🍄 Where is the Power of Sound?

From music of the spheres to universal harmony, experts weigh in on our vibrational nature—curated with an AudioDose of Alice Sonic Mushrooms.

Aug 16, 2024

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Like a fingerprint, every person has their own distinct sound.
If you know your own sound, you can heal yourself.
If you know your own sound, you can experience joy.

Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander. Where is the power of Sound? Alice asked this question to leading thinkers. Below is a symphony of responses.

To start, lets go back in time, to ZERO itself, all we hear is static…

🍄 AudioDose Alice on Sonic Mushrooms: Citizens of the Solar System

Cosmic Harmony

"As we head further and further back in time, the universe kind of collapses on itself. It implodes, it gets smaller and smaller as you head back toward the beginning. And as it gets smaller, it gets hotter and denser and, as it does so, we can use our understanding to press further and further back in time. In fact, we can use the currently known laws of physics to go all the way back to a split-second after the beginning. But if we try to use the known laws to push any further back, to go back to time zero itself, they break down, and all we get is this static, noise, garbage.” —Brian Greene, Physicist

Zero Point Energy: Empty space is a sea of energy

"The middle of the last century physicists made an astounding discovery, and that was what we normally consider empty space is not empty at all. Even if you go to the far reaches of outer space it turns out that rather than emptiness, what we call ‘the vacuum,’ is really a seething cauldron of what we call ‘quantum energy’ or ‘zero point energy.’ Zero point just simply means that even if you froze the entire universe down to absolute zero, froze out all motion, where everything would be as quiet as you could possibly get it, this energy is still there.” —Hal Puthoff, Engineer, Parapsychologist

All things in existence are made out of vibrating energy

"Electrons, quarks, they are the fundamental ingredients out of which everything in the known universe is composed. String theory comes along and strongly suggests that this is not where the story ends. String theory says that deep inside any of these particles, electrons, quarks, and some of the other more exotic species of particles, inside of each of these is something else. It’s a little filament, a little filament of vibrating energy, it kind of looks like a string and that’s where the name of the theory comes from. These little strings in string theory also can vibrate in different patterns. The key thing is that we don’t hear these different patterns as different musical notes, rather we see them as different particles. So an electron is simply a string vibrating in one pattern, like an A flat. A quark is a string vibrating in a different pattern, a B. In a sense, it’s like everything in the universe is kind of musical. It’s like the music of the spheres injected into the structure of the universe at a microscopic level.” —Brian Greene, Physicist

Ancient sciences taught that our vibrational universe is in harmonic proportion

We live in a vibrational universe, as we know from science. Vibration can be translated mathematically into any proportion, into any level of radiation that we want. You can translate anything into light, into sound. This is the basic theory behind a lot of what’s going on with vibrational healing with music or sound healing. The idea the ancients had of transposing the ratios of the stars and heavens into a form that’s not visual, but auditory, that we can listen to.

"This is at the root I believe of what we’re looking at. We are human beings living in a cosmic environment. We belong to the cosmos, we’re part of it, we’re made from the same thing. And clearly we are to exist and to compose ourselves in this existence, in Cosmic Harmony, and the minute we disrupt this, we’re in serious trouble. The Egyptians understood this, in their own way of looking at the world around them, they understood this, this is almost certain, and the order that they saw most perfect is the sky.” —Robert Bauval, Egyptologist

Pythagoras’ Music of the Spheres The planets emit a sound, a musical note,
based upon their relation to the Sun. At the right frequency, these tones become a glorious harmony.

