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Striking a drum, shaking chimes, circling a crystal bowl’s rim: these actions release sonic energy. In the US retail Yoga arena and beyond, enthusiasts use sound wave energy in sound bath events—meditative percussive immersions that surround bathers with the hum and tinkle of productive vibrations. As health researchers like Tamara Goldsby and colleagues confirm, when leveraged with care, sonic forces positively affect mood and well-being.
Amid the chime and drone of bowl and gong, sound bath afficionados deploy popular understandings of physics and the body to claim the practice’s calming, therapeutic effect. Yet their scientistic and spiritualized framings look past higher-order sociopolitical determinants of stressed-out tired minds and bodies. In its surging popularity and commodification, the sound bath’s radical resonance is diminished, its potential for socially impactful healing stilled in favor of its utility for individualized respite care.
Sound energy, life force
A postural Yoga class nears its end. Lights dimmed, participants take up the typical final pose: savasana (lying prone and still to “process” or “receive the benefits” of the practice). Any other day the room might lapse into near silence, scuffs of prior movements and rhythmic breathing replaced by ambient noise or new age music streaming softly.
But today, the teacher, aided by a colleague, releases various tones and vibrations from crystal bowls, chimes, a rain stick, a gong—instruments that, when struck by a felt-tip mallet, stroked in a swirl, shaken, or otherwise animated, emit streams of sonic energy. Now and then, one teacher’s voice gently and concisely explains that we are hearing a specific note, thought to be related to this or that chakra (embodied energy reservoir). The other taps a tuning fork and slowly moves around the room dipping, lifting, and rotating the buzzing tool, its resonance shape-shifting for each client in the process. The waves of sound washing over and through us are meant to intensify or deepen savasana-induced relaxation.
This particular exposure of measured bongs, slow rattles, and ringing pulses is just a taster (see also below); dedicated sound baths typically last about an hour. And the teachers suggest that the vibrational energy of the instruments in a dedicated sound bath (which the studio is about to begin offering regularly) could “remove energetic blockages,” “regulate our nervous systems,” and otherwise “shift” our “vibrations” back into good working order. Indeed, research shows that carefully executed sound bath treatments using singing bowls are notably therapeutic.
Sound baths are a variant of a practice called energy healing, in which universal or human energies are deployed, manipulated, enhanced, redirected, balanced, and so on, often via a laying on of hands. Technically, two classes of energy exist: potential or stored energy (e.g., chemical, mechanical, nuclear, gravitational), and kinetic or moving energy (e.g., electrical, radiant, thermal, motion, electrical). Sound is energy on the move through substances (e.g., air, water) in waves. Sound energy is released when an object or substance is forced (e.g., through percussion) into a vibrating state.
The science of sound medicine is in its infancy. But as physics experts know, sound waves coming from one object can induce other objects to vibrate when those objects are sensitive to the same frequency. This phenomenon—sympathetic vibration or sympathetic resonance—explains how one tuning fork leads a similar tuning fork across the room to vibrate without direct physical contact.
Empirical observations such as this, or regarding other material effects that vibrations can have, plus people’s experience of the emotional impact of music and of the spoken word, have no doubt fueled sound’s cross-culturally common reputation as an empowered force that can, for example, bring people into trances.
Sound can even be experienced as life generating. Many traditions hold that sound played a major role in the world’s creation. For instance, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Genesis 1.2–1.3 tells us, “[T]he Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light.” A Japanese creation story has sound begetting light and bringing order out of chaos. Even J. R. R. Tolkien’s fictional Middle Earth was acoustically driven, according to the origin myth he wrote for it.
In Hindu scripture (and in Yoga philosophy) “Om” is the primordial sound—the original generative vibration. Om, better represented as Aum, is one of six bija or “seed” sounds—single-syllable nonwords (Lam, Vam, Ram, Yam, Ham, Aum), each of which is said to have a particular vibratory frequency. Chanting or repeating a bija can therefore have certain vitalizing effects.
Sound baths leverage the connections that can be drawn between sound energy and vitality. And although sound baths built around such ideas have likely existed for eons, widespread interest is now burgeoning.
