Turns out sound healing can be actually, well, healing

Los Angeles
I heard a gong for the first time 15 or 16 years ago, says Jamie Ford.
Shed heard a gong strike before, obviouslyId seen the Gong Showbut this gong, in a 2000 kundalini
yoga class, was the first one shed ever heard.
I heard it and I was justI went to another place, Ford tells Quartz. I was calm. I could travel.
Everything just expanded.
At the time, Ford was a biologist studying the desert tortoise. The gong marked the start of a new
career path, one that led to a room in LAs Grassell Park neighborhood filled with crystals, tuning
forks, and 12 brass-hued gongs the size of big-rig tires.

Ford, 39, is a sound healer and owner of the Sound Space. In 30 minutes her year-old studio, will fill
with 10 strangers who will lie on the floor while the vibrations of her improvised gong concert wash
over them. Ford also does private sessions. About 75% of the people who come to her are dealing
with anxiety, stress, and depression.

The
Sound Space(Jamie Ford)
Sound healing adherents say that listening to percussive instruments like gongs, Tibetan singing
bowls, and tuning forks reduces stress and can place the listener in a meditative state. Practitioners
offer their services as an alternative treatment for problems like anxiety, chronic pain, sleep
disorders, and PTSD.
Sound healing is having a moment. There are sound healing Meetups in LA, London, and Chicago.

More than 5,000 people are listed in the member directory of the Boulder, Colorado-based Sound
Healers Association. The LA Times listed one of Fords sound baths in its annual holiday gift guide.
But are the benefits of sound therapy real? Or is this a particularly noisy form of quackery?
Planets versus peer review
Evidence of using sound, music, and chants to heal the sick dates back thousands of years to ancient
Egyptians and Australias Aborigines.
Today, a Google search for sound healing yields websites with auto-play music and a lot of celestialthemed clip art. Its not a regulated industry, though several associations offer correspondence
certification courses with modules like The Sound of Love and How to Achieve Dominant Outward
Radiation.
A search for sound healing yields websites with auto-play music and a lot of celestial-themed clip art.
The sound scene has a quintessentially LA, New Age-y vibe to it, a feeling bolstered by the fuzzy
explanations practitioners offer for why, exactly, the clang of a gong has therapeutic effects on a
human body.
Ford plays gongs whose makers claim to have specifically tuned them to the orbital properties of the
planets. Some practitioners say the right sound unblocks or redirects energy in the body, similar to
the claims of acupuncture. Others say the sound works in tandem with humans own vibrational
frequencies, or that it rearranges the ions on cell membranes.
These claims dont stand up to scientific scrutiny.
I spoke to Chris Kyriakakis, a professor of audio signal processing at the University of Southern
Californias Viterbi School of Engineering. Among Kyriakakiss areas of study is how the human brain
translates sound waves into perceptible sounds.
It would be nice if some of them were true. But theres no science whatsoever that supports any of
these claims.
Theres no scientific published peer reviewed paper that supports any of these claims, he said.
These are all cool claims. It would be nice if some of them were true. But theres no science
whatsoever that supports any of these claims.
OK, so sound healers theories about why their practices make people feel better dont stack up. But
science has looked at the question of whether people do in fact feel better after hearing certain
sounds, and on this, there is some evidence.
Music is a known de-stressor. Scientists from the National Institutes of Health found that subjects
who listened to classical music before a stressful event recovered from the stress faster than those
who listened to rippling water or simply relaxed in quiet.
But producing sound, particularly the deep, resonant kind sound therapy works with, may be even
more beneficial than passively listening to it. A 2012 study split 39 people caring for family members
with dementia into two groups. One was tasked with listening to relaxing music for 12 minutes each

day for eight weeks. The other used the same amount of time to practice kirtan kriya, a meditative
form of yoga that involves chanting.
At the end of the study the group that listened to relaxing music felt good, with 31.2% reporting
substantial improvement in depressive symptoms and 19% scoring higher on a mental health survey.
But the chanting group felt better, with 65.2% reporting fewer depressive symptoms and 52%
reporting better mental health scores.
The study sample is small. But lead author Helen Lavretsky, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, told
Quartz that sound has interesting implications for treating chronic stress and memory problems.
Lavretsky is also a fan of sound healing, having experimented with gongs, Tibetan singing bowls,
and chanting. (Ford sometimes has clients in private sessions chant as part of their therapy.)
In one study, the chanting group reported 65% fewer depressive symptoms.
One of sound healings biggest mainstream advocates was the late Mitchell Gaynor, an oncologist
and clinical assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and director of medical
oncology at the schools Center for Integrative Medicine. (Gaynor died in September.)
Gaynor encouraged sound therapy alongside conventional medicine, arguing that relaxed patients
have lower stress hormones, stronger immune systems, and better tools to cope with the
psychological and physical effects of their disease and treatment.
Gaynor was turned on to sound healing in the early 1990s, when a Tibetan patient gifted him a
traditional singing bowl.
If somebody had told me when I was a medical student in Dallas, Texas, that one day I would be
teaching my patients to use singing bowls to heal themselves, I would have thought he or she was
crazy, Gaynor wrote in the 1999 book The Healing Power of Sound.
Is it normal to have orgasms?
There is no standard response to a sound bath, Ford explains as bathers arrive. Some people report
expansive, consciousness-altering experiences. Some cry. Some fall asleep.

One woman came up to me [after a session] and said, is it normal to have orgasms? Ford says. I was
like, whoa. I should put that in my marketing materials.
With this in mind, I find myself sizing up my fellow bathers as they come through the studio door.
Fortunately, none of them look like the public-orgasm type, except maybe for the couple two pillows
down giggling and kissing softly on a shared mat.
I try to start a conversation. He doesnt want to talk about his crystals.
The poncho-clad gentleman next to me is busy arranging a set of crystals he brought from home into
a very specific configuration on his mat. I try to start a conversation. He doesnt want to talk about
his crystals.
The friendly-looking blond woman on my other side is more talkative, explaining that shes come to
the session to drop off some emotional baggage. I just want to get rid of stuff that doesnt belong to
me anymore, she explains. And if not, just to have a good time.
Ford encourages us all to lie down and relax as the sound bath begins. Played together, the gongs
create a surprisingly rich and complex sound that evokes the soundtrack of a 1970s sci-fi movie set
in space. Theres incense burning. Its a little trippy.
I close my eyes. My mind wanders. I replay a thing my kid did the other day, and suddenly theres a
childhood memory that hasnt lit up my amygdala in decadeswhere did that come from?
I think about space. Then I have what feels like a very deep revelation about a small personal
conundrum. Then I think about how my back hurts. After a while I curl up on my side and settle into
a pleasant absence of any real thoughts at all, until the music stops and Ford gently instructs us to
stretch and wake up.
I dont feel as if Ive traveled to a different astral plain, but I feel calm, a feeling that lasts as we bid
goodbye and head out into LA traffic, fading slowly like the trailing echo of a gong.