A Case For Sound Therapy: How Vibrations Can Heal Our Bodies

The human body is designed to be exquisitely sensitive to sound.

In utero, our ability to hear develops by about 18 weeks, making it one of the earliest senses to develop. By the end of the second trimester, research has shown that a fetus responds specifically to the sound of a mother's voice1. Doctors and hospice workers speculate that in the final moments of life, senses depart one at a time with hearing being the last to go—which is why we're advised to keep talking to our loved ones even after it seems they are no longer cognizant. Hearing is, in this way, one of our first and last modes of connection.

Though the sounds we might imagine are something like voices or music, from a pure physics perspective, sound is silent. When we experience sound, what is actually happening is vibrations are passing through matter—be it a gas, fluid, or solid—in the form of a wave. 

Think of it like a slinky stretched between two people: If one person gives their end a push, the slinky ripples forward until it reaches the other person, then bounces back, continuing on and on. 

Recent research shows that we pick up both audible and inaudible sound all the way down to a cellular level: In 2015, a study was published by biomedical engineering researchers from Columbia University building on the groundbreaking discovery that antenna-like structures containing an array of proteins on our cell membranes, called primary cilium, receive and respond to vibrational energy fields such as sound, light, and radio frequencies.

If a vibration in the environment resonates with the receptor's antenna, it alters the proteins' charges, causing the cell to change shape. This is a breathtaking discovery, given that defects in the primary cilium have been linked to illnesses as wide-ranging as arthritis, polycystic kidney disease, obesity, heart failure, and cancer. 

This is the very principle that sound medicine is built on: When we are ill, the body's natural order of frequencies is altered, but when we are exposed to certain external vibrations in sound, our internal rhythms can be calmed or restored.

This idea has been passed on through history from many cultures—ancient Egyptians, Aborigines, Tibetan monks, Native American shamans, and Vedic masters among them. These groups have variously used chants, mantras, song, and musical instruments to restore the vibratory frequencies of the body and mind, understanding instinctively what scientists were later able to prove: There is a direct relationship between environmental sound and our physiological health.