Pythagoras - Godfather of Sound Medicine in the West

Muses

The intellectual and spiritual godfather of sound medicine on the West was Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher known widely for his mathematical genius, was much more than the father of geometry - he was also one of the earliest visionaries to recognize the profound connection between sound, harmony, and healing. He credited as the first person in the Western civilisation to take an organised approach to using music as a healing technique.

Pythagoras studied philosophy in Greece, and then his teacher encouraged him to start travelling and visit Egypt, the civilisation which flourished for thousands of years, while Greece was only emerging. It said that he have spent 20 years in Egypt, he received teaching from Egyptian priests, many whom were women.

As legend goes, he was the first one to create a musical scale in the West.

He made experiments with his monochord or lyre according to one legend.He noticed that if he shortened the string twice = the frequency is doubled. But it was the same note, but the octave higher. This was the discovery of the first interval in music. Later, the other intervals were discovered which could also be expressed as simple whole-number ratios.

Pythagoras noticed that combining this intervals creates harmony between notes - the notes which follow ratios of integers are consonant and other which could not be expressed as ratio of whole-numbers are dissonant.

Musical Intervals

If we divide a string into twelve equal parts and shorten this string to the points 6,8, and 9 (thus obtaining the proportions 12:6 = 2:1, 12:8 = 3:2, 12:9 = 4:3 )

Iamblichus, a Neoplatonist philosopher from the 4th century CE, wrote a whole work called "Life of Pythagoras" (De Vita Pythagorica), where he mentions that:

According to Iamblichus, Pythagoras used music consciously as a form of healing and purification. He had his followers listen to specific musical compositions at different times of day to balance their emotions - invigorating in the morning, calming at night.

He even prescribed different modes and scales to "cure" disorders of the soul.

Pythagoras said: "Each celestial body, in fact each and every atom, produces a particular sound on account of its movement, its rhythm or vibration. All these sounds and vibrations form a universal harmony in which each element, while having its own function and character, contributes to the whole.

Pythagoras taught that the entire cosmos is structured according to harmonic principles, just like a perfectly tuned musical instrument.He believed that the planets, stars, and heavenly bodies moved according to mathematical ratios - the same ratios that create harmonious musical intervals - and that their movements produced a kind of grand, cosmic music: the "Music of the Spheres" (Musica Universalis)

This ideas of Pythagoras we found expressed in the work of Johannes Kepler, who was a German astronomer, who was also a musician. The most famous work of his works - Harmonices mundi libri V ("Five Books About World Harmony"), as if it were a piece of music which he had written about , and not the planets.

Kepler was the first one to notice, that celestial bodies move in elliptic orbit, and not circular. According to Kepler, God caused the planets to leave initially inherent circular orbits and to adopt complicated elliptic orbits to produce even more beautiful sounds.

What is remarkable is that the planets in our solar system from the unlimited possibilities of orbits - chosen that orbits which oscillate and sound in proportions prevalent in our "earthly music"

Kepler indeed proved in his Third Law of Planetary Motion the concept of Music of the Spheres described by Pythagoras hundred years before him - the law which is still valuable is modern science today follows musical proportions.

Willie Ruff and John Rodgers of Yale University programmed the angular velocities of the planets into a synthesiser. They followed precisely to Kepler’s orbital data (not modern recordings of electromagnetic “sounds” from space, but the mathematical relationships of orbital speeds) and transformed orbital mechanics into audible frequencies.

The piece of music they produced is called The Harmony of the World: The Song of the Planets (1979) as a direct homage to Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi.

To nobody surprise , the sounds of the planet correspond to traditionally attributes qualities of this planets.

Mercury - fast and relentless "The Messenger of Gods" .

Mars, restless in its sharper intervals, pulses with urgency and heat. Venus, by contrast, hardly shifts her pitch, holding a nearly perfect constancy that mirrors her ancient reputation for balance, beauty, and enduring love. The Earth, with her plaintive Mi–Fa–Mi, seems to sigh in the very syllables Kepler once heard - a song of struggle, but also of faith, carried faithfully through the seasons. Jupiter has a majestic sound similar to church organ, and Saturn produce deep-mysterious drone.

The sound spectrum of the six visible planets including Earth covers eight octaves, almost identical with the human hearing range. You can listen to this song in the internet.

After Kepler's death, three further planets (Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) were discovered, and of course their orbits also fit perfectly into Kepler's laws, corroborating them. Since these planets have very low orbital velocities (Pluto's orbit around the sun, for example, takes 248 years), their transposition into sound would be below the human hearing capacity. The orbital ellipses of these outer planets, however, can be made audible to the human ear as rhythms, because rhythm have lower vibrations than tones. Ruff, who is not only a scientist but also a jazz musician, commented: "I knew there just had to be rhythm out there."

All this summarised: The six visible planets with their elliptical orbits form a "six-part harmony motet" (expression coined by Kepler) and the three outer planets add the "rhythm section" (in Ruff's words) in which Pluto, the most distant, beats the cosmic "bass drum".

Before We Make Music The Music makes us - J.E. Berendt

The same whole-number ratios which we find in music are found everywhere: atomic structure, DNA structure, electrons spins, plants growth, crystaline structure, planetary orbits. I discuss many examples in details in my book here.

Many things which we find to be "beautiful" in nature, art and the human body follow the laws of the golden section. The proportions of golden section vacillate around the musical intervals of major (3:5) and minor (5:8) sixths and and around so-called ecmelic intervals (8:13, 13:21 etc. ), which can be interpreted as variations of the sixths.

Music teaches us harmony, and when one understands harmony, one can see this harmony everywhere.

Music is a miniature of the harmony of the whole universe, for the harmony of the universe is life itself. Man, being a miniature of the universe, shows harmonious and inharmonious chords in his pulsation, in the beat of hist heart, and his vibration, rhythm, and tone. Hence, healing is simply a restoration of this harmony

Beauty is born from Harmony, says Inayat Khan. What is Harmony ? Harmony is right proportion, in other words right rhythm - he explains. And what is life ? Life is the outcome of harmony. At the back of the whole creation is harmony. Intelligence longs to attain the perfect harmony; in a smaller or greater degree we are longing for harmony. But very often we don't adopt the right methods. Very often our methods are wrong. The object attained by both good and bad methods is the same, but the way one tries to attain it makes it right or wrong. It is not the object that is wrong , it is the method one adopts to attain it.

All the trouble in the world and the disastrous results arising out of it come from lack of harmony. This shows that the world needs harmony today more than even before. When a person learns music, he need not necessary learn to be become musician or to become a source of pleasure and entertainment for his fellow man, which is also good, but by playing, loving, and hearing music, he must develop music in his own personality. We must be able to give the harmony for which the soul yearns and longs every moment. All the tragedy in the world, in the individual and in the multitude, comes from lack of harmony. And harmony is best given by producing harmony in one's own life.

What we call beauty is the harmony of all experiences. What after all is music ? What we call music is harmony of the audible notes; but in reality there is music in colour, there is music in lines, there is music in the forest where there is variety of trees and plants, and there is harmony in how they correspond with each other. The more widely one observes nature, the more it appeals to one's soul. Why ? Because there is a music there. And the wider one's outlook on life becomes, the deeper one's understanding of life, the music one can listen to, the music which answers the whole universe.

-Nikita Ierisov

Philosopher, Jyotish Astrologer

Dharma Station,

Vancouver Island, Canada

Further Reading:

"The Healing Power of Sound" - Mitchel L. Gaynor M.D

"The World is Sound"- Joachim-Ernst Berendt

"The Music of Life" - Hazrat Inayat Khan