Photo via flickr by Orangeadnan

Sound is:

about
above
across
after
beneath
beside
between
beyond

The power of sound is being explored by artists, architects, authors, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, health practitioners, inventors, philosophers, physicists, scientists and thinkers around the world.

Futurist and author Kodwo Eshun in a conversation with Sputnik Observatory:

“The futurists invented the idea of lines of force; the idea that any object radiates a field of attraction and a field of force around it. They really understood acoustic space very early on. When (Marshall) McLuhan talked about acoustic space, what he meant was a space that you hear, not a space that you see. So that space was more in the round, because humans can hear behind their ears and hear around corners, we can hear in 360 degrees. You can hear behind your head. You have infinitely peripheral hearing. McLuhan was fascinated by this because he thought that it meant that if you could understand acoustic perception, then you could see a totally new way of understanding the world.” —Kodwo Eshun, Author, More Brilliant Than The Sun, Architectronics, sptnk, 0:50:20:23

Photo via flickr by jah~

Music of the Spheres was first presented by the Babylonians and then popularized by Pythagoras. Pythagoras and his students are also known for making outstanding contributions to mathematics, including irrational numbers. Pythagoras stated that all relations could be reduced to number relations, influenced from observations in music, mathematics and astronomy. Music of the Spheres states that each planet emits a sound, a musical note, based upon its relation to the Sun. Pythagoras suggested that if all planets were played together at the right frequency, a glorious harmony would sound.

Photo via flickr by Rickydavid

String Theory has been postulated as the Unified Theory that Einstein sought to achieve during the last thirty years of his life. String Theory states that the universe is composed of tiny vibrating strings with wave patterns similar to those made by common violin strings. Although not visible to the eye, these strings are said to lie deep within matter. String Theory states that all things are made out of vibrating energy.

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 String Theory comes from. And the key 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 then, it’s as if 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, 2001 Sputnik conference, manTRANSforms, 0:03:22:13

When we see the universe around us we see atoms, subatomic particles of all kinds. Today we realize that all these subatomic particles with all these Greek names can be summarized as nothing but notes, musical notes, on a vibrating superstring. The notes on the string correspond to the subatomic particles like electrons and quarks. The melodies of the string correspond to modern chemistry – all the chemistry of dna and proteins are melodies played out on the string. The universe is a symphony of superstrings.
—Michio Kaku, physicist, from a conversation with Sputnik Observatory, 0:29:17:04

Photo via flickr by just Chaos

A plant has openings on the underside of its leaves called the stomata. Sensitive to changes in the environment, the plant will react by opening or closing its stomata. Sonic Bloom is a new system launched by research scientist Dan Carlson, that combines sound and foliar spray to enhance plant growth.

According to Sonic Bloom, plants extract nutrients directly from the air through natural resonance after their stomata have been enlarged by bird sounds. Sonic Bloom mimics these birds sounds with ultrasonics made up of harmonic frequencies which stimulate the tiny stomata pores on plant leaves to open. When these pores open, the plant is able to increase its uptake of nutrients by over 700 percent!

Carlson spent many hours in the University of Minnesota library, studying plant physiology. Struck by the idea that certain sound frequencies might help a plant breathe better and absorb more nutrients, he experimented with various frequencies until, with the help of an audio engineer, he found one range that was consonant with the early morning bird chirping that helps plants open wider their stomata, or mouth-like pores. Carlson has developed a special organic spray to apply to the leaves along with the sound that induces stomata to open. Even in poor soil, Carlson reasoned, plants could be well nourished with a foliar spray containing the right combination of elements.

To develop such an effective nutrient solution took Carlson 15 years of trial and error, experimenting in labs throughout the country. To find the proper balance required endless testing with radioactive isotopes and Geiger counters to trace the elements’ translocation from leaves to stems to peak to roots. Among the first natural substances used was gibberellic acid, naturally derived from rice roots, needed by every living plant.

Eventually Carlson included variety of elements derived from natural plant products and from seaweed; he also added gibberellic acid and growth stimulants, altering the surface tension of the water base to make it more easily absorbed. The end result was Sonic Bloom.

Photo via flickr by csklein

Contrary to our conscious perception, plants do move…be it ever so slowly. sLowlife exhibition offers a window into the world of plants. It accelerates the time-scale of plants into our own frame of reference, speeding up their everyday lives to a pace that resonates with our own. For example, Sun Dance reveals sunflower seedlings as they grow and “reach” for the light, wriggling wildly as if in celebration of life. But such “festivity” is not confined to sunflowers; most plants exhibit this motion to some degree. When seedlings emerge from the soil, they search for the orientation that provides the greatest sunlight. To remain upright as they grow, they correct for the “leaning” that results from being temporarily imbalanced in the direction of light. The wobbling, circular, swaying movement (called nutation) facilitates exploration of their immediate environment.

Adjust your frequency. Physicists now suggest that the universe is composed of tiny, vibrating strings. Scientists now propose that the neural basis of consciousness is 40 hertz oscillations. Eighty years ago a man called Dr. Royal Rife said radio frequencies could kill cancer, today cutting edge science aims to transmit signals to cure disease. While phrases like “tune in” and “good vibes” have been going on for generations, if there is one trend that can speak for this decade, with the potential to be the driving force throughout the century, it’s frequency. Because, the fact is, everything animate and inanimate has a frequency. Take for instance the story of how an opera singer’s voice shatters a glass. This occurs because both the glass and her voice are oscillating in resonance. The fact is we are living in an energetic world, and even the definition of a person is based on the word “persona” which means “through sound.” And while alternative practitioners know that every person has their own distinct sound, called the ultrasonic core, treatments like BioSonic Repatterning, developed by Dr. John Beaulieu, that uses tuning forks to realign the nervous system, discharging emotional energies so that one can be free from dis-ease, are now considered avant-garde. In the future, not only will music be a drug, but according to now-deceased renegade scientist Jacques Benveniste, all biological activities will be recorded and digitized for diagnostics and detection, with health and medical applications ranging from the detection of viruses for bioterrorism, to the digitization of pharmaceuticals enabling medicine to be sent via email for instantaneous sonic digestion. Moving ahead inside our cultural waveform, it’s safe to say that we are just beginning to understand the power of frequency. Crop Circle Researcher Colin Andrews even reports that not only do people who witness crop circles forming hear trilling sounds, but the dimensional ratios inside its geometric shapes are precisely the same as the diatonic ratios of the Western musical scale. If sound creates form, as illustrated by the Swiss doctor Hans Jenny in his experiments called Cymatics, then all life, from the architecture of our bodies to the design of every leaf on every tree, is just frozen music. So, go ahead, resonate with the collective.