The sound of healing. Every culture in the world ahs used sound and music to heal. Finally we're catching up

Vegetarian Times, March, 1998 by Suzanne Gerber

Seven years ago, Peter Fisher(*), a 60-year-old physician in Ohio, was driving to work when he recognized the symptoms of an impending stroke: bright flashing lights, numbness, headache. Calmly, he pulled into a gas station, leaned on his horn and asked the terrified attendant to call an ambulance to take him to a specific hospital. The only movement he had was his eyelids, and his only means of communication was blinking once for yes, twice for no.

A few weeks later, Peter's desperate wife placed a call to Don Campbell, a composer, music researcher and teacher, healer and the author of The Mozart Effect (Avon Books, 1997). Campbell, who knew the Fishers professionally, suggested they play as much Mozart as possible in Peter's room, and a few weeks after that, he paid a personal visit. "I sat on the right side of the bed, because the right ear is the quickest way to the language centers of the brain, and began to sing and simultaneously tap each syllable into his hand," recalls Campbell. "For the next three hours, I would sing and tap for five minutes, then rest for 10 minutes." At the end of the Session, the two men were actually communicating with a codified system by which Fisher would indicate letters with eye movements.

This experience, which Campbell calls integrated auditory patterning, enabled Peter to begin to reconnect with the outside world. A few months later he was fitted with a light-emitting cap, which activates computer keys when it is directed at them. Now in a wheelchair, Peter writes journals and keeps in touch with his family and former colleagues.

Ironically, three years after participating in Peter's rehabilitation, Campbell, then a robust 43-year-old, learned that he had a potentially fatal blood clot in an artery just below his brain. He was given three options: undergo immediate surgery with no guarantee of a positive outcome; be admitted to the hospital for six weeks for hourly monitoring; or simply wait a few days and see what happens.

Campbell, who'd spent 10 years investigating the effects of sound on the body, was quite knowledgeable about therapeutic uses of music. So he decided to pass on the surgery and hospitalization and simply hum. Fearful that a more powerful sound might bring on a stroke, he hummed quietly for three to four minutes at a time, up to seven times a day. He did this for three weeks, at the same time meditating on healing images. He went back for a second brain scan, and when his doctor saw the results, he was speechless: The blood clot had shrunk from more than an inch and a half in length to an eighth of an inch, and Campbell was proclaimed out of danger.

"Sound therapy" may seem like just the latest New Age fad, but in fact it dates back thousands of years. "The use of sound and music is the most ancient healing modality," says Jonathan Goldman, founder and director of the Sound Healers Association in Boulder, Colo., and author of Healing Sounds (Element Books, 1996). "It was practiced in the ancient mystery schools of Egypt, Tibet, India, Athens and Rome for tens of thousands of years. Much of this information disappeared in the West, but it's been re-emerging in the last 10 or 15 years."

Even if you didn't know that a thousand years ago the Chinese believed music could do everything from transform people's characters to restore the fertility of the soil, you do know that sound is a powerful force. Most of us, at one time or another, practice our own version of music therapy. We instinctually make--or seek out--sound to express our emotions. A mother naturally sings to soothe her baby. When we're depressed, we play or make our favorite music, either to lift us out of our gloom or to intensify it; when happy, we play joyous music to enhance the mood.

We're in good company. In The Iliad, Apollo, the mythical god of music and medicine, halted a plague because he was so pleased with the sacred hymns sung by Greek youths. Pythagoras, who discovered that all music could be expressed in numbers and mathematical formulas, founded a school that, among other things, trained students to release worry, fear, anger and sorrow through singing and playing musical instruments.

Music is a fundamental component of all major religions, from Christian hymns to Jewish cantorial melodies to the muezzin calling Muslims to prayer. Buddhists recite mantras and prayers and chant to win merit in this life and those to come. Millions of people around the world chant the Sanskrit mantra "om" daily to purify mind and body and become one with all creation. Sufis (the esoteric branch of Islam) hold that higher states of consciousness can be attained by concentrating on the reverberations of bells and the harmonic echoes of choirs. And Judaism's mystical Kabbala teaches that chanting certain vowel sounds connects one with the energies of the Divine.

Don Campbell may he one of the leading American pioneers in his field, but the man he calls the Einstein of sound is Alfred Toamtis, M.D., a Frenchman who's devoted his life to the study of the human ear and the effects of musical sound on the brain. It was Tomatis who first established that fetuses can hear sound. Back in the 1960s, the Paris-based physician was called in to investigate a strange malaise that had overtaken a monastery of Benedictine monks in the south of France. Out of the blue, the brothers had become listless, tired and depressed. Once other medical authorities had ruled out physical causes, Tomatis began to search for changes in their diet or work conditions but discovered none.