“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibrations” -Nikola Tesla
Taking the course “Art of listening and sonic resonance” has opened my eyes, ears, and mind, to the extraordinary power of sound to shape matter in both metaphorical and literal senses. Firstly, I became keenly cognizant of how unaware and inattentive I was to my daily soundscape. Next, I was astonished to discover that my selection of sounds and music was so narrow and limited and that such limitation was likely spilling over my thinking, feeling, and overall living. In this paper, I express, expand, and explore these two surprising findings seemingly hiding in plain sight. Then, I play with the powerful idea of sound organizing matter from the macro everyday level down to the infinitesimal quantum level and the far-reaching implications of such a play.
Am I even listening?
At the course onset, I started to pay a great deal of attention to my sonic diet day by day and moment by moment: both my urban soundscape, of which I have less choice in the matter, as well as my conscious selection of music. I noticed that my listening is mainly habitual and largely unconscious. For example, I noticed that I automatically put background music on as soon as I wake up in the morning and leave it on for most of the day. Though the music waves are likely entraining my brain, landing on my skin, and entering my ears anyway, my attention was largely absent to the very music I selected: it was all tuned out of my awareness. I didn’t truly listen to the music, it was excluded from my conscious experience. What, then, was the point of putting music on in the first place?
The more attention I paid to sound, the more I discovered that there is a rich, layered urban and natural soundscape already present around me. This kaleidoscopic soundscape included bird sounds that I have never noticed, the ocean waves afar, the very tall palm trees swaying in the wind (a precious sound from my childhood), the white traffic noise from the iconic Route 1, etc. In short, there was already a full and intricate sonic life around me that I was completely absent to and which I muffled by the background music I habitually played at home. It almost feels that there is a vast piece of life that I was rejecting and saying no to. It was clear I wasn’t truly hearing life around me and I was also piling on sonic waves that I was mainly disregarding. Then the question becomes: “What then was I listening to most of my day?” The answer came very quickly: my thoughts.
Listening to my thoughts
Thoughts, according to science, is a very different phenomenon when compared to sounds. Thoughts are predominantly explained as electrical currents in our brains and are a result of neurons firing and connecting. We have devised instruments that can measure the frequency of such phenomena (electroencephalogram) and have quantified thoughts to be anywhere from 0.5 Hz to about 30 Hz (noting that this quantification is possibly greatly distorted as it is mediated through an entire skull). Sounds, in contrast, are a mechanical phenomenon carrying energy through a physical medium. These two are both forms of energy propagation in waves though seemingly different in how they operate: one electrical and the other mechanical.
Our ears are instruments devised to detect sounds as mechanical wave (not electrical) and are oriented to our external environments which is why we cannot hear our blood flow, our digestion, and other inner biological activity unless from the outside echoes (e.g. a stethoscope listening to the heartbeat from outside the cavity). Using this framework, hearing my thoughts is not exactly correct. We are accustomed to equating listening to a purely mechanical act of hearing sounds and cataloguing them through our brain. But the more attention and perception is infused in the act of listening, and the more it becomes an act of presence, awareness, and even participation (or absence).
A quantum perception
In Quantum Physics, there is a famous century old experiment which parallels this active participation. It is called the double-slit experiment and has coined the infamous “observer effect” (Welch, 2020). One of the main outcomes of this experiment is that the observer influences how our reality manifests moment by moment. Each nano-second, our world is always in superposition: all potentialities exist in a cloud of infinite possibilities. When a human consciousness observes the moment (or a measurement is taken) then this cloud of possibility returns one outcome, and it is the nano-second we experience in the moment known as the collapse of the wave function. Therefore, the act of observation or instrument measurement draws creation into reality and without it reality remains virtual, unmanifest, and pregnant with possibility.
Welch interprets the act of observation to not simply include the human eyes or measuring instrument but to expand to any act of presence: a human consciousness being present to the moment. Therefore, I ask: my already and always present soundscape is here, what happens to it when I am absent to it? Is it in superposition (all possibilities in suspension)? Does my absence negate its existence? Is it awaiting my awakening to it to come into existence and interact? Conversely, what happens to my soundscape when I am truly present to it? Is it brought into existence (collapse of the wave function) by my observation act? Is it transformed by my act of listening? Does my act of present listening change the sound? And the sound me? Is this what Carl Jung interpreted as participation mystique (Jung, 1964)?
A limited sonic diet
The second most important and astonishing realization in this course is how much my conscious selection of sounds and music was limited. Given my very diverse cultural upbringing and geographical global living, I always thought I had a wide listening repertoire. However, I found that to be false when I started to be exposed to the teacher’s suggested artists.
