A while ago I got into Tibetan singing bowls, which have very rich and evocative overtones. It was suggested by the vendor, and also by a musician who plays gongs, that various musical notes (A, B, C, etc) have been associated with various chakras. Any octave.
I just couldn’t buy this! I wanted a way to prove it to myself right then and there.
Leaving aside the question of whether chakras really exist. Let’s consider that they could instead represent various systems or states within the body, or just bunches of nerves coming together up and down your spine.
Does anyone have insight into whether this whole thing has any merit and, if so, how I could demonstrate this for myself with commonly available tools like an online tone generator?
This was recently discussed in this thread; the consensus, as far as there was one, was that most people lack perfect pitch training and do not pay attention to the absolute pitch of individual notes, though they can hear differences.
That leaves open the question of designing your proposed experiment; you would need to specify in advance how each chakra is supposed to feel, and devise a way to measure that emotion (word associations?)
It seems unlikely to me. I’m not sure that the utilization of fixed pitches has much of a history in the music of the Indian subcontinent before the introduction of the harmonium. The classical music, Hindustani at least, is generally performed by soloists, with rhythmic and dronal accompaniment, and is also largely improvised. This sets it apart from western music, which is generally about performing pre-composed pieces, often in an ensemble of many performers. Both of these things bring a greater need for fixed pitches, so a piece can be performed in the key that the composer intended and so that all the instrumentalists can get in tune with each other.
The musical notes used in the Indian subcontinent - Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha and Ni, in shortened form - are therefore not of fixed pitch. The foundation note (Sa) of the music performed could be any note on a western keyboard or, indeed, any pitch at all. It is the mathematical relationship of the other notes to the foundation note that is important.
So I don’t think that the exact note a single Tibetan singing bowl produces makes much difference to anything, in isolation. I doubt any singing bowls are even made to produce any particular pitch or frequency.
Furthermore, the pitch of a note is not standardized in western music even today. Many orchestras use a tuning of A = 440 Hz, while others use A = 443 Hz or other variations. Many modern ensembles performing Baroque music use A = 415 Hz, around a semitone lower. Historically, things would be even less standardized - an 1815 tuning fork from the Dresden opera house gives A = 423.2 Hz, while an 1826 fork from the same opera house gives A = 435 Hz, and at La Scala in Milan, the A above middle C rose as high as 451 Hz.
The sounds of multiple singing bowls would be a different matter, since the mathematical relationship between the two, or more, notes will produce different psychological or physiological effects, just as how in western music a minor third is described as sounding “sad”, and a major third as “happy”.
Well, this little theory about notes and chakras has already been proven in your anecdote, hasn’t it? The hypothesis is that notes “have been associated” with chakras, and both the bowl vendor and gong performer associate notes with chakras. Therefore, notes have been associated with chakras. Q.E.D.
Obviously, I’m not serious, and I also want to be clear that I’m not mocking the OP at all. But the big deal here, IMHO, is that the hypothesis is so general as to be nearly unfalsifiable—even if, for the sake of argument, we assume that chakras are real, definable and somehow measurable.
“Associated with” can mean nearly anything, which is quite similar to meaning almost nothing. Maybe this is just a case of the OP being careful not to overstate the claim (a laudable impulse). But there’s not enough to test here. IMHO, this is a claim that Wolfgang Pauli would have dismissed as “not even wrong.”
Walken After Midnight made good points about absolute pitch/frequency and how that doesn’t apply here, as well as the point that a single-note instrument like a bowl can’t have an interval. Intervals are important, of course. That said, you mentioned the “rich overtones” of the singing bowls; that sounds like a chord to me rather than a single note. Would it be valid to treat the sound of a given bowl as a chord? There are smartphone apps out there that will perform the requisite FFT to let you “see” the frequency components of a given sound.
