The compositions mentioned in this blog are not yet uploaded to the Unisonic Ascension site. When they are, this message will disappear and the needed link to the site will be posted within the write ups of the various compositions. This process has taken longer than expected. The person who is uploading and taking care of these compositions for the site is flowing with many changes in her life, and will take care of the uploading when she is able to. We made an agreement to not hurry the process, so that when they are finally uploaded that they will be as perfect as possible and the download process will be as smooth as possible.
If you feel your own spiritual process feels called to work with these compositions sooner than their uploading. There are some compositions already uploaded by may work for you and which will be of a similar quality. All the ones with the name "Ambient Dharma" attached to them are mine. I also have a youtube channel with many ambient studies on them under the name "Raku777". This will give a feeling for what I have been working on, though recently there has been a lot of growth in a certain direction that has gone beyond them.
If you are eager to get these compositions sooner than this, you are welcome to email me (send the email address through the blog post, if the posting works as it should, it will be "comments moderated", and will not publish to the site, but I will see it and get back to you). Blessings.
Friday, September 13, 2013
Stargate 741
This composition evolved to become a companion to Aurora 285. After the composition finally reached a completion, I found that it felt similar to Aurora 285, even though the entire creative process had different music files and considerations behind it.
Stargate 741, like many of them that I have working on recently, is very multi-layered, having approximately 12 to 16 layers of sound mixed and balanced in relationship to each other. The layers are sometimes formed about a base tone, which is nearly always a solfeggio music note. A few of the layers have the follow base notes: 63, 174, 285, 417, 741, 852, and 1347. The last one is a "gate frequency" that seems to shift consciousness in a specific way very immediately. I have been running these core sounds through some software that can add harmonics, generating the next note up and down the octave scale, taking the core frequencies and finding matches with notes higher and lower on a virtual keyboard mapped out with solfeggio notes. The same software builds a harmonic richness around each of these notes, making them the peak of a bell shaped curve. This entire "bell" is then blended with other tracks to produce more harmonics. Sometimes this creates overlaps where the volume of certain zones of the frequency spectrum become too much. These peaks are gently EQed back into an MWO field (multi-wave oscillation field, kind of like a richer white noise that is less randomized). In this manner, a composition can be generated with the solfeggio scale. A rich ambient texture emerges with little peaks that are solfeggio, usually embedded is a sea of harmonic fifths and some harmonic fourths.
When reviewing the sonic building blocks that were used, many of them had the "delta wobble" which is a gentle ramping up and down, in slow microtonal steps, a binaural beat of 0.2 hz to 2 hz. Rather than a very focused sine wave or square, I have found it is better to use a very tight band harmonic thread and then detune it appropriate to make the binaural beat. It seems that the brain does better with there is a very slight variation and a texture to the sound. It feels less harsh. It has more warmth. The layering of delta wobble tracks gently reinforces the binaural beat. It is like a gentle overload that seeps into the brain and organizes it, bringing coherence to the levels of dreaming and nondreaming sleep, helping the brain to process experience, digest their meanings, and integrate the data for greater life effectiveness. If the binaural beat tones are too distinct, it feels like it is drilling and can be intense. If there is too much built around the sounds, it dilutes the experience. But if there are layers of compatible binaural beats that reinforce each other, each feeling gentle and woven into the whole tapestry, then there is an effect that is both strong and gentle. It gives the brain a little wiggle room to do its own processing and it not like a railroad track that forces everything into too tight a groove. This measure of mind play seems necessary.
There is a thin "ah choir" that has double non-repeats. The choir sounds were generated on the ZynSubAddFx and have no repeating patterns for two minutes. This was elongated to about 16 minutes and looped, then dynamic time shifting and a one note shift that is accomplished in 60 minutes of step by step microtonal changes makes the entire track have no repeats, but with enough similarity to give a loose reference point.
There are about three layers that are mainly to add texture and progression to the composition, so that it seems to be going somewhere, into an unknown, where the brain can create its own resolutions.