"The Pythagorean concept of Music of the Spheres is that the planets are like tuning forks. Each planet has a sound, and the relationship between them is like between the relationship between Earth and the Sun. Everything was geocentric in the old, and I think it still is in astrology, come to think of it. Therefore the relationship between Earth and Sun, between Earth and Mercury, or between Earth and Jupiter was a different mathematical number, a different interval. Pythagoras then mapped that to the musical scale, so the musical scale became the Music of the Spheres.” —John Beaulieu, Sound Healer, Biosonic Repatterning

White Noise is the frequency of all planets; the ultimate universal sound

"If you actually were to listen to the music of the spheres, to me, ultimately it would be this sort of like white noise. In fact, I used to listen for hours to the radio astronomers recording, different recordings of star systems and so on. And this sound, they filter out different things; you can hear Andromeda, or here’s another constellation, or you can actually begin filtering out the sounds of those constellations.” —John Beaulieu, Sound Healer, Biosonic Repatterning

Our brains are similar to a satellite dish; constantly tuning into different frequencies, different possibilities

"I think my favorite metaphor now is if you were to look at a satellite dish, and you look at the base of your cranium, they look the same. Where a satellite dish looks like that, it’s round and so on, and it has a little thing that comes out. Your cranium looks the same way and it has a bone right here called the sphenoid that comes out. What happens is your cranium is constantly rotating, just like the satellite dish, and you get different frequencies, you tune into different possibilities. That’s the transits of the stars above.” —John Beaulieu, Sound Healer, Biosonic Repatterning

The solar system is a natural sound source

There is something about being able to listen to the immediate environments outside our planet. There is a natural human curiosity in what space is like, or what a galaxy is like. And to have that curiosity satisfied by being able to listen to space is something that would be very special. Shortwave radio is actually the ionosphere in music of the stars and the sound of the solar system. When the sun sends out solar flares, it interrupts radio signals. So there’s a lot of sounds out there. If you took a shortwave radio and tuned the dial, some sounds would be glorious, and some sounds would be ominous. There’s a lot of different things on the dial. It’s a good practice sometimes to take a shortwave and mess around with the sounds in-between the stations. That’s where the action is. Radio waves are a force of nature, they’re not a man-made thing. Alice likes the idea of this—sound waves mingling with signals from a distant galaxy. In fact, there was a group in Princeton doing what they call optical SETI. SETI stands for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Optical SETI means looking for light flashes. Turns out that lasers are a good way to communicate and it’s just as good as radio. Perhaps aliens might be using laser beams to communicate.

Space is a frequency domain for interstellar communication

"The story of the Voyager Interstellar Record which I had the honor of being the creative director of that project. That was a message affixed to both Voyagers with music, images, sounds of Earth, and greetings in 59 human languages, as well as one whale language. Those messages, those golden phonograph records are onboard the Voyagers, the fastest objects ever created by the human species—moving at 38,000 mph beyond the outer planets making for the great open sea of interstellar space.” —Ann Druyan, American documentary producer

Sound: The architect of the universe

"What happens when you magnify nature and listen inside? I decided I would go and find out what are the rhythms and the melodies emanating form our landscape instead. What is its wavelength? What is its rhythmic structure? And I didn’t know it then, but what I was exploring was fractal rhythms and melodies. What kind of sounds and rhythms and melodies that nature made.” —Bruce Odland, Composer and Sound Artist

🍄 AudioDose Alice on Sonic Mushrooms: Earthcore Spin

Morphic Fields: Nature moves in patterns
Forms are shaped by resonant relationships

"I came to the conclusion that plants and animals are organized by fields, invisible fields, morphogenetic fields, form-shaping fields. I developed the beginnings of a new theory of life. Each species has it’s own fields, forms with organisms, as one develops and governs the instincts of animals and the learning patterns and behavior—and also, underlie mental activities of human beings. I think we need a field theory of minds and this theory implies that. The morphic fields are not just for the organization of individuals, they’re for the organization of society, so each social group has a field which includes all the members of the group within it. A flock of birds or a school of fish have fields. When the whole lot can move or turn at practically the same time, this is a field phenomenon.” —Rupert Sheldrake, Biologist

All nature is geometrically designed All geometric patterns are sonic equations

Sound artists are very interested in real time and what’s going on right at the moment and how you can change its resonance so that it becomes observable. For example, how you can take, in a fractal flow like water and rhythms. People have become more deeply ingrained in the study of systems, the study of complexity theory, and chaos theory. They start to see the universe as algorithms. They see everything is happening this sort of way. One also gets the feeling that you know you’re right if a system is beautiful or a solution, a mathematical solution is beautiful, you know you’re onto something. Somehow, beauty has come back to us as a sign that we found something that’s true.