At first, I found that listening to Pauline Oliveros was jarring and even absurd as her style felt confrontational, cacophonic, disorganized, and very unpleasant. The experience felt like an aggression and a trespassing on my inner world. I had a harsh emotional reaction to it and a full judgement committee formed in my head to evaluate and condemn the music and its composer. To the teacher’s suggestion of staying with it, I mustered some patience and listened some more.
The more I stayed present to the music, the more I noticed my inner experience. For example, I recognized how I was braced in my body when faced with non-melodious music: I held tension in my posture, jaw, face, and even hands. My breathing was shallow as if anticipating and strongly wishing a change into something more pleasant. My emotional tone was that of frustration, stress, harshness, and confusion. I realized I was mentally rejecting and excluding this sonic experience at all levels of my being.
With repetition, increasing comfort with this inner state, and simply time, I was able to give in more and relax around it. Surprisingly, it felt that my aperture was widening rather quickly. I found my mind became curious and absorbed in the activity of listening, my body less anxious and more inviting of the experience, and my inner posture to be that of clam, interest, and exploration. This culminated into a full-blown somatic reaction while listening to a rather violent and aggressive Xenakis piece: I sensed my entire right body melting and getting lighter and longer. Then my right arm and hand started to shake vigorously for quiet a while. I was taken by the experience for what seemed like ten minutes before returning to normal. It felt like a release of some sort: but from what? A whole posture of listening and living? Perhaps.
Opening the aperture
Since I realized how much I limited my sonic diet, I was rather curious about the impact of such limitation on my entire life and way of being. By being reductive in the sounds and music I listen to or put myself in, I am likely limiting my ways of thinking, perceiving, relating, speaking, and acting. Tolerance of frequencies that seem aggressive, or just very different at first is certainly something we could all use right now. What if our contemporary great political and social divide was, at least in part, due to a limited and intolerant sonic diet? What if we could all listen not just more, but more importantly differently to music, others speech, information, ideas, etc.? What world would we create if we listened without reactivity and then choose more consciously to take part in, or respectfully depart from, the dialogue? We know that music can alter our moods. Can it also widen our minds and open our hearts? Personally, listening has released trapped energies in my body and opened my mind to explore new vistas and be aware that there are many more vistas I don’t even perceive yet or can even imagine.
Shaping and reshaping matter
This brings me to the most fascinating point of inquiry thus far: sound literally shapes and organizes matter. This should be an outrageous statement for most of us: we live our daily lives with plenty of sounds and music around us and we do not see that these sounds bend and transform objects or environments. When was the last time you saw that a particular piece of music changed the shape of your hand? Affected the tree outside? Or aroused the water in your drinking bottle? Never is a likely response.
In his remarkable Cymatics video, composer Nigel Stanford (Standford, 2014) shows the influence of sound in shaping matter as well as the natural elements. Through the playing of specific piano tones and percussions, rerouting sounds in creative ways, and using some clever instruments to make the experience more visible and graspable, he proved that sand became organized in very predictable and stable patterns. Water exhibited its own cylindric formations and electromagnetic particles were moved by music. Even the elements of fire, aether, and electricity (via a Tesla coil) were shown to be reorganized and imprinted upon by sound.
The video is very startling and hard to correlate to everyday experience in which we do not observe such reshaping of the elements by our soundscape. On further analysis, the video uses highly specific and controlled environment to make the invisible visible: a physically closed set protected from the variables of the natural world, specific studied and chosen tonalities and frequencies, stable surfaces, rerouting devises, etc. In contrast, everyday life may have these sonic effects diffused, trampled upon, or eliminated altogether given the open environment with all its forces and variables. Be that as it may, this video has made a great impact on me and illustrated that what we see is highly limited and conceals a great deal of activity and reshaping of matter by sounds whether we know it or not.
What about my body?
This dazzling video impelled me to inquire even further into how, then, sound is forming, reforming, and organizing my very own matter and cells: my body. As we know, we are formed of 70% water, 15% bones and cartilage, and 15% soft tissues, ligaments, etc. How does inner and outer sound give shape to all of these considering the abovementioned video?
