Sound is medicine, according to the research of David Gibson. Every person, emotion, and ailment has a tone. He explains that we can use frequency to match or cancel out a negative vibration, or meet a negative emotion more easily. He discusses the process of finding a sound that best expresses an emotion, and letting it out, like we did as babies. He suggests that “…emotions are like water, they’re meant to flow. They’re not meant to stay around, they’re meant to move on through.” He also explains that there are more exact frequencies to explore for specific mental states. “There’s Delta which is for sleep, Theta, which is mostly dreaming or when you’re in the zone, when you’re like totally blissed out or there’s Alpha where you’re totally present and aware, and then there’s Beta where you’re thinking and processing which is where we are most of the time.” He explains how music therapy is being applied in western medicine to help patients with depression, pain, and even Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Gibson emphasizes that it’s not necessarily a one-size-fits-all, but that we can find and categorize the music that helps us in specific ways and place them in our proverbial medicine cabinet. “We often do it intuitively,” he says, but we could do it more specifically. “It’s unbelievable what’s been happening with people just by using sound and music.”