741 hz is the main note and links with the 1347 hz gate frequency to produce a kind of movement into another dimension. Hence the composition name is "Stargate 741". The frequency is about awakening to intuitive wisdom. One can also intend to tune into something and move towards it, traveling with "mind heart alone" through a kind of calm intending and wanting. I think that we will eventually understand this and will be able to travel with our mind/heart, without the aid of crude metal space ships. The travel will be "real" in the sense that it will be equally valid compared to putting our physical bodies into a metal ship and launch it with intense fossil fuel combustion. It is what it means to travel in our "light body", possibly in spheres of light, with a counter-rotating star tetrahedron engine drawing a portion of infinite energy from the zero point field.
The frequencies are layered so that the borderland between sleeping, dreaming, and waking is felt, bringing conscious awareness and being presence into this space, feeling the place where these worlds interact with each other as part of a larger unified realm. Dogen Zenji, a Zen master who deeply realized enlightenment, one time said, "The universe is a single bright radiant pearl". Ambient music can express some of this, sharing how it is possible for a single unified evolving sonic tapestry to be simultaneously be unity and diversity, having a textural richness like the endlessly different experiences we have as sentient beings, and yet an underlying unity which is the music itself. As the brain rhythm entrains to this, it may open up to something else, like suddenly noticing that we have always been breathing air our whole lives and that our hearts are always beating.
Stargate 741, like many of them that I have working on recently, is very multi-layered, having approximately 12 to 16 layers of sound mixed and balanced in relationship to each other. The layers are sometimes formed about a base tone, which is nearly always a solfeggio music note. A few of the layers have the follow base notes: 63, 174, 285, 417, 741, 852, and 1347. The last one is a "gate frequency" that seems to shift consciousness in a specific way very immediately. I have been running these core sounds through some software that can add harmonics, generating the next note up and down the octave scale, taking the core frequencies and finding matches with notes higher and lower on a virtual keyboard mapped out with solfeggio notes. The same software builds a harmonic richness around each of these notes, making them the peak of a bell shaped curve. This entire "bell" is then blended with other tracks to produce more harmonics. Sometimes this creates overlaps where the volume of certain zones of the frequency spectrum become too much. These peaks are gently EQed back into an MWO field (multi-wave oscillation field, kind of like a richer white noise that is less randomized). In this manner, a composition can be generated with the solfeggio scale. A rich ambient texture emerges with little peaks that are solfeggio, usually embedded is a sea of harmonic fifths and some harmonic fourths.
When reviewing the sonic building blocks that were used, many of them had the "delta wobble" which is a gentle ramping up and down, in slow microtonal steps, a binaural beat of 0.2 hz to 2 hz. Rather than a very focused sine wave or square, I have found it is better to use a very tight band harmonic thread and then detune it appropriate to make the binaural beat. It seems that the brain does better with there is a very slight variation and a texture to the sound. It feels less harsh. It has more warmth. The layering of delta wobble tracks gently reinforces the binaural beat. It is like a gentle overload that seeps into the brain and organizes it, bringing coherence to the levels of dreaming and nondreaming sleep, helping the brain to process experience, digest their meanings, and integrate the data for greater life effectiveness. If the binaural beat tones are too distinct, it feels like it is drilling and can be intense. If there is too much built around the sounds, it dilutes the experience. But if there are layers of compatible binaural beats that reinforce each other, each feeling gentle and woven into the whole tapestry, then there is an effect that is both strong and gentle. It gives the brain a little wiggle room to do its own processing and it not like a railroad track that forces everything into too tight a groove. This measure of mind play seems necessary.
There is a thin "ah choir" that has double non-repeats. The choir sounds were generated on the ZynSubAddFx and have no repeating patterns for two minutes. This was elongated to about 16 minutes and looped, then dynamic time shifting and a one note shift that is accomplished in 60 minutes of step by step microtonal changes makes the entire track have no repeats, but with enough similarity to give a loose reference point.
There are about three layers that are mainly to add texture and progression to the composition, so that it seems to be going somewhere, into an unknown, where the brain can create its own resolutions.
741 hz is the main note and links with the 1347 hz gate frequency to produce a kind of movement into another dimension. Hence the composition name is "Stargate 741". The frequency is about awakening to intuitive wisdom. One can also intend to tune into something and move towards it, traveling with "mind heart alone" through a kind of calm intending and wanting. I think that we will eventually understand this and will be able to travel with our mind/heart, without the aid of crude metal space ships. The travel will be "real" in the sense that it will be equally valid compared to putting our physical bodies into a metal ship and launch it with intense fossil fuel combustion. It is what it means to travel in our "light body", possibly in spheres of light, with a counter-rotating star tetrahedron engine drawing a portion of infinite energy from the zero point field.