Sound travels very fast in the earthly atmosphere at more than 340 miles per second: leaving Las Vegas and landing in San Francisco in one second. Human bones are made of minerals like Calcium and Phosphorus in which sound travels four times faster: in one second the sound could reach Atlanta from Denver. In water, sound travels five times faster: completing the journey from Denver to Boston in a quick second. Organs, muscles, ligaments, etc. generally scatter sound as they are far less dense. For these reasons, the human structure is a far more superior sound conductor than air by an aggregate factor of four; letting our bodies receive, amplify, and be shaped and reorganized by sound in very powerful and real ways. I am left with a curiosity: how does my soundscape enter my body, reshape my water cells, pulsate in my circulating blood, reverberate in my bones, affect my tissues, muscles and ligaments? Since my senses do not catch that the water in my body is twisting or my cells bouncing as shown in the video, could it be that they do anyway? Or at a different level?
At the quantum level
In his cymatics work, John Stuart Reid, acoustic physicist and inventor, showed that red blood cells in a petri dish were grown by more than 20% simply by being immersed in specific sounds (Reid, 2021). This experiment connects sound directly to cells unmediated by ears, nervous systems activity, brain signals, etc. which makes these effects even more extraordinary and direct.
Einstein’s famous equation E = M C^2 is another entry point to this inquiry. This equation states that any object having a non-zero mass (even if infinitesimal) also has intrinsic energy. Most natural and man-made objects have non-zero mass and therefore have potential energy even if at rest. All human beings have non-zero mass and therefore have this same energy: latent to our senses but extremely vibrant if we had more powerful instruments of perception.
A way of discussing the human being is the use of patterns of energy. For instance, if I were to zoom into my hand, I will begin to see tissues, then cells, then sub-cell elements including the cell’s nucleus, mitochondria, etc. If I were to zoom in further, I will reach atoms. Entering the atom is finding vast amounts of space and a tiny nucleus containing a proton a neutron surrounded by a cloud of electrons. If I could zoom in even further, quantum physics states that I will find more space and sub-atomic particles like quarks which are tiny packet of energy themselves. Ironically, the more I zoom into matter, the less matter I find and more energy I encounter. This applies to us as a sound receiving instruments as well as the sound wave itself. Therefore, I am curious, how does sound impact us at this quantum level? How do these packets of energy from sound to bodies and back interact, co-create, and participate in life? How do they shape and reshape each other? Such an inquiry remains theoretical and empirical evidence is lacking until we further our instruments., theories, and curiosity about the topic.
You are what you hear
In his book The Universal Sense, Horowitz claims “You are what you hear” (Horowitz, 2012). He discusses many verified experiences where, playing with amplitude, frequency, and phasing, he was able to induce nausea, vertigo, debilitating fear, hyper vigilance, love, coherence, gratitude, and other visceral reactions thought to be largely under the control of our unconscious mind. He goes so far as to demonstrate how hacking the human brain is easy with sound: directing attention and awareness at sub-conscious levels.
It was somewhat scary to read this, though I want to remain hopeful since any and all tools can be used benevolently as well as malevolently. We know that ancient and native civilizations used sound as medicine, inspiration for scientific progress, artistic expression, and spiritual evolution (Grof, 2019). Much more recently, National Public Radio (NPR, 2025) reported that such sonic vibrations were used in modern day police force to scatter and reroute crowds and protests. Therefore, such sonic technologies have been and remain in use whether we know it or not, like it or not, approve of it or not.
As for me…
As for me, what this course and my individual inquiries have shown me is that sound is an extraordinary force that shapes the world in a real and scientifically quantifiable way: both inner and outer. I have learned that sound is a piece of life wanting to come into existence and co-create with me every momeny. That it can be used for progress, wellbeing, and inspiration as well as misused for control, chaos, and manipulation. I choose to participate in the former for the betterment and evolution of life, humanity, and myself. We are what we hear. More precisely, we are what we choose to attentively listen to.
References
Grof, S. (2019). The Way of the Psychonaut: Encyclopedia for Inner Journeys (Volume 1). MAPS
Horowitz, S. (2012). The Universal Sense. Bloomsbury Publications.
Jung, C. (1964). Civilization in Transition, Volume 10. Princeton University.
Reid, J. (2021). Testing a 2500-year-old hypothesis. Cymascope. https://cymascope.com/testing-a-2500-year-old-hypothesis-%E2%80%8B/
Stanford, N. (2014). Cymatics on Solar Echoes. https://nigelstanford.ultrawave.net/cymatics
The Associated Press (2025). Like a sound from hell: Was an illegal sonic weapon used on protesters in Serbia? NPR.https://www.npr.org/2025/03/26/nx-s1-5341198/sonic-weapon-serbia-belgrade-protests Welch, K. (2020). Texture of Time. Fox Publications.