⬆️ Some musical accompaniment for the journey ahead 🎵
In this piece, we will explore acoustic phenomena, known to us through the science of Cymatics, that show sound was among the first organizing principles in the universe after the Big Bang, on par with gravity. Sound may also have been instrumental in helping the first living cells form in the primordial soup of early Earth, using many of the same organizing principles. Just a bit of science to clarify first…
Sound can be a somewhat amorphous term so here we will define it as follows: Sound is a mechanical wave that travels through various mediums, like air or water, as a vibration. This vibration interacts with the molecules of these mediums by pushing and pulling on them, like ocean waves crashing and receding on a beach. This push and pull, also called compression and rarefaction, is what creates the oscillation of a basic sine wave.
The speed at which this oscillation happens determines a sound’s frequency, measured in Hertz (Hz.) Higher frequencies move quickly with shorter wave lengths and lower frequencies move slowly with longer wave lengths.
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Only frequencies in the ~20 Hz to ~20,000 Hz range are audible to humans but sound waves still exist at much higher and much lower frequencies. In many ways, the “audibility” of sound is a side-effect of the natural phenomena of these acoustic waves vibrating, and the medium through which they move can have a drastic effect. We are all used to hearing sound move through Earth’s atmosphere, but the same sound would “sound” very different if we were somehow able to listen to it while standing on Venus or Jupiter, similar to how a sound changes when we hear it from underwater.
Cymatics - what is it?
Cymatics, derived from the Greek word κῦμα, meaning “wave”, refers to the study of sound and vibration in visible mediums. In modern culture it tends to have 2 facets, 1 aesthetic and 1 highly technical. Perhaps best known are the beautiful, almost mandala-like images created by sound waves exciting grains of sand on a metal plate or exciting water in a small dish.
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More scientifically, Cymatics refers to “the study of the periodical effects that sound and vibrations exercise on matter” and the objective of these studies is to better understand the ways all types of matter, from galactic debris to human blood cells, are affected by certain vibrational frequencies interacting with them.
Air, or any medium, expands and compresses (the rise and fall of the sound wave) as sound travels through it. The energy of the sound applies pressure on the air molecules, stimulating them and causing movement in a certain direction. This process is essential for recording sound since it is this binary interaction that a microphone can pick up and convert into the ones and zeroes of a digital signal that a computer can understand. Extrapolating on this process further is what allows us to convert sound and represent it in other mediums.
If you’ve spent enough time on the internet, you’ve likely come across people sharing Cymatic images. They are pretty astounding and it's not hard to see why people are fascinated by them. Typically a fine sand or liquid is placed above a speaker cone or other resonant material (like a metal plate or sheet of paper) and as specific frequencies are played the material flows into various patterns. However, many ideal circumstances must be present for the patterns to emerge, including not just the frequency and amplitude (volume) of the sound but also the temperature and viscosity of the atmosphere and the specific medium being stimulated.
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One of the earliest tools for observing these patterns was called a Chladni plate (named after Ernst Chladni, who will return to shortly.) Sand was sprinkled on a brass plate and then a violin bow was scraped along the edge, vibrating the plate in a specific way that caused the sand to scatter according to which parts of the plate resonated.
It is not agreed upon whether the Cymatic image that appears in these experiments directly correlates to a specific frequency (as in, any time that frequency occurs, this identical pattern is created) or if the specific pattern is also dependent on all the other variables present as well (as in, the exact same frequency might produce a different looking pattern if it’s played in a different atmosphere or medium.) Are we “seeing” a specific frequency or are we “finding a resonant mode of a medium that is excited by that particular sound.”
The term “Cymatics'' was not coined until the 1960s, by Hans Jenny, but human cultures have been studying sound and its effect on people for nearly as long as we’ve been around… Which means it’s time for a quick tangent to account for how we got here in the first place. After all, this wouldn’t be Socratic Engineering if we didn’t take a peek down the rabbit hole of intellectual history.
