Short YouTube podcast clip (Ben Greenfield with guest Porangui) introducing somatic (cymatic) sound therapy: origins traced to Jan Hensing (1960s) and demonstrations of how sound can organize matter. Porangui gives DIY instructions for cymatic experiments using a speaker, a plate or drumhead, white salt for visibility, and a sine-wave generator app; recommends sweeping frequencies from around 20 Hz up toward 20,000 Hz to observe standing-wave geometries.
Hey, this is Ben Greenfield. I thought you'd like this little clip of my latest podcast. I think you call them. What do you call them? Cymatic sound therapy.
Somatic sound therapy is kind of a way to describe the whole thing. So, you know, because cymatics, right, is basically the. It's a coin that was termed by Jan Hensing, who's a. He's, you know, a scientist, a researcher from. I believe it was Switzerland or. Or Sweden. Switzerland, I believe, is Swiss. And essentially he came up in the 60s, and with this whole technique, he started this area of study, which was then termed a whole field called Cymatics. C Y M A T I C S which was basically looking at the way that sound would basically create structure in the physical realm. And actually he created some really neat experiments and they're documented pretty well. So you can YouTube somatics and just look at some of the videos online, and there's some old black and white videos that were from his scientific experiments that he basically come up with. And it's fascinating. He tried different mediums, like everything from liquids like water and what happens if you basically send a vibration into the water, everything to kind of different types of more viscous liquids and activating those and basically resonating them. Like, I was talking about the tuning fork, essentially the tuning fork. You're striking the fork. Fork is. Then you're putting energy into this. This object, this physical medium, and then that begins to vibrate and resonate. And essentially, if you could slow that down or somehow see that, or capture that. This is the phenomena of Somatics that we see. And what he showed, which is really neat and I really recommend. And I actually have done this experiment at home. You can recreate it yourself. A simple way to do it is take a speaker. And this is super. Do it yourself home style. But take your speaker, whatever it is, take the. Lit the front off of it, like the. Whatever the, you know, the nylon that's on the front of it. And just get the cone, if you can, then put a plate that's. And I actually just took it because I'm a drummer too. I have lots of drums in my house. I just put a big drum on top of it with a black. Like a kick drum and with a black head on it, nylon head. But you could do this just taking like a thin plate of metal or something like that, like a sheet, maybe it could be Plexiglas. And then put salt, a bunch of just white salt. And for me, it works really nice. If you have a black surface with the white salt on it, because you can see the patterns really well. And then essentially I just hooked up the speaker to a sine wave generator and you can just get those on the app store or whatever on your phone and start to do basically what would be a sweep of frequencies. So you can start down from 20Hz, which you can't really hear. Most speakers can't reproduce 20, but as you start to go up from 20 up into like, say, you know, 40, 50 to 100Hz, you'll start really being able to hear that to say where like a kick drum likes to hang out. So most music, we all hear the kick drum pretty well, but you usually feel the kick drum more than you hear it. So same idea. And then you're going to go basically sweep it up and you'll take your little app or whatever and filter all the way up to 20,000 hertz, just kind of go through the full spectrum. And if you do this slowly enough, you'll literally watch the salt begin to vibrate. And it'll look like chaos at first. It'll just be like dancing around all over the place, a lot of salt on the floor, so, you know, put a blanket down or whatever. But as you get going, you're going to find certain frequencies, frequencies that all of a sudden will literally crystallize into a geometry until it looks like someone drew a mandala on this surface with the salt. And it's like a standing wave. Like the salt will start to organize itself into these concentric circles and different kind of fractally looking geometry. And it's really amazing. And as you go higher with the frequency, the more complex the shape will take. And literally, as you get high enough and you can do this with actual notes, with pitches, like playing a keyboard, if you will, it will form these different geometries and some of them, some frequencies will be a little bit more chaotic. It'll go chaos. For instance, all of a sudden you keep sliding up and next thing you know, it'll start to form into another geometry shape more complex than the previous. And then you'll kind of find a certain frequency or range of frequencies where it's like the sweet spot where it really holds that shape. And then you'll keep going.
If you enjoyed this clip, you should check out the whole episode and a host of other topics over at BenGreenfieldFin Fitness. Com. Have an amazing day.
