I took part in this experiment in a ‘science salon’ in Tokyo in 1991.
These comparison graphs represent my own brain waves, recorded and measured during two separate segments of one minute each in duration. I was sitting in a sort of comfy ‘cockpit’ with electrodes on my head.
The object of the experiment was to determine the amount of time spent in each brain wave state and to compare the overall effects of normal relaxation with the same amount of time spent overtone singing.
Theta waves are the deepest here (delta being deeper, but usually only present during sleep).
The figures in the count column (number of seconds) suggest that more time is spent in deeper brain wave states during overtoning than in ordinary relaxation. The most pronounced difference is in the amount of time spent in beta waves.
The bottom chart represents the levels of concentration and relaxation in both cases, with the highest possible score being 200. The higher the number of points, the greater the level of concentration or relaxation. The results show a significant overall increase in both states while overtone singing. While starting out approximately with the same concentration level both times, there is an opposite trend in concentration during the second half, which increased dramatically in the case of overtone singing. It is interesting to note a deeper level of relaxation while overtone singing as opposed to that of an ordinary relaxed state.
The analysis of the overtone singing segment describes this as a highly meditative, healthy and stable state, with strong energy to rid oneself of stress. When you think of simultaneously being very relaxed and focused, this would be an advantageous state to be in while engaged in almost any daily activity, and one to cultivate with the practice of overtone singing.
*Admittedly, this experiment was brief, and may not represent conclusive evidence. However, I feel that the positive implications for the benefits of overtone singing may be investigated in an experiential way. In other words, let your intuition guide you !
I will be drawing your attention to some of my friends and colleagues in the field of overtone singing, who have done a lot of research on the topic over the years.
My guest blogger today is Mark van Tongeren, from the Netherlands, is an ethnomusicologist that I met in Tuva in ’95, at the International Symposium of Throat Singing. He is a doctoral candidate at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, and happens to be an accomplished overtone and throat singer of the Tuvan tradition. What I find exciting about his work is his approach to combining the scientific and artistic realms.
He has written an excellent academic book called ‘Overtone Singing’, which, from the title you can imagine- this is an all encompassing work about the topic as it occurs in very diverse ways across the globe. It covers the history, origins, various traditions of remote regions and prevailing perspectives of the world today.
Here is his blog, where I recommend in particular the post ‘Forum interview about Thresholds of Audibility’.
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.
***
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.
CommentI was one of those who suffered tinnitus, and who has overcome this supposedly incurable condition. In my rock and roll days of the late 70′s and early 80′s, I was in a very loud band, confronted 6 nights a week with being in direct line with the lead guitar player’s excruciating amp volume. This may or may not have been the cause of my fairly rare form (known to some researchers as ‘pulsating tinnitus’), appearing in the late 90′s. The symptoms were either a low- frequency clicking or rumbling earthquake in the middle of my head. The clicking was rhythmic, though not based on my heartbeat, and though it may have been enjoyable for certain drummers, it wasn’t for me. And it had nothing to do with TMJ syndrome.
I was directed to the most respected ear, nose and throat specialist in Toronto, Ontario. He basically told me there was nothing I could do about it. I was stuck with it. His advice was to learn to live with it. That helpful little bit of information was the norm until fairly recently.
Don’t ask me how, but it pretty much went away by itself. Maybe because I started doing something right, such as eliminating the high stress factors in my life. But I’d like to bring up a perhaps related event that happened earlier, that might shed some additional light on the mysterious workings of the inner ear.
Around 1991, I participated in a research project for the late Dr. Alfred Tomatis. He was a genius on the subject of hearing/ listening, albeit highly controversial amongst the scientific community. He concluded that the voice can only reproduce what the ear hears. This is debatable. But he produced so many miraculous reversals in the realm of so-called lost hearing capacity, among other things, such as treating attention deficit disorder, autism, preparing the ear to learn new languages.
The premise behind the research was that he took several subjects who had already been doing intensive toning training on their own. He wanted to see if we had quicker results in improving the higher end of our frequency response for hearing after the 10 day experiment. That is, quicker than people who had not undertaken this training. The experiment was to listen to special filtered music on headphones for up to 6 hours per day. This music, filtered in a quite irritating way at times (it was either Mozart or Gregorian chant) was designed to gradually restore our higher frequency response.
As this experiment ultimately resulted in my ability to hear higher frequencies than I had become accustomed to (proven via before and after hearing tests) I’ll admit that it does not really explain how I got rid of the low frequency earthquakes later on, to be sure. But it does seem to point me to the conclusion that we are malleable, that the course of history can be overturned. Cilia (the itsy bitsy little hairs lining the ear canal that are each responsible for a particular frequency) that have been laying down and playing dead can be taught to stand up again and become functional. Tomatis claimed that the reason they’d been lying down in the first place was due to early traumatic experiences involving those very frequencies. Psychological/ physiological damages, if you will. So perhaps the reverse is also true. We can learn to turn down the volume of the troublesome frequencies.
So, though I’m certainly no expert, I’m throwing around ideas here that might correlate to the whole topic of tinnitus, hearing loss, hearing gain, relief of debilitating symptoms.
Here’s a suggested natural cure for this nagging problem from one of my favorite sources of alternative healing, NaturalNews.com
Here’s a collection of videos on current treatments.
Sharry Edwards has also been highly successful in her approach to tinnitus. It is just one area of many that is addressed in her ground breaking work, Bio Acoustics Therapy.
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