This composition is entitled "Holographic Brain 528". The composition is a multiple layer ambient tapestry rich in harmonic fifths, mainly my beloved D and A chord, and in Solfeggio healing frequencies, with the two main ones being 285 hz and 528 hz. The 285 hz has grounding qualities, while the 528 hz has heart qualities and is related to genetic change. The entire scale, including upper and lower octave echoes of the entire scale is present within this composition. The overall effect is a retuning of the entire brain into entrainment with those rich healing frequencies. The choir sounds are tuned to the D and A harmonic fifth. There are about six layers of choir sounds that embellish each other. All in all, there are about 17 layers of sounds woven together in this sonic tapestry. There are subtle microtonal changes which span the entire composition, so that no two seconds of the composition are the same.
I have been experimenting with a Holographic Brain theory first proposed by Karl Pribram. On one level of function, our brain is not organic and chemical, but luminous and electrical. The organic supports this functional level. There is an amazing interplay between the organic and the electrical. Through thinking we can change the organic chemical level and visa versa. When we listen to a sound healing composition. The sounds that we listen to become electrical pulses that surge through our brains. They activate what I like to visualize as a 3D LED monitor. I learned this when I was guiding a Parkinson's patient to visualize and rotate a rose in her mind. In Parkison's part of the issue is that the "substantia negra" is deprived of dopamine. It means that vital organic nutrients are not effectively going to this space. What seemed to happen was that the LED 3D rose overlapped this area and fed this part some dopamine. Part of her prescription is to take a megadose of L-Dopa and therefore she is taking in enough, but it is not being delivered fully to this location. When she was visualizing the rose, her body stopped shaking completely.
The results were not permanent, though, because we have habitual thinking grooves. Our neuro-dendritic pathways tend to think the same electrical firing patterns, activating the same sequences of thinking, feeling, and reacting whenever certain stimuli touch our external and internal senses. This means that parts of our brain are getting worn out and other parts are being deprived of activity and atrophying.
I feel part of the problem is that our whole culture is locked in more rigid modes of thinking, feeling, and listening that it realizes. The vast majority of music is diatonically locked into 12 notes and 8 octaves, meaning that only 96 core frequencies fill our life, and even among these, music is patterning itself in the middle of this scale, using standard chords, rhythms, and progressions. We are surrounded, too, by a 60 cycle hum, by refrigerators that roar the same sound when cooling is needed, by washers and dryers which have similar sounds, by trucks that roar at the same speed, etc. The level of sonic variation is not really rich enough to feed our brains.
I think why there is an attraction to ambient pad music is that they are the most harmonically rich music. Trance music, too, sometimes has tones that cover the entire audio frequency spectrum, but are sometimes dominated by intensive highly repetitive beats (which can be a benefit for dancing but do structure the composition in a strong way). It emulates part of nature which crafts white, pink, and brown noise into new EQ patterns as the wind moves through trees, as thunder rumbles in a storm, and as solar winds stimulate the high frequency aurora EMs that trickle down to ranges that we can hear. The patterns of nature and cosmos are in some sense fractal and dimensionally rich. They are not merely random and not patterned into rigid repetitions of musical chords, arpeggios, and 4/4 beats. They evolve by a logic woven into the needs of life itself. Without the solar winds stimulating the aurora EM shimmering, life on Earth would not be possible. Magnetism is far more important than it first seems. A vast amount electrical phenomena is needed to keep us alive. Our brains depend deeply on a kind of electrical richness. It happens with every sensation any of our sense organs pick up and converge into our brains as life experience. It is fundamentally all electrical.
Our brains hunger for 3D sound, too. What I have found that we have a threefold axis of sound. There is right and left with our stereo sensing ears. There is up and down with high frequencies perceived as coming from above and bass frequencies perceived as coming from below. There is close and far (front and back), with loud sounds perceived as close and quiet sounds perceived as far away. Artfully shifting sounds within this entire matrix can sweep frequencies across the entire holographic brain. We can move the locus of sound to touch upon neglected areas.
Part of this is easier to do in a healing session, because I can look into the auric energy fields of the brain and make overtones with my voice and keep on rotating their modulations and frequencies until the sound keys into the brain areas that need attention. I think sometimes that musicians do this with their audience with a subtle feedback loop that they are sometimes very aware of. They hook into their audience and feel something returning to them from the audience. This level is a little more precise than this general hook in, because it is intending not merely to make connection, but to touch exact areas, open them, heal them, evolve them, and reweave them back into the vast matrix of interactive light paths that form our thinking and our life.
This and other compositions evolved to support my sound and energy healing work. They create a tonally rich environment that my own voice tones can sound with, play off of, and draw from. The music needs to be involving, but not dominating. The person's own process on the healing table needs to be in the foreground, not the melodies. The music also needs to be supportive without being distracting. The music should not compete for attention with what wants to arise to consciousness from within.
Embedded in this composition are angelic sounding choir sounds that blend together. When composing these sounds, I have been using the Zynaddsubfx and the Paul Stretch program. Both are free downloads online and both were created by Paul Nasca. I consider both these software synths to be the best for composing ambient pads. The Paul Stretch is really an effects and sample processor. It cannot generate notes, but can process a musical sample in a wide number of ways to bring out the tonalities hidden within them. The Paul Stretch program has taken me over 100 hours of composing to really get the feel of all the modules, what they can do, how to work with them, and how to combine their effects. It feels like sound sculpting. I find that my ear has grown from this exploration and has become more sensitive to how sounds combine harmoniously or cacophonically. Sometimes parts of a sonic tapestry will compete with each other and the brain will process this as a kind of tension, a tug of war. This generally does not feel good.
