Jay Griffiths writes:

Sound is life. The sound of God’s voice created life, in Christian understanding. In the womb, sound is the first of the senses to apprehend the world beyond the body: a fetus is able to hear their mother’s voice, while a chick in the egg hears the song of its parent birds. Hearing is thought to be the last sense to leave us in our dying, and we speak of the silence of the grave.

Healing has traditionally been associated with sound, from the psychological medicine of a lullaby to the chants of monks and nuns in the early hospitals of monasteries, convents and religious centres. The incantations of shamans are some of the oldest of medicines. Melody and song are understood to have healing qualities, ancient and modern, from gong baths to Brian Eno’s album Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978). When something is well, we say it is ‘sound’.

The body is well when it is in harmony with itself, in its inner balance of homeostasis. In traditional Navajo culture, medicine people are known as ‘Singers’ whose healing work seeks to restore harmony within the individual, and more widely to attune a person with other humans and the world.

Nature’s sounds are healing. The sound of a rainforest; the flowing of a stream; a cascade of a waterfall; frogsong, insect rhythms and birdsong: these heal and salve. We humans as a species were born into our existence hearing the mother-voice of nature and the primal song of the animal musicians who were there before us, drumming, carolling, whistling and hooting. [Continue reading…]