Aside from the “positive” effect of the major third and the fifth (as well as the “sad” aspect of the minor third), there’s also the Devil’s Tritone, or diminished fifth. It’s really dissonant, and dissonance is generally unpleasant. But these things are notoriously culture-dependent, which is one reason that music composed on a chromatic scale can sound so foreign to ears raised on Western diatonic music. Plus, intervals that were considered offensively dissonant a few hundred years ago in Europe are frequently components of catchy pop songs now.
As I said at the top of my post, the question as posed is trivial and untestable. Even if it were testable, I’d still be persuaded by Walken’s point that the absolute pitch of the bowls isn’t well controlled. (It would need to be if the bowl-maker were trying to affect a particular chakra with a particular frequency).
But if the question reduces to, “Can music affect people’s sense of well-being in ways that are hard to articulate?” then I think it’s pretty easy to answer “yes.”
(I should be clear that I don’t know much about music beyond what I picked up in two music theory classes in college. I’m willing to bet every other poster in this thread knows more about music than I do. I welcome any corrections or explanations).
I’ve measured the pitches of my singing bowls using an app called SpectrumAnalyzyer (nifty) and they’re not entirely true to Western pitch, although they do come in families so I have two C bowls, one about an octave higher than the other. The lower one is noticeably flat and I got it precisely because of this flaw. The mathematical relationship between the harmonics and overtones on a single bowl are very significant. Each bowl registers about 2-3 pitches above its pure tonic.
The overtones within a single bowl aren’t exactly the “Devil’s Tritone” although I do know what that is. They’re somewhere between a perfect 5th and something a little moodier, on the flat side. Halfway between major and minor. It makes their overall timbre very evocative.
Note that not all singing bowls sound this good. There are a lot of cheap knockoffs that sound like they’re made of lead. I have handmade bronze ones that I bought purely for their sound.
I agree with the above about the fixed pitches and I still don’t see how ANY Western note, eg C or A, could have some special character at any octave. I’d be more likely to believe that, say, middle C had physiolgical effect that could be different from the adjacent A, but that so-called high C would be something else entirely.
Yes; your app does what I suggested: it performs a fast Fourier transform to move from the time domain to the frequency domain. In other words, it converts a waveform in such a way that you can see all the component frequencies.
What do you mean by “the relationship between the harmonics and the overtones in a single bowl?” Aren’t the harmonics simply overtones that are integer multiples of the fundamental frequency? The sound you describe sounds a lot like a chord…how is it different? I’m really not kidding when I say my knowledge of music theory is limited.
Finally, what’s the difference between a Western note and (I guess) an Eastern note? I mean, either in the absence of a scale and its intervals is just a tone, right?
Bells and bowls (upside-down bells) have inharmonic spectra which are not described by simple integer ratios. That’s what gives them a bell-like sound. An article.
Yes, though notes struck on different instruments will sound very different, for example a bell vs a violin. They are not simple sine waves.
To answer your first question, the harmonics on my singing bowls are not simple integer multiples. Also, sometimes I get multiple readings on the same tone. One bowl has an A3 tonic (217 or 220 Hz) with a harmonic that is either D#5 (609 Hz) or Eflat5 (618 Hz). All of these show up to 14 decimal places on my computer’s built-in Calculator function. I don’t know if the tonal readings are that accurate, it’s only a SmartPhone app. Each bowl is a little different in terms of the proportions. There’s a third harmonic that’s higher up than the first 2, which I can hear but not get a reading for on the app.
The second question is a vast domain of knowledge. World music in general has a microtonal aspect, meaning there are tonal shadings between the standardized Western 12-step chromatic scale. Each region’s music theory is different. Blues music also has “quarter-tones” which are notes between the notes. All these shadings give these musics their soul and are vitally important in both execution and appreciation.
A third aspect of all of this is that the metal alloy itself affects the tone. Not the pitch – I’m talking about the harmonics and the timbre. Bronze being a preferred metal for gongs and bells due to its tonal richness. An iron bell sounds quite different, can also sound awesome but not as reliable as bronze. Silver, also. I wish I knew more about this!