The frequencies are layered so that the borderland between sleeping, dreaming, and waking is felt, bringing conscious awareness and being presence into this space, feeling the place where these worlds interact with each other as part of a larger unified realm. Dogen Zenji, a Zen master who deeply realized enlightenment, one time said, "The universe is a single bright radiant pearl". Ambient music can express some of this, sharing how it is possible for a single unified evolving sonic tapestry to be simultaneously be unity and diversity, having a textural richness like the endlessly different experiences we have as sentient beings, and yet an underlying unity which is the music itself. As the brain rhythm entrains to this, it may open up to something else, like suddenly noticing that we have always been breathing air our whole lives and that our hearts are always beating.
Monday, July 29, 2013
Om Thunderstorm 417
This composition is built around a sustained chanting of "Om" with an simple and light echo effect to enrich the sound and make it more full plus a detuning so that there is a delta wave binaural beat created. There is a thin harmonic layer that cycles delta wave frequencies between 0.1 hz to 3 hz, gently back and forth, always changing in microtonal increments. There is a 3D thunderstorm track that has a pulsed pink noise Schumann resonance frequency (7.83 hz) plus the four subharmonics (14.3 hz, 20.8 hz, 27.3 hz and 33.8 hz). They are also done with pulsed pink noise and also create a 3D sound field. There is also an embedded 417 hz pulsed pink noise and an embedded sound of electrical energy emerging out of a "zero point vacuum field". There are two layers of actual lightning sounds and a synthesized thunder rumble.
I have been adding a 3D sound field to each composition, because I theorize and feel that it allows the binaural beats to affect more of the brain cells, based on how the brain stores information holographically. I also theorize that the brain can generate a small amount of zero point energy. In my studies of zero point energy, drawing pure energy from the vacuum of space, it seems that a lightning bolt draws more energy out of the vacuum field than it takes to produce the lightning bolt. This is may have been what inspired Tesla to develop the Tesla coil. What I got was when you replicate within your holographic brain an electrical phenomena, then you make an electrical representation of an electrical phenomena, and essentially duplicate the process in the brain. In short, using audio representations of zero point electrical energy being drawn out of the field, we can convert our brains into zero point engines, at least during the duration of the sonic meditation. The quality of the electricity, too, that is generated this way is more healing.
The overall effect of this composition is to get one unstuck in the energy healing process (with solfeggio 417), ground in the Om field, tune the brain to delta waves (and secondarily supporting a subtle retuning to Schumann harmonics), expand the effect to a wide amount of brain cells, and recharge the brain with zero point energy.
The composition is meant to be used with headphones for the deepest effect and can be used to create a peaceful ambient sound environment. It is more powerful, too, if you "Om" with the composition, at least for a while, so that more cells are involved. There are about seven layers of sound within this composition.
Thursday, June 27, 2013
Holographic Brain 528
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Completing Grief 417: Dakinis Warm Breath upon the Crying Child (composition notes)
I composed this picture ("Anguished Child," Tenabah, copyright 2013) using a black and white photo as a starter template. The colors represent the emotional anguish of the inner child. There is a sense of a background luminosity that the child is always abiding within, but not a sense that the child is feeling into and relaxing into this luminosity, even though within this luminosity is the dakini energy chanting "ah" sounds in choir, in harmonic fifths, especially D and A, radiating the energy of healing in full trust that the child will eventually and slowly relax into their warm breath and be healed.
