The Oldest Idea About Sound

This is an exploration of one of the oldest ideas people have had about sound: that it does more than carry meaning from one person to another, and that it can arrange, lift and shape the world it moves through. We follow the idea through chanting traditions, a story about Tibetan monks and a block of stone, the laboratories where sound really does hold things in the air, the patterns sound draws in sand, and finally the low ringing of the planet itself, the Schumann resonance. Some of what follows is measured. Some of it is belief, and some of it is story. We try to say which is which as we go.

A sound at the beginning

Many traditions place a sound at the very start of things. The Mandukya Upanishad, one of the shortest of the Hindu scriptures, describes the syllable Om as everything that was, is and will be, and whatever lies beyond time as well. Nada Yoga, the yoga of sound, gathers the same feeling into two words, nada brahma, often translated as "the world is sound". The Gospel of John opens with the Word, the Greek logos, present before anything else was made.

The practices that grew from these beliefs are as varied as the places they come from. Monks of the Gyuto order in the Tibetan tradition chant with a voice so low and controlled that a second, higher tone rises out of the first, and one singer seems to hold a chord. Gregorian chant was sung for centuries in stone churches whose long echoes stretched each note into the next. These are beliefs and practices, and they belong to the people who hold them. What they share is something anyone who has sung with others will recognise: a long tone, held together, changes the room and the breath of everyone in it.

The monks who raised a stone

In 1961 the Swedish engineer Henry Kjellson published a book called Försvunnen teknik, which means lost technology. In it he retold an account he said came from a friend, a Swedish doctor who had travelled in Tibet in the years before the Second World War. The friend described monks standing in an arc below a cliff with large drums and long horns. A block of stone lay in a hollow in front of them. As the instruments played in a steady rhythm and the monks chanted, the stone was said to rock, then rise, then travel up the face of the cliff to a ledge high above.

The story has travelled far since then, through books, documentaries and long conversations late at night. It reached Kjellson second hand, it was never photographed or recorded, and nobody has been able to trace it further back. It is best held as a story people keep telling. The more interesting question is why they keep telling it. Part of the answer may be that it gives a shape to something many of us sense when we stand close to loud, rhythmic sound: it has weight, and it pushes.

What sound does in the laboratory

Sound really does lift things, on a smaller scale. A sound wave is a travelling pattern of pressure in the air. When two waves meet from opposite directions they can form a standing wave, with fixed points where the air is almost still and points between them where the pressure swings hard. A small object placed at one of the still points, a polystyrene bead or a drop of water, can float there, held by sound alone. This is acoustic levitation, and laboratories have been doing it for decades.

In 2015 a team from the universities of Bristol and Sussex, with Asier Marzo as lead author, built what they called an acoustic tractor beam: a flat array of tiny speakers that could catch a bead from one side and steer it through the air. In 2018 Marzo, Mihai Caleap and Bruce Drinkwater reported twisting, vortex shaped sound fields that trapped particles larger than the wavelength of the sound itself. Other groups use acoustic tweezers to sort and move living cells without touching them. The scale is beads, droplets and cells, a long way from blocks of stone. Still, it is a real bridge from the legend to something you can watch on a laboratory bench, and it is a wonderful thing to watch.

A long tone, held together, changes the room and the breath of everyone in it.

Patterns in sand

In 1787 the German physicist Ernst Chladni scattered sand over a thin metal plate and drew a violin bow along its edge. The plate sang, and the sand moved. It gathered along the lines where the plate stayed still and left the vibrating areas bare, drawing stars, crosses and nested rings. Each note drew its own figure. Chladni toured Europe with his plates, and people came in numbers to watch sound become visible.

In the 1960s the Swiss physician Hans Jenny took up the same idea with tone generators, vibrating sand, powders, pastes and water. He called the study cymatics, from the Greek word for wave, and published his photographs in 1967. The forms look grown rather than made: hexagons, spirals, clusters like cells, patterns that pulse and turn as the tone shifts. It is real, repeatable and visible, and it is easy to understand why people who spend time with it begin to speak of sound as something that organises.