What I have found has been happening is that I can feel how to create something that feels musical and harmonious that is essentially atonal, amelodic, and arhythmic. I want the brain to be freed by the non-repetition. The sounds sweep across the tri-axis sometimes fast and sometimes in very small microchanges. The choir sounds stay embedded within the pads and do not totally stand apart from the supportive sound matrix. It is our brains that pull them out further by our desire to hear them. As a result, the composition will sound different on different days, depending on what frequencies our brains hunger for.
Although it is arhythmic, there are subtle binaural beats. These are, again, created by our brains. They are created by phase shifting a 63 hz solfeggio harmonic so that our brains create a 2 hz to 4 hz rhythm entrainment and emulate frequencies associated with deep sleep. This means that the composition can be used for meditation and dreamtime emotional processing.
I am posting my compositions as "Ambient Dharma" (my musician name) on Unisonic-Ascension.com. My good friend Jandy has graciously allowed me to upload my compositions for download there (they are found in her "Wonderful Singles" section). The compositions will have the same titles on the blog entries. There may be some that do not fit the parameters of her site that I may find alternate ways of presenting them. I will note these on this blog when they are set up. I plan to have this blog be my master index for all my online compositions. This one I intend to have uploaded on her site soon and I will edit this post to include a link when she does. There are a number of older compositions on my youtube channel: Raku777 with videos accompanying them that I, Jandy Rainbow, and/or Michael Mish have created. I may also create a 10 minute sample of the composition on the youtube channel with the larger total composition available for download on her site. I intend to note all this in this blog as well as describe in detail the how and why of the composition.
Update 5/28/2013: I added the "binaural beat layer" in preparation to upload to the Unisonic-Ascension (dot com) website. I did this by using my Paul Stretch software to create a "harmonic line" at the solfeggio 63 hz frequency (the lowest bass sound people seem to use in this healing scale). It is a thin line that sounds like a single tamboura string vibrating. I find that this sounds more musical than a pure sine wave. I then used the other functions on the Paul Stretch to create a "ramp" where the thin line detunes according to pattern to create incremental slow changes moving from 0.2 hz to 3.0 hz over a 10 minute interval and then rest at 3.0 hz for a 10 minute interval and then ramp down to 0.2 hz over a 10 minute interval, and then rest at 0.2 hz for a 10 minute interval, and then restarting this pattern. I could feel this solo line shifting my brain and tuning me to the delta wave zone.
I then added this harmonic line to the total composition. I EQed some room on the bass floor of the larger piece for the harmonic line to inhabit, volume adjusted it so that the harmonic line is barely audible and noticeable in the weave, but can be noticed if you know what to look for. It is heard as a gentle long wave floating in the background and does help to increase the amount of delta waves in the brain. I also slightly EQed the harmonic line to remove some stronger sounds at the edge of its narrow bandwidth.
At this point, the composition is "relatively complete" ("fv1" aka final version one). I will hear it for about a week, listening to the total composition about 8 times. To see if it still sounds right, balanced, and good. It seems to take this much time, because of some interesting features of the ambient tonal environment. One is that it is different every time. The brain seems to take in different frequencies depending on its need and so it sounds a little different each time depending on what the brain wants to notice. Two is that I try it at different volumes to hear the resolution at each level. It is going to get played in different environments and so I need to hear how it is going to change with different speaker configurations and/or headphones. Right now, as I am writing this, I am hearing it on some relatively inexpensive "monitor quality" (flat EQ) headphones. My main configuration has two Alesis "Monitor One" passive studio reference speakers that I got locally, two Mirage "bug eye" speakers which reflect music off surfaces to create a 3D sound, and one tower subwoofer. They are all tuned to sound well together. I also play them separately (except the subwoofer which always plays with the Mirages and has a bandpass filter cut off the bass going to them).
I often play the Alesis alone to get the flat straight "studio reference" sound. But I like the sound of the whole configuration and use the whole configuration when I do my healing work. I am planning to soon add at second set of reference monitors and two center channel speakers (emphasizing the mid-range) on the other side of the healing table to create a fuller "3D field" for the sound and energy healing work that I do. I will also be able to play any set separately to see how various configurations of speakers will sound.
In a paradoxical way, one composition is really very different with each configuration. It is similar to changes in EQ with one speaker set. Even the room that the music is playing in, with its dampening and reflecting characteristics, will make a big difference. Ambient music has the widest range of sounds of any music and therefore is very sensitive to the playing context. Indeed, a speak system is very much like a synthesizer in the sense that it is "creating" the music and the quality of the synth and/or the speaker system will determine much of the sound quality. The extreme case is that the built in computer speakers in a notebook computer have too little bandwidth to do justice to any of these compositions. They are more for listening to words and vocal music in online videos. They can give an idea of what the music is meant to sound like, but not actually demo the sound.
I would suggest monitor or reference quality headphones and/or reference quality speakers for listening. The Mirage and Alesis combo is ideal for the space. They cover one weakness of each. The Mirages create excellent 3D imaging, but have no "front" to them, no directionality at all. Most music we hear has a "front" to it, the music comes from where-ever the live musicians are expected to be and then bounces off the walls of the space (with its own echo and reverb index). The Alesis speakers can that front. But since they are reference speakers, they are designed to not engage the room and to not reflect off the surfaces (thus not altering the flat EQ). They have excellent "tight realistic sound" but do not easily fill a space. The sound instead moves in a "tube" towards the listening ear of the studio musician. So the Mirages fill the space with a 3D feeling and the Alesis speakers provide directionality and clear articulation of the sounds.
I do find that the "fv1" version seems to maintain its integrity when played through different speakers. The inter-relationship between the vibrational layers remains the same, though the volume of the layers undergoes the little bit of change depending on environment.