Studying Sound in Ancient Times
The Aboriginal tribes of Australia were among the first people to experiment with using sound for healing, perhaps as far back as 40,000 years ago. The yidaki, or Didgeridoo as it’s known today, was an instrument of immense importance in tribal rituals and was believed to have healing properties, a claim that modern science has recently legitimized through experiments showing it can help with things like sleep apnea, anxiety, and stress. Though these tribes used the yidaki mainly in spiritual and healing rituals, it indicates they were among the first to harness the power of sound and vibration to influence physical matter.
The Egyptians were also fascinated by sound and its ability to influence the physical world. Dating back to at least 4,000 BC, the Egyptians had a sacred tradition involving the chanting of vowel sounds, a ritual that only the highest priests could engage in and described to us by the Greek traveler Demetrius from around 200 BC:
‘In Egypt, when priests sing hymns to the Gods they sing the seven vowels in due succession and the sound has such euphony that men listen to it instead of the flute and the lyre.’
Vowel sounds were considered sacred to the Egyptians, so much so that the written hieroglyphic language contains no vowels1. This concept of “sacred vowel sounds” was present in other parts of the ancient world (for example, the Hebrew language also lacks vowels, partially due to the belief that the name of God can’t be represented in writing) and this is a topic that warrants much lengthier discussion in a future article2.
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A reverence for sound is seen in many Eastern traditions as well, which incorporate spoken mantras and chants as part of their meditations and other rituals of spiritual ascension. Again, it was believed chanting certain vowel sounds could bring about physiological changes within a person, but even “regular” syllables had resonant frequencies that could affect specific parts of a person. Sometimes the benefits came from chanting the sound itself (because certain reflex points are stimulated within the mouth) and other times the chant only needs to be heard, and special resonant spaces and buildings were created to enhance this effect. This is conjecture but it's not outrageous to believe this could have been a guiding principle in the architecture of many ancient temples.
Suffice to say, it seems clear that cultures like the Hindus and the Buddhists have been aware that sound has an intimate relationship with the geometry of reality. Modern Cymatic imagery is the long sought-after proof of this, and it also makes a great segueway into everyone’s favorite geometer, Pythagoras.
Pythagoras, as we’ve discussed at length previously, believed deeply in the connection between math, geometry, and sound or music. He founded a Mystery School on Crotona that taught the flute and lyre as the primary instruments of healing, saying:
“Each celestial body, in fact each and every atom, produces a particular sound on account of its movement, its rhythm or vibration. All these sounds and vibrations form a universal harmony in which each element, while having it's own function and character, contributes to the whole” - Pythagoras
And
"The geometry of the shapes is solidified music" - Pythagoras
Certain intervals or notes corresponded with certain ailments and if we can understand and “map out” these relationships then we can use musical instruments to influence them. Pythagoras would even call this “musical medicine” (μουσική ἰατρεία) and the instrument he invented, the Monochord, was intended to be used for this purpose. His followers also practiced chanting and singing in unison to treat certain, more esoteric ailments of the soul, like passionate anger or aggression.
Whether you believe in sound’s healing properties or not, the key takeaway is the observation that sound has the ability to push something “out of alignment” back into its proper alignment, and this aspect of sound and music would be echoed by the titans of Greek philosophy, such as Plato and Aristotle, as well. If sound can influence and organize physical molecules, perhaps it can also help put one’s soul in “good order.”
Studying Sound in Slightly Less Ancient Times
Returning more specifically to our discussion on Cymatics, we’ll jump ahead to the early Renaissance of the 1400s and the journals of Leonardo DaVinci. Many credit DaVinci with the first real observation of Cymatics (as we understand it today), referring to a casual comment he makes in his notebooks about how the dust on his table seemed to organize into specific patterns whenever the table was vibrated by his pounding on it. A few hundred years later, in the 1630s, Galileo would pick up this idea and develop it further, observing dust forming into parallel lines on a brass plate when stimulated by the very musical sound of an iron chisel scraping across it.
