In sound therapy, consonance and dissonance are not merely musical terms. They are embodied states, doorways into presence, and catalysts for transformation. Just as in nature, where night gives way to morning and the compost becomes fertile soil, these two sonic qualities reflect the cycles that guide all healing. They invite us into a relationship with rhythm, with feeling, and with the vibrational intelligence of the body.

Exploring Binaural Tones, the Overtone Series, and Brain Body Syncing at the Intersection of Sound and Neuroscience

When we listen to music, we experience more than just the melody or rhythm. What the human ear hears is a complex web of sound, woven together by a series of hidden vibrations that our ears may not always consciously notice but are crucial to shaping the way we perceive sound. This web of frequencies is made up of the fundamental tone and a series of overtones and harmonics.

Sound is all around us. It’s in the buzz of traffic, the rhythm of music, the chirping of birds, the hum of the refrigerator, and the tone of my children's voices. At its core, sound is energy moving through stuff—air, water, metal, and the body. The concept of ‘energy moving through stuff’ is indeed ancient: in my studies of Daoist cosmology, this is the way that Qi gets described.

Resonance, from two Latin words meaning ‘to sound again’, is a concept rooted in physics. Resonance describes how a system's natural oscillations expand when presented with a matching frequency. In the human body, resonance is both a phenomenon and a metaphor for understanding how organ systems respond to their internal and external environments. Ultimately, resonance is about relationships. In the allopathic medical field, resonance has become a key component of non-invasive diagnostic tools. Technologies such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) use resonance quite literally to visualize the inner workings of the body. In the complementary field, more holistic understandings of rhythm and balance—drawn from nutrition, lifestyle, and ancestral health—are reshaping how we think about healing.