http://youtu.be/Is4XizadHWc
Available for download at:
http://unisonicascension.com/variousmp3s/
under the title: "Completing Grief"
in the "Wonderful Singles" tab
Musician's Name: Ambient Dharma
This composition is called "Completing Grief 417: Dakinis Warm Breath upon the Crying Child". The composition has about five layers (some of the layers also have layers). The first layer is made with my "harmonic tamboura" program on my favorite software synthesizer, the ZynAddSubFx. I was tweaking the sound of the keyboard, partly deliberately and partly randomly, when I came to a sound that sounded like the tamboura. This was an instrument that I had gotten from the Ali Akbar Khan School of Music and tried to play for a while. I later made a PVC deep bass version of the instrument which I later gave to a friend who later gave it to another friend. The challenges of the actual instrument is that you need to constantly retune it, deep bass longer strings even more so. Another problem with the actual instrument is that you cannot alter the chord very much, so that I was locked into CF or DA. I also had an electronic tamboura which could be altered to other chords. I eventually sold this to a musician in Minneapolis when I was visiting there. The sound quality was good for small gatherings through its built in speaker as a support drone sound, but the sound quality of the line out had too much signal to noise artifacts for any decent recording. I was happy to have found a better sound through tweaking the virtual dials of the softsynth and a sound that had all the possible chords available, even solfeggion chords.
The progression starts with the CF and CG chords played in single notes played close enough to reverberate with the next noted to form the two note chords. The CF chord is the "fire chord" according to the Edgar Cayce channelings and is meant to activate the kundalini fire at the sacrum and bring it upwards. This is the primal life force that wants to move up through all the chakras and open the crown chakra of unconditional bliss-enlightenment. The CG is an harmonic fifth which introduces balance and unblocked growth into this fiery energy.
The next part of the progression is cycle of three harmonic sixth chords which represent sadness, anger, and fear. The harmonic sixth chords have a sad angst tone, because they are unresolved. They represent the three afflicted emotions. They are afflicted because each of these emotions has the mark of suffering (dukkha) to them. When we feel them, we feel sorrow in them in the present moment. When I was studying a lot of data from regular psychology, I was surprised that this simple observation was not made about these emotions, that they have the mark of suffering in them. This can be verified easily by present centered awareness. Regular psychology does acknowledge that these emotions have a debilitating intensity to them, where we can no longer function in ordinary life. These delibilitating and afflicted levels of the emotions are the emotional charge associated with trauma level experiences. The harmonic sixth chord progression is meant to invoke these emotions in order to gently heal them. From a musical awareness, the unresolved quality of the chord brings in its own resolution, the afflicted emotions call in their own healing. This is done by the surrounding support layers holding their completions. This means that we are meant to expand our awareness to the space surrounding the emotions and let the space heal us.
The next step in the progression are three fire chords, CF, DG, and EA. They are meant to keep stimulating the energy forward, and support the CG harmonic fifth of unblocking growth. The next step in the progression after this are three harmonic fifths, CG, DA, and EB which retune the chakras to each other and create balance.
The theme of the entire progression is stimulating movement and balancing the movement with the intention of unblocking stuck emotional places within us. This progression is supported by a solfeggio chord of 417 for breaking up crystallized emotions and 852 for "coming home" back into luminous emptiness. The solfeggio 417 and 852 notes are formed by very pure sine waves. They are phantom tones with the actual tones being 415 right and 419 left, and 850 right and 854 left. This makes a delta 4hz binaural beat when heard with headphones. Because there are two 4hz binaural beats, the the brain reinforces itself deeply at this frequency and goes into the correspond state of consciousness, a deep dreaming level consciousness that has access to the "crying child" within our subconscious mind. When played without headphones, the right and left sounds form two isochronic frequencies of 417 and 852. This allows the composition to sound musical both with and without headphones and have a similar effect.
The warm breath of the Dakinis, higher female beings who live a vow to save all sentient beings from sorrow, is represented by a three layer harmonic choir chant of the seed syllable "ah". The "ah" sound is keyed to the DA harmonic fifth which is about bringing the wisdom (A) of luminous emptiness into the belly needs anxiety chakra (D) to meet the emotional needs of this chakra. Inside the belly chakra is a needy child, alone, sad, afraid, and in angst about life, crying and grieving because it has lost its home in the warm lumious creative emptiness that is constantly birthing the manifest universe. The "ah" sounds of the Dakini are breathing this warm energy upon the crying child with the gentle confidence that the child will breathe in this nourishment and through this breathing gently rejoin the luminous emptiness as part of this luminous emptiness. "Ah" is also the seed syllable and summary of the Heart Sutra whose core message is: Let go, let go, really let go, totally let go, let go of trying to let go, let of even possessing the wisdom of letting go, let go so deeply that all fear and the possibility of fear completely ends, awaken to your true nature, your luminous selfless empty nature, rest within the interdependence of everything with everything else, abide in the sentient oneness of life, and flow blissfully with its intuitive wisdom. "Ah," being the sound of insight (as in "aha!") and the sound of let go ("ah" for relaxation), is the essence and most condensed version of this sutra.