In the 1680s, famed scientist Robert Hook would make immense leaps in this field, further refining Galileo’s brass plate experiment (thankfully using a violin bow now instead of a chisel) and starting to document the “nodal” patterns that emerged. These experiments would be carried on by Ernst Chladni who, while very much influenced by the work of Robert Hook before him, is often credited with inventing the field of Acoustic Studies. His experiments were crucial to our understanding of acoustic vibrations and pitch, as well as laying the groundwork for what would eventually become the science of Cymatics.
Chladni was a German musician and scientist who, building on the previous experiments with brass plates, noticed that holding the bow at different angles when stimulating the plate created different vibrations and thus different patterns. He would make it his life’s work to document as many of these figures as he could, known at the time as “Chladni Figures”, and he published these images in 1787. Of great significance, this work definitively proved that sound waves could exert force on physical matter, since his experiments were easily replicable by anyone. Sound, which had always been elusive to science due to its invisibility, could now be visualized and studied through its effect on other physical matter.
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People were, unsurprisingly, fascinated by these images and how they were created. The esteemed English scientist Michael Faraday would stoke this curiosity further by experimenting with the effect of sound on mediums other than sand and flour, like water and oil, and demonstrating these experiments to the public to great effect while at the Royal Academy in the 1830s. The patterns that appeared in water and other liquids when stimulated by sound would become known as Faraday Waves.
The Victorian Age would see many other acoustic inventions inspired by scientists like Hook, Chladni, and Faraday. Among them were many of the early experiments of Alexander Graham Bell, who became fascinated by the idea of representing sound in other mediums, such as light, which also traveled as a wave. These studies would eventually lead to the invention of the telephone3.
Another notable invention of this time was the Eidophone, invented by Welsh singer, songwriter, and scientist Margaret Watts Hughes in 1891. A person could speak into the Eidophone and the vibrations of their voice would be converted into illustrations that Wells dubbed “Voice Figures.” She published her studies Looking at the images she published in her 1904 book “The Eidophone” the similarity to Chladni Figures is obvious, but the Eidophone could also produce more “artistic” images, like the example of the tree below.
Inspired by all this research that came before him (and also the anthroposophy4 of Rudolf Steiner) Swiss physician, pianist, fine artist, and philosopher Hans Jenny would become intensely interested in exploring this burgeoning field of study in which sound is made visible. He would go on to provide rigorous empirical evidence for these phenomena and group them under a new field of physical science he’d call “Cymatics.” He would create several videos on the topic as well.
This brings us close to the present day, where perhaps one of the most famous examples of Cymatics in pop culture is the work of Dr. Masaru Emoto. Dr. Emoto famously studied the effect of vibrations on water molecules and plants, claiming that speaking calmly and lovingly to a plant, as opposed to meanly and harshly, could cause it to grow more healthily. He also showed that the structure of water molecules differ when they are subjected to constant positive stimuli as opposed to constant negative stimuli. Perhaps you’ve seen images like the following floating around the internet as well. Though his work has at times been criticized for not being “scientific” enough, it has yet to be disproven and points to a much grander connection between consciousness and nature.
Pioneering work in Cymatics is still being carried out today by scientists like John Stuart Reid, who invented the Cymascope - an instrument that allows us to observe Cymatic patterns in water. Reid, originally an acoustic scientist, became fascinated by Cymatics specifically after conducting several experiments within the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Suffering from a chronic back injury at the time, he was amazed to find himself pain free, permanently, after prolonged exposure to certain frequencies in this chamber.
Modern Discussions Around Cymatics
I realize that much of this history of Cymatics has also touched on the idea of sound as a tool for healing, which is an obviously related field, though many might claim it is “less scientific.” Even though most ancient cultures studied the healing properties of sound in some way, further research in this field was almost non-existent in the West until the medical properties of ultrasound waves were re-discovered5 in the 1930s.6
The fact of the matter is, sound is undeniably capable of rearranging the structure of molecules within a medium and, as such, has nearly limitless potential as a tool for healing. To be clear, this is not healing that occurs from simply listening to a sound, but rather from sound therapy, in which specific frequencies and sound waves are sent directly into the body through the skin.
