as the 15th century, people have known magnetism. English physician William Gilbert wrote books on magnetism and even reported that the Earth is a giant magnet and that is why compasses work. It wasn’t until the 19th century that we went further with magnetism. When Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell introduced the theory of electromagnetism. About 50 years later a 26 year old Abert Einstein comes up with the Special Theory of Relativity. This theory says that space and time are constantly adjusting with one another in order for the speed of light to stay constant and unchanging. Unfortunately Einstein could not go further with his theory. String Theory was first developed in the late 1960s, but scientists struggled to make successful equations with this theory. Thus many scientists had dropped String Theory all together. It wasn’t until 1984 when String Theory made a breakthrough when it was found that the “mathematics of String Theory deftly avoided potentially lethal technical issues”(Loose Ends: String Theory and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory). This breakthrough brought many scientists’ attention back to String Theory and are still calculating and testing it today. Unfortunately we do not have a microscope powerful enough to see String Theory within particles. This is due to the fact that particles are heavier than what scientists had anticipated.

“So if a quark is nothing, but a string vibrating in one pattern. An electron is nothing, but a string vibrating in a different pattern. A neutrino nothing, but a string vibrating in a different pattern still. So if I take all of this back together. I have my ordinary orange and if these ideas are right they are speculative, but if they are right. Deep inside the orange or any other piece of matter is nothing, but a dancing vibrating cosmic symphony of strings.”

-Brian Greene, Loose Ends: String Theory and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory

Yes, String Theory is still just a theory that has not been experimentally tested, but it does tie together concepts that have been proven. For those who are still skeptical of the science behind vibrations and frequency healing the human body. There are still the experiments of Nikola Tesla that prove that the human body does have positive effects from high-frequency currents. He learned this after safely passing high-frequency currents through his own body. This experiment also debunked Edison who claimed that alternating currents through the body is dangerous. Later Tesla would demonstrate alternating currents on his own body in a 1891 lecture that would amaze the lecture attendees. Physician Samuel Howard Monell who attended the lecture would later note “that by all the laws of alternating and direct currents should have brought the lecture to a close by the death of the daring lecturer”, but instead Tesla was safe and continued on with his lecture. Tesla used a transformer that he called a Tesla Coil in order to produce high-frequency and high voltage currents that he called Tesla Currents. He used these to transform electrical energy into therapeutic heat as the Tesla Currents pass through the body. This technique is now used in what we know as diathermy. Around this time Tesla invented the Mechanical Oscillator that sends vibrations of various high-frequencies through the human body. This invention uses the concept of everything is made up of frequencies and vibrations in order to create a device that heal’s both the body and the mind. Tesla and his assistants would use this device for the next 4 years.

“When I began to practice with my assistants mechanical therapy we used to finish our meals quickly and rush back to the labo- ratory. We suffered from dyspepsia and various stoma- ch troubles, biliousness, constipation, flatulence and other disturbances, all natural results of such irregular habit. But only after a week of application, du- ring which I improved the technique and my assi- stants learned how to take the treatment to their best advantage, all these forms of sickness disappeared as by enchantment and for nearly four years, while the machine was in use, we were all in excellent health”

-Nikola Tesla

Telsa who was a survivor of the cholera disease that almost took his life searched for new ways to fight off disease and keep one’s body in good health. By the end of his life he strongly believed that in order to maintain one’s health, you have to manage a proper diet and use mechanical vibrations.

If Tesla’s research was so groundbreaking then why is it not widely used today? Some of Tesla’s research is being used by contemporary doctors like diathermy, but it is hard to say why vibrations as medicine is not used as widely as one would think. A more contemporary figure, Fabien Maman figured out vibrations as medicine with his tuning fork technique. Maman is a jazz musician who studied Aikido and acupuncture from Sensei Nakazono in 1975. Nakazono taught Maman classical Nan Jing styled acupuncture. Maman would later figure out how to combine acupuncture with music by using tuning forks instead of needles. He found “that the tail of the tuning fork transmits the vibration to the meridian, cell and DNA, while the resonance of the fork itself, (the other end) transmits the same message to the counterpart of the meridian - the energy field, in order to erase the source of the negative patterns, which, over time, can duplicate in the physical body”(Acupuncture with Tuning Forks and Color). In 1981 Maman would team up with biologist Helene Grimal where they would study the relationship between living cells and sound vibrations. In their 18 month study they researched on how human cells react to 30-40 decibel sounds. They observed uterine cells exposed to both human vocals and acoustic instruments by mounting a camera to a microscope. During this experiment, they found that cancer cells exposed to the 9 note lonien scale(C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C-D) with an acoustic instrument would lose their structural integrity and explode after a 14 minute mark. Surprisingly with vocals using the same 9 note lonien scale, the cancer cells would explode after a 9 minute mark. The two then did a 1 month study with two women with breast cancer. The two women would sing the same scale everyday for 3 ½ hours. At the end of the study, one woman’s tumor was undetectable and the second woman underwent surgery. Her doctor reported that the tumor had substantially shrunk. After this study, Maman concluded that

“cancer cells cannot maintain their structure when specific sound wave frequencies attack the cytoplasmic and nuclear membranes. When the vibratory rate increases, the cells cannot adapt or stabilize themselves and die by disintegrating and exploding.”

This amazing study isn’t really used for mainstream cancer treatments. Most cancer patients have to undergo chemotherapy and sometimes even radiation before they have to get the tumor surgically removed. My boyfriend who has incurable cancer was never told by any doctor that certain sound waves and vibrations could help with his battle with cancer. My guess is that this kind of treatment does not help pharmaceutical companies. Since it is common knowledge that they have influence over most medical textbooks. After heavily researching this interesting remedy, I do want to try this method of treatment.

Sources:

Vučević, Danijela & Djordjevic, Drago & Radosavljevic, Tatjana. (2016). Nikola Tesla and medicine: 160th anniversary of the birth of the genius who gave light to the world - part II. Medicinski pregled. 69. 391-401. 10.2298/MPNS1612391V.

The Harmonious Blacksmith, joranrudi.no/renstemming/pythagoras-e.html.

“HISTORY OF SOUND HEALING.” Red Doors Studio, www.red-doors.com/sound-healing.

“How Researchers Killed Cancer Cells with Just a Human Voice.” Gaia, 21 Mar. 2020, www.gaia.com/article/healing-with-sound-frequency-and-vibration.

“Acupuncture with Tuning Forks and Color.” Acupuncture with Tuning Forks and Color, Tama-Do Academy of Sound Healing, Color Therapy and Chi Movement, tama-do.com/roothtmls/acupuncture.html.

Dattaro, Laura. Loose Ends: String Theory and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. YouTube, World Science Festival, 2 Aug. 2019, youtu.be/YSWd21z2qqE.