Ahh, remember the long sweet lingering in the womb, when the subtle echoes of outside voices and the swoosh of amniotic fluid soothed your waiting soul? NO?
Well, even if you don’t, there are adults who believe that what goes on acoustically in proximity to mom’s bulging belly may have dramatic effects upon the evolving brain therein.
This is not in the realm of my expertise, though I’ve always been fascinated by the prospects.
I like this post about introducing the unborn to music, with a range of choices to consider. The ‘Mozart Effect’ is widely known, but I agree with the idea of the mother using intuition with the responses of her fetus. Regular hearing begins at about the 4 month stage. It is believed that the most effective music in terms of future musical development depends on rhythmic factors. Higher frequencies tend to be muted out in the fluid environment.
There’s also underwater sound therapy (for those who’ve already gone through the birth process, that is).
When I attended a seminar in Halliburton, ON about sound ecology, I witnessed a video made by a woman who explored recording her own reactionary (wordless) sounds underwater while scuba diving by a coral reef. To me, it was as close as any of us might ever get to being back in the womb. It was incredibly comforting, creating for me a longing to get back there, away from the cacophony of every day life.
What I can give you from my own experience, though it’s not highly sophisticated, is very simple. While lying in a bathtub, lie back with your head slightly submerged, just enough so that your ears are under water. Hum, sing, overtone sing, yodel, try all those funny noises you made as a kid, etc. Notice the intense listening you experience inside your head. Without the interference of those sound waves traveling through the air (or at least have them greatly reduced in significance), there is an unusual calmness present. It allows us to get inside our own sound. And in the case of overtone singing, it tends to ‘exaggerate’ the harmonic content we might otherwise miss.
When it comes to recording whale song, for example, there are numerous complex factors to take into account. I won’t pretend to know or understand these principles, but if you’re interested, here’s a good site for the layperson.
I did have the pleasure of ‘jamming’ with the songs of the whales from Raratonga, on a recording by Lisa Walker. I could imagine sharing their environment, and perhaps even intutitively acknowledging what they were communicating.
It has been shown that the calls of dolphins, with their staccato like sound when heard above water, actually resemble human overtone singing when recorded underwater with hydrophones. For me, that’s reason enough to sing overtones, if we can interact with these highly intelligent beings!
CommentDon Campbell is a well known author and expert on the healing voice and effects of music (notably the ‘Mozart effect’) on the psyche. He was the founder of the Institute of Music, Health and Education in Boulder, CO, from ’88 to ’97, with the program he had developed in toning and color.
I received my certificate in the course offered there in 1991. This required me to attend the intensives at the end of the year, where the following experimental demonstrations were carried out.
What I’m relating in this blog is some amazing examples of ‘body scanning’ through toning. Four subjects volunteered to stand and do a ‘siren’ of sound from the top of their range down to the bottom. As Don carefully observed their body language, he came to conclusions about how they held their voices in relation to beliefs, deep seated blocks or injuries in their bodies. Then he would suggest an antidote to their problem, and witness the instant results.
1. After one woman did her siren, he asked her if she’d ever had anything happen to her wrists. She said, yes, she’d sprained (or broken?) both of them and it was very painful. How did he know? Her voice was full of wrists. She was ‘favoring’ her wrists.
Antidote: He got her to put her arms behind her back and pretend that her wrists were handcuffed together. In other words, quite the opposite of ‘favoring’ them. The result in the next toning siren was truly more free in sound.
2. A woman’s siren was quite timid and weak.
Antidote: She was asked to pretend she was an (American) football quarterback, get into position with the imaginary football, shout out the numbers, then instead of carrying through with the play, go into her siren again. The results were as if she’d been given a new lease on life.
3. A woman, while doing her siren, was notably very limp with her body, overly relaxed. Although this might be considered helpful to be relaxed, in her case it caused her voice to be quite non-committal. She was like a Raggedy Ann doll.
Antidote: He asked her to pretend she was a wooden soldier. Her resulting siren sounded like it came halfway between the two extremes.
4. Most amazingly- a woman who had essentially only one vocal cord, as the other was damaged with scar tissue through some bad surgery. Her siren was extremely weak, squeaky, and pretty much disappeared at numerous areas in her range.
Antidote: He asked her if she felt hot or cold, and if so, where? After some thought, she claimed to feel warm on her chest and cold on her upper back. He got two towels, one soaked in hot water and one in cold, and wrung out. Placing the cold towel on her chest and the hot towel on her back, she then repeated her siren. The results were dramatic. It was as if she had almost grown back a normal vocal cord.
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We then went off in small groups, where each of us did our own similar experiment. In my case, I was favoring my neck, holding it stiffly. I’d nearly broken it on two occasions, once at about age 6, and once at age 17. Once I realized I was doing this, I gently rolled it from side to side, offering greater freedom in my siren.
BTW, in my eBook, offered for free on this site, ‘Tone Your Way to Inner Revelation’, Don Campbell wrote the preface, as it follows the complete guidelines in the course mentioned here.
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