Sacred Geometry: The mathematical pattern of the universe;
the design of the human body

“In mathematics there are numbers that you keep dividing into each other and they never ever come out. They go point, point, so on. The Golden Mean number is like that, so is this. It’s “C” and “G” 265 and 384, is two into three, or three into two, and it goes on forever, point da da da. That’s called an irrational number. Now, first of all I just love the idea of irrationality. So this is completely irrational, and yet it’s the interval of harmony of harmonies. So “C” and “G” was really meant as a way of returning to stillness, and it turns out the ratios of your shoulders to your hips, to your feet and so on, are all laid out in the same mathematical relationships as from here [points to index finger], this would be “G” and that would be “C”. You see this is, from this joint to that joint, it’s a little longer right, that’s the longer tuning fork, that’s the shorter tuning fork. And if it went here, from here, from this joint to that joint, that’s longer and that’s shorter, now that becomes the longer tuning fork and that’s the shorter tuning fork, and if we go from here to here, then there to there you get the same thing throughout your whole body. So your whole body is set up in this interval, and if you looked at it geometrically it would actually form a five star pattern. With top of the star here, point, point, and point at each hip. And this five star pattern is a, if you drew a five star, in the middle of the five star there’s a pentagram, you draw another star inside that pentagram, in the middle that’s a pentagram, you draw another star and so on – It’s a spiral. So it’s just a geometric way of looking at a spiral.”—John Beaulieu, Sound Healer, Biosonic Repatterning

All nature speaks the rhythmic language of geometric patterns

Fractals are something as ancient as life itself, but in a new format. It’s a new way of looking at ourselves. Because our nervous systems are mathematically based; patterns, recognition of patterns, recognition of mathematics. And our nervous systems go into progressive levels of abstractions. Rhythm is totally linked to the distributive brain of the body. The human is a distributive brain. The brain starts at the fingertips and ends at the toes. So rhythm, information as rhythm, information as polyrhythm, is a good way of triggering the distributing intelligence of the body. Every part of the body thinks, because rhythm is the how-to to recognition, it’s how to get the body to recognize its own system of language. Understanding the ratio we see in nature, we see in flowers, and the whole idea behind sacred geometry. “What are these geometrical ratios that we find in nature?” On some deep level our nervous systems recognize and speak the language of these deep geometrical patterns.

We live in a resonant world.
We are dependent upon resonant relationships.

The world of nature, animals, plants, the Earth, the relationship between the planets, the relationship between the different forms of the whole world of the natural world and the physical world that we inhabit, is one of resonate relationships, and one of sort of these geometrical forms and patterns, and the way they all relate together is the same. So if the world is a resonate world and we’re not resonating in it, and this is the irony, as we’ve come to understand the world as a resonate place, which we have increasingly in every discipline, and understanding the world as a resonate place has come concurrently with a refrain from resonating ourselves.

🍄 AudioDose Alice on Sonic Mushrooms: Adjust Your Frequency

Cultural Waveform: Re-Tuning the World

What is the current state of sound?
What are the politics of sound?
Who controls the soundscape?
Are we building a society out of tune?

🍄 AudioDose Alice on Sonic Mushrooms: Metamorphosis

We find it very interesting to look at all of the whole culture from a sound point of view, as a philosophical stance and a provocative stance, because it provides a whole different point of view in looking at these things. There is a cultural schism between the ears and the eyes and our culture is front-loaded with visuals. 70% visual information in our culture and 30% the rest of it. And we would like to reverse the equation a lot and see what it looks like.

🍄 AudioDose Alice on Sonic Mushrooms: Knowing

To be “I am,” that’s my whole point of being here. Because that “I am” is a singular vibration, it’s a standing wave form, it’s like being a note on a guitar, it’s music.

In the beginning was the word…

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