Six Soothing Sounds

I have a confession: I have a form of writer’s block. It’s not the traditional writer’s block where you stare at a blank screen struggling to start or even where you write and revise that first sentence over and over. My problem is that I am stuck in a loop of writing about the same thing, so I wanted to challenge myself to write about something different. I lacked a topic, so I tried an old writing prompt technique: get a random article from Wikipedia and write about it.

The first article I found was interesting but did not inspire me to write, so I tried again. And again. And again. I felt like Goldilocks—trying things that weren’t quite right … until they were.

An article on chakapa came up. Chakapa is a rattle that curanderos (healers) and shaman in Peru use. It is made of the leaves of a bush by the same name and is believed to calm the patient and clear the surrounding energy.

I thought about how smudging, burning sage, does the same thing by fire—or rather smoke. Then I went down a path about the rejection and the growing social and scientific acceptance of various alternative therapies. That became far more academic than what I wanted to write, so I went to back to basics. I reread the Wikipedia article on the chakapa and chose one take-away to mull: the chakapa produces sound to induce calm and healing.

Sound is powerful for eliciting emotion and memory—good and bad, but I never explicitly thought about sound to elicit calm, so ask myself a question: What are some calming sounds?

I came up with the following:

1) Solfeggio frequencies

One night I was scrolling Facebook, and I saw an ad for a special tuning fork. It was tuned 528 Hz, the so-called “Miracle Tone.” The claims in the ad made it sound like they were selling snake oil, but I needed a little help with the problems they purported to solve, so I set about to research whether there was any validity in their claims. What I found was a set of seven frequencies with healing or calming properties—complete with YouTube videos with 9-hour recordings of each tone. I was able to test the claims for free. It wasn’t peer-reviewed, double-blind scientific experiment, but it was a test, nonetheless.

The tones were familiar from yoga studios and massage parlors, and I could imagine tai chi being done, as well. I can’t say whether they met their claim and created positive shifts and balanced my chakras. I only loosely know what that means. But I can attest that they did soothe. And a fluttering near my sternum (physical manifestation of anxiety?) stopped.

2) Music

With music, sometimes we relate to lyrics, sometimes to melody. Sometimes we have to play or sing ourselves; sometimes we have to just listen. But music has an undeniable ability to move our emotions in any direction. A well-crafted playlist can do wonders to elicit calm. There was day that I was upset about something shortly after I met my now late boyfriend. He sent me a song (“I Can Only Imagine” by Mercy Me) along with the message, “It’s soothing.” He was right.

3) Fire

While a wild or unexpected fire brings tremendous stress, there is tremendous calm brought by the campfire or fireplace. While the activity of sitting in front of the fire engages at least four of the five senses—you can see the flames, hear the crackle, smell the burning wood and smoke, and feel the warmth—the sound alone brings calm. Think about the cheesy Yule log videos that people play at Christmas. Nobody watches the video, but the sound brings a little respite.

4) Water

It doesn’t matter if it’s a babbling brook, rushing river, crashing waves, or pouring rain, the sound of water soothes. Think about how a rainy day inspires you to curl up inside. Think about the CDs and apps that use water sounds to lull you to sleep. Think about the popularity of tabletop fountains in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

5) Forest

“And into the forest I go, to lose mind and find my soul.” — John Muir

With the last two items being fire and water, forest brings in air and earth. The expected sounds in the forest—the various gentle rustlings, crunches, and crackling in the wind or under foot—brings serenity and a unique spiritual healing. The sounds are nearly impossible to replicate outside of the actual forest setting, so the benefits come from the whole experience, including the sound, but not the sound alone.

6) Silence

I will acknowledge that there are two points of opposition to this argument. One is that silence is not sound, but the opposite of sound. The other is that silence can be disturbing.

On the point that silence is no sound, I point out that I am not using a scientific definition; I am going by intuition. And to those who go by intuition, silence speaks. Listen.

On the point of whether silence can be disturbing, I point out that it really depends on what is in you during the period of silence … and after. I recall a that I was in a modified corpse pose during the savasana at the end of my yoga flow, and I started crying. I had been practicing for a little while and had gotten to the point where I could lie in savasana without busy thoughts filling my mind. Why was I crying? Was I disturbed? Possibly. Did I have a new sense of calm when I was done? Absolutely.

This list is not clinically studied nor definitive. But the exercise of developing it reminded me that simply listening to something may be provide relief from feeling of unease.