Sound healers have claimed that all of these various emissions have the same intention: to move us from a place of imbalance to a place of balance. This is nice and neat but doesn’t guide us toward optimal design or application. Do Tibetan bowls, classical music, rap music, laying in a babbling brook, petting a purring cat, and feeling the sound of wind through the trees all bring us into the same balance? Also, do we need to consider the state of imbalance which we seek to remedy?

My entry into this field of research came when I got hold of a “Qigong Therapy Apparatus”, a device based on research quantifying the frequencies of sound emitted from the hands of natural healers as measured in the China National Electroacoustics Lab. It had been tested in hospitals and medical laboratories in Beijing for such conditions as pediatric digestive problems, immune response to pulmonary bacterial infections, uterine bleeding, and other conditions with surprisingly good results.

I compared the frequency output of individual Qigong masters with their effects on patients and found that some excite and enliven, some uplift and inspire, and others calm and relax. Clearly healers and their energy emissions are not all the same. Only a part of their emissions is properly described as Sound Healing.

For the past 30 years CHI Institute has pioneered the development of Infrasonic Therapy: the application of low frequency sound to reduce pain, induce calm, and accelerate recovery. In scientific terms, this is best described as Stochastic Resonance Therapy, which is the application of noise, or a highly unpredictable signal to a system to improve it’s function or sensitivity. CHI products, most notably the CHI Palm, apply noise, or a highly variable signal within specific frequency and phase angle for people to enhance their human experience.