Water & Sound - How Sensate Resonates with our Cells

• Celebrating World Environment Day and World Oceans Day

Articles page HERE

It is water that makes life possible

The primordial elements of water and sound are vital to life -  two forces that are at the heart of everything.

Biophilic is a term used to describe sound made within nature, and this has been a  consistent influence in my writing of the Sensate material. It is the combination of heard sound with low frequency felt sound, when composed as a single piece of orchestration, that defines the trade secret Sensate Signature Soundscapes™

Many of the Sensate Soundscapes contain water and several are water themed:

• Mabon Rain
• Mill
• Orford Hum
• Darwin’s Octopus
• H2Ohm
• The Shipping Forecast

I hear from many people who are feeling distressed about what is happening to the planet we live on, to the land, sea and air. Eco-anxiety is real and it affects many of us.

How can we handle feelings of shock and sadness for the planet and the needs of future generations? How do we deal with people hurting that which we love?

We can learn from the flora and fauna, the trees in the forest, the plants in the sea, who selflessly help each other even when they are not of the same species and are, in theory, in competition with each other.

As human beings, I believe we can work in service to nature and to the community. We have a responsibility to this world to ensure that the ecosystem in which we live is functioning well, we know that we have to give back. This is a relationship of reciprocity. 

Seek connection - There is an innate love of Nature in all people, and Nature is the best source of all healing.

As humans, we must learn how to work honourably with our power, out of self-respect and out of respect for the rest of the world. We need each other and in order to survive we must learn to work with others even if we disagree with them or cannot always understand their actions. When others hurt us we can learn to ride the currents of emotion and keep the bigger picture in mind.

The Sensate MIssion:

It is our mission to help humanity thrive by helping you thrive,
by overcoming the effects of stress and anxiety in daily life.

Because:

• We protect what we love
• When we think about nature more, we think about ourselves less, rather than less of ourselves
• Our planet is unique in our solar system due to the amount of liquid water we have, every drop of which arrived on the back of an asteroid (probably)
• We could be called Water, rather than Earth. Our vast water resource is the source of all evolution and the development of life
• The seas are just as important, if not more so, for the health of the planet than the rocks and trees.
• All life came from the sea, we grow and emerge from water, and water soothes and cleanses us.
• Blue ecotherapy - being by water or sea - is a powerful antidote to depression and anxiety
• The sight, sound and smell of water calm and revitalises our mental and emotional well-being.

This is how I explain how Sensate works:

OK so I create what I call soundscapes which go on to the app. These specially composed audible tracks with psychoacoustic properties which you hear in the headphones. Synchronised with the audible elements is the low frequency or infrasound composition, which is best thought of as being part of the overall orchestra, a bit like the bassoon or the oboe form part of an orchestra. These low frequency elements, experienced through the Sensate on the chest via bone conduction, create the very physical basis for the Sensate experience and the sound we easily recognise as unique.

This resonance is propagated through the sternal bone on the chest into the space inside the thorax, where there's a lot of air and fluids - in the lungs, the spaces in the heart, in the column of air from the throat to the diaphragm and below the diaphragm into the abdomen.

This is a very similar process to methods humans have used over thousands of years to produce specific therapeutic effects on the body and mind - on mood, on heart and breathing function, and on all the autonomic nervous system and organ functions of the body. But this takes a lot of skill and few people have this skill today. Sensate creates the same type of effect in a reliable, consistent and easy way for people without the experience to use their own body as an instrument.

How Sensate, Sings to Our Cells

H2O, fluid dynamics and sound

I was astonished when I discovered that sound travels through the fluid part of the body much faster than the speed of nerve conduction velocity! The impact of this is truly significant: the speed of sound in body fluids is one of the quickest effects in the body. Sensate uses this aspect of physics specifically through amplification of low frequency sound into body fluids:

• Nerve conduction velocity 40-70 m/sec
• Speed of sound in air 340 m/sec
• Speed of sound in water 1500 m/sec
• Speed of sound in bone 3500 m/sec

The human body is composed of  70%-94% water.

Sound signals travel many times faster in the body through water, fluid-rich fascia and bone than the speed of the fastest nerve conduction. Water and fascia are natural anatomical conduits that are already in place in the body and create channels for the vibratory stimulus to ripple through the body (think of dropping a pebble into a pond).

Made up mostly of water, the extracellular matrix (ECM) occupies the spaces around cells and the intracellular matrix (ICM) is the fluid inside the cells. We can think of these matrices as being like internal oceans of H2O and other molecules that touch the surface or reach inside of every structure in the body. In a sonar-like effect, sound vibration travels through the length of these ‘oceans’ at great speed. On the macro level, sound travels through water much more efficiently than through air: for instance whales can hear sound underwater up to 16 km away from the source.

And this is a water planet we have evolved from. 

The Solar System body with the greatest volume of liquid water is Earth, which has an estimated 1,361,620,510‬ km³ (326,666,904 cubic miles) over 350m of the stuff on, in or around it in the atmosphere.

We are all familiar with waves and tides and the ripples that can be produced in water by dropping something like a stone into a pond.

In nature, we can observe Frequency patterns in water - called Cymatics these are an interesting way to observe a visual analogue of frequency patterns and how they are emulated by physical structures such as the H2O within body cells. Cymatic patterns are simply a visualization of wave patterns produced by vibration. This is interesting to us at Sensate because the patterns generated by frequency in water demonstrate the effects of soundwaves on the fluids in the body, which is what Sensate is designed to achieve using low frequency and infrasound.

Remeber:

• We protect what we love
• When we think about nature more, we think about ourselves less, rather than less of ourselves