Singer, Scientist and the Visible Energy of Sound

By Jagpreet Luthra

She was a singer. As she practiced a particular tune, she would experience a 'trance-like' mental state and see a snake-like form. This connection between a particular tune, her mental state and the sudden appearance of a snake-like form foxed her but also prompted her to experiment.

In order to test this experience, she spread out sand particles in that area and again started singing that tune. When she inspected the sand particles she actually saw that a snake-like form had come into being.

She was the famous British-Welsh singer Mrs. Watts Hughes, who later went on to invent the eidophone in 1885, a device that translated the vibrations of her voice into patterns on a glycerin-coated elastic membrane.

Later, a Swiss medical doctor and scientist, Hans Jenny who studied visual sound intensively, published his first volume Kymatik in 1967 and his second in 1972, the year he died. Jenny coined the word Kymatik ('cymatic' in English) from the Greek 'Kuma' meaning 'billow' or 'wave', to describe the periodic effects that sound and vibration have on matter and recorded cymatic imagery for further experiments.

Cut to the times of the vedic rishis. The vedic masters gave us the complete science of mantras which are composed of sounds that are potent enough to form the bodies of devas they are attributed to. That is the science behind tantra. These highly developed sciences are authorities on the knowledge of creation and energies which run creation, that's why they were well guarded and were handed over only through guru-shishya parampara, for only the correct pronunciation of the mantra would yield the desired result. Modern researchers now agree that sound corresponds to matter and is capable of creating forms and shapes. They however are yet to discover how this property of sound can be used to achieve superhuman feats…the field of expertise of the vedic seers.

According to an article in the Cornell University Library, Hughes wrote: '…I have gone on singing into shape these peculiar forms, and stepping out of doors, have seen their parallels in the flowers, ferns, and trees around me; and again, as I have watched the little heaps in the formation of the floral figures gather themselves up and then shoot out their petals, just as a flower springs from the swollen bud the hope has come to me that these humble experiments may afford some suggestions in regard to nature's production of her own beautiful forms', which describes in simple language how sounds work in creation and the vedic view that everything emerges from sound which was explained in detail in the last issue of The Inner World.

Source - http://www.theinnerworld.org/