Waves and spirals

Sound travels as a wave, and yet the part of us that turns it into hearing is shaped as a spiral. The cochlea, deep in the inner ear, is a coiled tube about the size of a pea that turns roughly two and a half times. Along that coil, different places answer to different pitches, high notes near the entrance and low notes towards the centre. In a sense we hear by letting each sound find its place on a spiral.

Spirals appear in many other places too, in the chambers of a nautilus shell, in the seed head of a sunflower, in the arms of the galaxy we live in. Science offers no single thread tying these together, and we offer what follows as speculation only. There is something lovely in the thought that the ear took the shape of the patterns it has been listening to for so long.

Thought, intention and matter

A quieter form of the same old idea says that thought itself, or intention, can reach into matter. In July we wrote about the photographs of water crystals made by Masaru Emoto, and about how they have not been repeated under careful conditions, in Before It Was a Word, It Was a Sound. We would rather hold the question open with curiosity than close it. What seems clear is closer to home. A sound, a word or a held intention changes the person holding it: their breath, their attention, the way they meet the next hour. Whether it reaches further is a question people have asked for thousands of years, and one we are glad to keep asking.

What research has measured

Modern research has looked at narrower questions. A 2019 meta-analysis by Miguel Garcia-Argibay, Miguel Santed and José Reales gathered studies of binaural beats, two slightly different tones played one to each ear, and found small effects on memory, attention and anxiety. A 2023 systematic review by Ingendoh and colleagues looked at the idea that such beats pull brainwaves into step with them and found the evidence inconsistent. Both are careful, and both leave plenty of room for further work.

Then there is the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum in Malta, an underground chamber carved into rock more than five thousand years ago. Acoustic studies of its rooms found a strong resonance close to 110 Hz, low enough to sit in a male voice. In a small pilot study in 2008, Ian Cook, Sarah Pajot and Andrew Leuchter played tones around that frequency to volunteers and recorded shifts in their brain activity. It was a pilot with a small group, and it reads best as an invitation to look further. Even so, there is something moving in the picture of people shaping stone rooms that answer the human voice.

Whether it reaches further is a question people have asked for thousands of years, and one we are glad to keep asking.

The Earth's own ringing

The Earth is wrapped in a kind of chamber. Below is the ground, and around sixty to ninety kilometres above it is the ionosphere, the electrically charged layer of the upper atmosphere. Lightning strikes somewhere on the planet around fifty times every second, and each strike sends electromagnetic energy into that chamber, which rings at a few particular frequencies the way a bell rings when it is struck. The German physicist Winfried Otto Schumann predicted these resonances in 1952, and they were first measured clearly in 1960. The lowest sits close to 7.83 Hz, with further peaks near 14, 20, 27 and 33 Hz.

This ringing is electromagnetic, too low and of the wrong kind for the ear to catch, and instruments around the world record it every day. Links between the Schumann resonance and human health remain unproven, and we are happy to let it be what it is: the Earth's own weather, sounding quietly in the space around it.

Where the Intention Frequency sits

This is where Intention's own practice begins, and we want to be clear about what it is. Every Word of Intention is paired with one of those measured harmonics, raised by octaves into a range you can hear. The measurement belongs to the Earth. The pairing is ours, made by hand, and we say so openly. The Frequency is a ritual. It gives the Word a little more presence, and it is a way of recognising the Earth and the way it speaks to us.

On the Intention Frequencies page you can open a family, find your Word and press play. The note you hear is the planet's own, lifted several octaves to where a human ear can meet it, and it carries the same Word you might wear on a hoodie or hang on a wall. The monks with their drums, Chladni with his bow and the engineers with their speakers were all, in their own ways, listening to what sound does when it meets the world. The Frequency is a small, daily version of the same listening.

A quiet extension of this idea

Our pieces are built around this principle. A single word, placed so it naturally comes back into your attention during the day. Not something you have to focus on the whole day, just something that stays with you.

Explore the words