CHAPTER 1

SONG OF THE SPINE

In the beginning
there was the word
the sound
the Song

IN ALL CREATION, animals communicate with sounds and songs. The humpback sings beautiful songs that sound very much like human ballads. It is only male humpback whales that are known to sing, and their songs are like a deep, haunting mournful raga that once heard cannot be forgotten. These songs contain complex vibrational patterns, and although the humpback is capable of singing over a range of seven octaves (similar to the range of the piano), it typically sings notes belonging to only one octave. Like humans, whales use rhythm to remember their songs from season to season. Scientists believe that humpbacks use their songs to communicate with one another over hundreds or even thousands of miles. In some Native American cultures, it is said that whale medicine shamans have the ability to tap into universal consciousness.

Other mammals, such as bats, emit a steady stream of high- frequency ultrasonic clicks or chirps, up to 200,000 times per second. Electronic devices are needed to reduce these ultrasonic sounds to frequencies our ears can hear. Bats use echolocation to find their way and their prey. These echolocation chirps are like musical notes, so that the bat receives a "musical" picture.

The timing of the echoes composes an image of the landscape that describes the type of prey, the direction of its movement, and its velocity. Medical researchers are now developing a navigation device for blind persons that emits ultrasonic bat-like calls and converts the echoes into sounds that can be heard by the person using the device. Preliminary tests of the device show that humans adapt remarkably well to the bat echolocation system.

The American Museum of Natural History once had an alligator named Oscar that would bellow a B-flat whenever it heard a B-flat played on any kind of instrument. Some observers believe that the B-flat bellow is used by alligators as a mating call. But perhaps the alligator¿s B-flat bellow is something much more primordial. Astronomers have recently discovered that a black hole in the Perseus star cluster emits a B-flat sound wave 57 octaves below the middle B-flat on a piano.

Birds compose songs using various rhythms, changing pitches and permutations. Citing the work of the late Luis Baptista, Patricia Gray (head of the biomusic program at the National Academy of the Sciences) wrote, "The canyon wren's trill cascades down the musical scale like the opening of Chopin's Revolutionary Etude." Baptista's analysis revealed that the canyon wren sings in a chromatic scale, which divides the octave into 12 semitones. Birds can identify a wide range of frequencies and remember their arrangement. Within a bird's song, many frequencies or tones may be sounded simultaneously, and quite different birdcalls may sound the same to our ears. A bird's brain can distinguish between the subtle rise and fall of pitches, perceive the changes in the sound's shape, and listen for repetitive patterns. So the next time you are called a birdbrain, take it as a compliment!

An ancient Chinese proverb says: "A bird does not sing because it has an answer -- it sings because it has a song."

Is it coincidental that many different species share a similar pattern of songs and melodies? I think not.

Music calls to the heart of our emotions. Music can bring tears of joy or tears of sadness. The appreciation of music is universal and profound. The question remains whether there is any evolutionary advantage to the songs of humans and other animals. In searching for answers, many scientists are delving into the origins and purpose of music.

Could it be that music predates human civilization or language? I think so. Flutes made by Neanderthals more than 43,000 years ago have been recovered in France and Slovenia by paleoanthropologists.

Where in the brain is music processed? Are there specialized neurons that interpret music? According to Daniel J. Levitin and other researchers, when a person listens to music, neural structures in the cerebellar vermis, a primitive region of the brain, are activated. Because music so profoundly affects our emotions, Levitin suspects that it must have some ancient and important function.

Levitin proposes that music stimulates our innate drive to find patterns in the environment. He writes, "From our culture we learn (even if unconsciously) about musical structures, tones, and other ways of understanding music as it unfolds over time, and brains are exercised by extracting different patterns." He also suggests that music may serve as a means of communication.

The father of chiropractic, Daniel David Palmer, stated that "Chiropractic is founded on tone." When the spine loses its "tone," the result can be what chiropractors call a subluxation, a partial dislocation of the vertebrae that affects the nervous system and surrounding tissues. There are 12 vertebrae in the primary or kyphotic (thoracic) curve, which starts at the T1 vertebra and runs through to T12. The secondary or lordotic (neck and lower back) curves also have a total of 12 vertebrae.

It dawned on me that the spine, with its kyphotic and lordotic curves, looks like a standing wave. A standing or stationary wave consists of a wave and its reflection. Energy is transferred back and forth between the two parts of the wave. Is it possible, I thought, that some kind of energy echoes between the primary and secondary curves of the spine in order to maintain the structural and neural integrity of the spine and nervous system?

That question led to a long period of research into the resonance of the spine. From physics, I learned that any object that vibrates has its own natural resonance and that the range of the resonance can be broad or narrow. When an object encounters vibrations that are within its natural frequency, it will begin to oscillate and produce vibrations that augment the original vibrations. I thought that a vertebra, like most objects, is likely to have a natural resonance. Because the vertebrae of the spine differ in size, shape, and weight, each vertebra is likely to have its own natural frequency of vibration.

My first step was to determine the resonant frequency of each vertebra. Because of my background in music, I quite naturally thought of using tuning forks to apply different frequencies to the vertebrae. I used a technique called muscle testing to determine if a specific frequency had a strong effect when applied to a vertebra. Muscle testing is a comprehensive yet exquisitely specific system for discovering the innate resonance of the whole person.

I used 12 tuning forks, one for each of the 12 semitones in the octave. I applied each of the 12 tuning forks individually to each of the 24 vertebrae, and performed muscle testing during each application. The results were remarkable: for each vertebra, only one of the tuning forks resulted in a strong muscle-test response, and the remaining 11 tuning forks produced weak responses. In other words, each bone of the spine has its own tone and frequency. These tones of the 24 movable vertebrae form what I call the Song of the Spine.

The next step was to determine if applying specific vibrational frequencies to the vertebrae would generate a sympathetic response that would activate these embedded harmonics that lie within the spine. In many cases, the results have been astounding. I call this vibrational therapy bone toning. It is my great hope that this book will stimulate and encourage others to experience the power of sound healing, and further investigate the therapeutic uses of sound.

Although tuning forks have proved to be an effective tool for restoring harmonic resonance in the spine, using them for extended periods of time is not very practical. So I commissioned an electronics engineer to build a device that generates the specific vibrational frequency that I found corresponding to the bones of the spine -- a device that can easily be applied to any location on the spine. Such a frequency generator will soon be available to researchers and practitioners.

Every system in the body has a rhythmical nature and inherent harmony. This rhythmic harmony is expressed, for example, in the expansion and contraction of the diaphragm, the beating of the heart, and the circulation of the cerebrospinal fluid from the skull to the sacrum. And to all this, we can now add the Song of the Spine.