What is Sound Therapy?

Sound therapy uses different types of sound, from a specific instrument, a combination of instruments, a piece of music or your own voice to help improve your health and wellbeing by restoring balance to your whole system.

A sound therapy session may be focused at improving your physical health, mental or emotional well-being, energetic alignment or a combination of any or all of these.

Different methods of sound therapy have been developed because sound is produced in so many different ways. Whether you’re an active or passive participant in the way you use sound therapy, sound and music can significantly alter mood, stimulate memory or touch our emotions in a way that is often both subtle and immediate.

Sound therapy works on the principle of ‘sympathetic resonance’ – one vibrating object producing a spontaneous response in another. Such response occurs because all matter in our physical world has the capacity to vibrate and every object has a frequency at which it will respond more easily than others – its ‘natural’ frequency. Whether you pluck a string, hit a drum, or hum a note you’re producing vibrations that radiate out from their source, influencing anything they come into contact with.

Sound & music act as 'neutral' stimuli on many different levels. For example, whenever we listen to music, sound waves enter our body establishing a global response simultaneously throughout our whole system. Our body responds immediately as vibrations travel through the body’s own pathways at the speed of sound, reaching all the different systems at a cellular level.
We’re literally “wired”for sound.

We often believe that it’s a certain musical genre or specific instrument that causes us to reject listening to certain types of music. In reality, the tempo or tone of a particular instrument is simply activating tension that is already present in our system. Ironically the music we like the least can have the most therapeutic benefit – used in moderation!

How can Sound Therapy help?

Sound therapy can help create change in both our physical and emotional state. Using either sound and/or music on a regular basis and in a conscious way can help release and resolve tensions that frequently have an emotional origin to them and which have, over time, developed into physical symptoms or conditions. Regular use can help you gain greater awareness of emotional behaviors that may have contributed to such tensions.

Initially, you’re likely to experience temporary discomfort, but by releasing stress through consciously using sound and music, you can improve your capacity to relax and support your body’s recovery process.