The Role of Sound in the Early Universe
These ideas about the healing properties of sound are relevant to this discussion because it highlights the power sound and vibration can have on physical matter. With this in mind, we now turn our attention to the early universe, less than a billion years after the Big Bang.
The universe had a drastically different appearance at this time, being a mostly soup-y sea of plasma with charged particles and the ingredients for proto-galaxies distributed fairly evenly throughout7. Eventually, gravity set to work trying to pull slightly denser patches of matter together into what would eventually become galaxies. However, the process of drawing this matter together caused it to heat up and exert a new force repelling it in the opposite direction, eventually leading to a cycle where it cooled down again after being pushed far enough away and then was drawn back by gravity to repeat the process.
This oscillation between the pull of gravity and propulsion of heat created “waves of pressure - sound - that propagated through the plasma.” These sound waves are known as Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations (BAOs) and they rippled throughout the cosmic soup, causing the distribution of matter to become slightly denser along the ridges of these ripples. Eventually, when the universe reached around 380,000 years old, atoms began to form and matter began to cool down more efficiently. Without the repelling force of heat the BAOs essentially froze in place and gravity then became the dominant force in the universe.
The ridges of the BAO waves had “a bit more matter than the average across the universe8” causing these areas to clump up faster, attracting more and more matter until after hundreds of millions of years they become dense enough to become the stars around which galaxies could form. If sound waves hadn’t generated these ripples in the cosmic soup it may have taken much longer for these things to happen, or they may have never happened at all. Even if that weren’t the case, their absence would have resulted in a drastically different makeup of the universe than what we know today.
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It is perhaps not surprising then that many cultures have traditions or myths in which the universe is created from sound. For example, Hinduism speaks of the universe being birthed from the sacred “Om” sound, while Christianity and Judaism believe “In the beginning was the Word,” the sacred λόγος (Logos) that God spoke and from which the universe sprung.
Sound as an Organizing Force for Life in Abiogenesis
Now we’ll get a bit more theoretical. Much of the following is based on lectures by the aforementioned John Stuart Reid, inventor of the Cymascope, and these build on the idea that sound can play a role in organizing matter and molecules.
Much like the early universe, the early Earth was another primordial soup full of lifeless, charged matter. One of the biggest mysteries about life is how it started, what initiated Abiogenesis, “the natural process through which life emerges from inorganic material.” Early Earth was ripe with all the ingredients needed for life but what eventually brought them together; how did a soup of inorganic matter take that first step towards becoming something more? There is a popular analogy about a watchmaker: If you could somehow produce all the components needed to build a watch in a single test tube and then just swirled that tube around forever, would the pieces ever align and become a watch on their own?
The same could be said for life on Earth, and this is why many people believe in the idea of an intelligent designer (i.e. a Watchmaker) of some kind. There’s plenty of debate over how the components of life even ended up on Earth but that’s just the first step. Once everything was gathered here, how did this gumbo become the first intelligent cell and, eventually, a fish?
“Sonic Scaffolding” is a theory that proposes that sound provided the catalyst for prebiotic compounds to organize themselves. What sound and where did it come from? The deep, rumbling hum of hydrothermal vents along the ocean floor.
Imagine, deep under the primordial sea, all the ingredients of life, precursors to the protocell, jostling around with all the other bubbles created by these hydrothermal vents. Some of these ingredients might have attached to the surface of a bubble and the first protocell formed when the deep hum of the hydrothermal vent caused vibrations that caused these prebiotic compounds to organize on the surface of this bubble, much like Cymatic patterns on a microscopic Chladni plate.
The warm water around these hydrothermal vents is already an ideal breeding ground for life and its known that the bubbles of gas they release resonate at specific frequencies according to their volume (thanks to the Helmholtz Formula.) Cymatic patterns are definitely created on the surface of these bubbles so it would only be a matter of the “right” pattern being created that allows the organic compounds to align in the “right” way.