The last layer is a 3D whirling vortex sound that merges with the "ah" choir and the gentle beat of the delta 4 hz binaural beat that synchronizes the brain with this luminous empty space. The whirling vortex is the activity of luminous space itself, showing that we exist and are at home within a living universe that cares for us, beyond all the apparent dramas of ordinary life, the play of karma.
The composition is called "Dakinis Warm Breath upon the Crying Child" because inside all of us is this part that is in angst, formed before our intellectual adult mind, and which needs healing and which is not satisfied with words or analysis. The composition is meant to touch this part of ourselves and bring it back home.
Extra notes: When I am not composing music, I am usually doing energy, breath, and emotional healing work. I created this composition to help assist in "completing grief". I like this way of phrasing the process, because I do not consider grief to be a problem. The grief itself is part of our healing and integration of loss. I found that grief moves through six phases in order to fully heal our sense of loss. The first phase is "acknowledging loss". This is where we intellectually acknowledge loss and emotionally feel the loss as grief. The second phase is "letting go". This is where we visualizing sending the person into the light in a bubble of light. We feel the grief as letting go of something that we cherish. The third phase is "feeling where he or she is now". After we acknowledge loss and let go, then we can feel the person where he or she is now. It is an intuitive and energetic connection. It is feeling that "separation" from what we love is an illusion and that we can always be with them now. This completes most of the grief to feel this. The fourth phase is "letting the person have his or her journey". It is to feel, imaginatively, where they are going in their journey, through the bardo (the place between death and rebirth) and on to other lifetimes. Our journeys cause us to meet with people we love, again and again, and part again and again. We trust that we are meant to be with each other as long as we are meant to be with each other, and then meet again when the time is right. We relax into this implied trust in life. The fifth phase is "giving ourselves the gift that they gave us". I found that a few people still did not finish their grief after moving through four phases and found a little more was necessary. One person said that her lost lover made her feel beautiful and she needed to now make herself feel beautiful, to acknowledge the beauty in herself that the other person saw. I found that one more phase after this was necessary, the sixth phase, "giving the gift to someone else". It seems that we only keep, emotionally, what we give away. When we make someone else feel beautiful (or whatever the gift was), then the circle is complete. And through out this whole process, it is important to fully feel the emotions and breathe, breathe, and breathe.
I am putting these notes out, because I find that it helps a person smoothly go through his or her grief. It is important to not try to "fix" grief, as if it were wrong or inferior. Sometimes a spiritual "bypass" happens, where we believe the person's soul has gone on and do not acknowledge the loss. It is our body that misses their body, and needs this completion. The chemistry of grieving tears is chemically different from allergy tears or hammer on the thumb tears. The body is shifting its chemistry to adjust to the loved one not being there anymore. Completing the grief allows a person to make a new connection with the person that is heartful, loving, spiritual, and beyond body. When a person does not want to fully feel the grief, he or she holds his or her breath. To fully feel the emotions, it is important to breathe in deeply and fully, expanding the lungs fully and gently pressing the rib cage from all sides. The belly is meant to expand out on the inhale and relax in on the exhale. The neck and jaw are meant to be relaxed too.
Grief becomes compassion, appreciation, and gratitude. The love is already hidden within the grief. We only grieve loss of someone we love and so the love is inside the grief. This is also why it is important not to fix the grief, to try to stop grieving, to judge grief as bad in any way, or to "get rid of" the grief. The energy is meant to be transformed by completion of its natural movement. Saint Paul one time said, "They that sow in tears, shall reap in joy."
Because grieving is natural, it is possible to do this process on our own. But sometimes a little help is necessary, especially if we were raised in environments that made grieving and crying wrong or even punishable. A skilled healer may be useful to help undo the repressions that prevent this process from being easy and natural. I am available, too, if someone needs this and cannot find anyone in his or her area, or just feels called to work with me. I can do it remotely with a phone link, via Skype or Google Voice. Ideally with a headset so that one can relax, lie down, breathe, and move with the inner experiences that want to happen.
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