One interesting piece of evidence that would seem to support this line of thought is that many of the earliest life-forms and biological structures actually look a bit like simple Cymatic patterns
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This is still a hypothesis but I find the images to be particularly thought provoking. Similar analogies can be drawn between Cymatic patterns and the distribution of flower petals (phyllotaxis) when a flower blooms. Nature loves its poetry and to see these principles of organization reflected both on the grand scale of universe creation and on the microscopic level of cell formation would seem to be in line with this principle. I am of course only scratching the surface of the actual science here as well.
Conclusion
Humans have been fascinated by sound and its effects on us, both as music and as more abstract noises and tones, and have been studying it for as long as we’ve been studying anything. A resurgence of interest seems to have occurred lately and it's exciting to think about what new discoveries (re-discoveries?) still lie ahead.
Even if some of these ideas seem a bit far-fetched, consider that we humans are over 60% water (more than half) and the effect of sound waves on water is undisputed. There are many factors at play, but if you are being bombarded with loud vibrations, it is affecting your physiology in some way. It's easy to ignore ancient studies (“the universe came into existence from a spoken word?”) but time and again science has actually come through to provide a basis for many of these beliefs. This is a very important concept to keep in mind. Any idea potent enough to survive for 1,000s of years is worth looking into, and who knows what ideas we currently accept as fact today may one day be shown to be ludicrous.
The vibrational properties of sound can rearrange the structure of molecules, this is a fact, and therefore there’s nothing “crazy” in thinking sound can be used to repair and re-structure damaged cells for healing purposes. While sound does not have agency, it does have creative power and if it helped to shape early life, chances are this process is still going on today in much the same way. Sound is, in many ways, “the shape of life.”
I’ll leave you with 2 quotes:
“Biology is the feedback mechanism for the universe to learn more about itself.” - Nassim Haramein
“Frequencies are only patterns to their own surroundings, just like us. As beings we can only experience what our surroundings offer. What matters is how we use that experience. We tune into different channels just like a mixing board, our minds separating current and frequencies… We are the living experience of cymatics. We are the experience of living information. We are the experience of our surroundings, and our surroundings are experiencing through ourselves. Once we grasp this as a species there will be a true evolution of being.” —David Schiermeyer
To some degree, all reconstructed ancient Egyptian pronunciations are at best an approximation, since its common practice for modern translators to insert vowel sounds to help standardize modern pronunciations
Spoilers, I’m working on a hypothesis that correlates this sacredness of vowel sounds with their prevalence in modern pop music, especially in the “vocal chops” of electronic artists like Kygo and in the songwriting process of hit producers like Ryan Tedder and Louis Bell.
Perhaps even cooler than the telephone was Bell’s “Photophone”, which converts sunlight into sound.
*Anthroposophy is a large and complex topic on its own but, in brief, it is a philosophy that believes that ‘thought’ is sense like sight or hearing, and through it human beings have the intellectual potential to uncover and access all manner of knowledge in the universe and other planes of existence not otherwise apparent to our 5 senses. The parallel to Cymatics, in which an invisible force like sound is made comprehensible in other mediums, is no coincidence.
There’s evidence to suggest that the ancient Egyptians were aware of the healing properties of ultrasound as well, even if they didn’t call it by that name. Many priestesses, in their healing rituals, would use the sistra, an ancient musical instrument similar to a rattle, composed of many metal discs that, when shaken together, created ultrasound frequencies.
The invention of recorded music also played a role in the history of visual sound - since it involved the literal process of making sound visible, when music is physically carved into a vinyl record for later playback. This also sparked a more philosophical discussion around copyright, since it wasn’t clear if this “visible sound” was a new creation, separate from the original sound that created it and thus able to be copyrighted and owned separately, or if it was simply an aesthetic transformation, like writing the same words but in a different font.
This gives an interesting context to the Stoic concept of Sympatheia, that we all come from one source.
I enjoy the charmingly Socratic analogy NASA gives, “like a single ounce of cinnamon sprinkled into about 13,000 cups of cookie dough.