Recording the Healing Power of Cat Purr

Outside of Santa Barbara, musician and healer Sudama Mark Kennedy lived in Rattlesnake Canyon with his mystical cat Nunu. Nunu had a thunderous purr. Master sarod player Montino Bourbon said to Sudama “we need to record that purr.” Montino returned with his hi-tech recorder and Nunu responded to the enthusiasm with six minutes of mighty purr.

Montino Bourbon

Eleven years later, Sudama and I (producer and musician Joss Jaffe) brought the recording into the studio with the intention of making the Cat Purr composition. Remarkably, Nunu purred perfectly in B flat. Not a whisker out of tune.

Nunu: the cat who purrs in B flat.

The Power of the Purr

It turns out that the purring of the cat is a healing phenomenon. Lions, tigers, panthers, cheetahs and little cats too all purr in the range of 20-150 Hz. This remarkable resonance can heal bones, reduce stress, and assist in a healthier life for the cat.

Because a cat can be such an unpredictable creature, it has evolved a steady state vibration that keeps its entire body in optimum condition. For a cat, purring is an evolutionary “default setting” that allows healing rest between sudden bursts of activities such as pouncing on a mouse, leaping over a wall or climbing a tree. In contrast to these activities, the cat will sleep for hours and then eat. This range of cat behavior finds its balance in the vibratory field of purring!

Scientists recently discovered how a cat purrs. A sound wave is created between the cat’s free-floating hyoid bone (suspended below the skull like ours), its vocal cords, and its diaphragm. This sound wave arises naturally as it purrs. This is not only healing for the cat, but for others as well. As a result of purring, cats rarely have joint issues. Listening to cat purr can heal our joints as well. The purr has a healing effect on many of our conditions.

Good Vibes: The Healing Power of Cat Purr

A purring cat creates a meditative standing wave. The vibrating frequencies affect our body and mind. This calming sound relaxes us like the ringing of a Tibetan bowl or the ambient strings of a tamboura. Having a purring cat in your lap mysteriously opens your heart and brings you into a cozy loving resonance.

Healing Power of Cat Purr Graphic Designed by Gemma Busquets

Healing Sounds of a Cat Purr

Petting a purring cat calms your nerves. The various frequencies affect us in different ways. The healing power of cat purr is seen in a variety of metabolic markers. Cat purr is beneficial for lowering your blood pressure, reducing your risk of heart attack (by as much as 40%), promoting the healing of infections and swelling, and is helpful for the repair of soft tissue in the case of ligament, tendons and muscle injuries. Even if you are allergic to cats, the recording of a cat purr can still offer these benefits.

Cat Music

Cat purr is musical. Currently there is a huge interest in medicinal music. In recent years, the rates of people looking for ambient, meditative and calming music has skyrocketed. The vibrations contained in a cat’s purring are a perfect addition to this widely popular art form.

How would one include cat purr in music? We asked ourselves that question and created a cat raga.  With the cat purr acting as a drone, we tuned and performed along with Nunu’s frequency. In this case, Nunu the cat purred in B flat. The 44-minute version of the song can be heard here in this video released by Sudama and Joss’ record label Be Why Music. The instrumentation involved in Purrfection 44, including electric sarode (the ‘trode), flute, and tablas sounds mischievously like a cat.

Speaking of musical cats, the cheetah is remarkable in that it only purrs at specific frequencies: 25Hz, 50Hz, 100Hz, 125Hz & 150Hz. Amazingly this is a Major Chord. This is one cool kitty.

The Musical Purr of the Cheetah

Frequency & Musical Interval

25 Hz Fundamental (tonic)

50 Hz Octave

100 Hz Octave

125 Hz Major 3rd (just intonation)

150 Hz Major 5th (just intonation)

The Magical Cat

In ancient Egypt, cats were worshipped for their meditative awesomeness. They were believed to be spiritual creatures, thought of as protectors and able to heal illness. They show up in the hieroglyphics as a mystical being in ancient Egyptian life. The deity Mut was also depicted as a cat and in the company of a cat. Throughout time and around the world, cats have been linked to magic. They are still linked to magic even today such as when a black cat crosses your path. Cats have long been symbols of independence, creativity, courage, self-confidence, relaxation and peace. This cat magic is available for you as well.

“A cat can make you feel well rested when you’re tired or turn a rage into a calm just by sitting on your lap. His very nearness is a healing song.” – Shannon Hale

“The ideal of calm exists in a sitting cat.”  – Jules Renard

“Holding this soft, small living creature in my lap this way, though, and seeing how it slept with complete trust in me, I felt a warm rush in my chest. I put my hand on the cat’s chest and felt his heart beating. The pulse was faint and fast, but his heart, like mine, was ticking off the time allotted to his small body with all the restless earnestness of my own.” – Haruki Murakami

Sudama Mark Kennedy

About Sudama Mark Kennedy

Sudama Mark Kennedy, whose father was once a hostage in Iran, grew up in many cultures as a diplomat’s son. A creative writing/poetry major at Princeton, Sudama discovered that his electromagnetic signature had a documentable effect on machines and living beings. As a result, he has helped thousands of people heal themselves in highly creative ways. A world music pioneer in the 90s, multi-instrumentalist Sudama transmits his celestial frequencies through “living word,”sound, heart songs, and kirtan.

Joss Jaffe

Joss Jaffe is a Vocalist, Tabla player, multi-instrumentalist, composer and record producer. He has 4 albums of original music. His most recent album “Meditation Music” debuted at #3 on the Billboard New Age Chart on October 4th 2019. He has collaborated with Grammy Nominated Artists Jai Uttal, Silvia Nakkach and Dave Stringer as well as Grammy Award winning Reggae artist Mykal Rose of Black Uhuru.

www.jossjaffe.com

The post Healing Power of Cat Purr from the Cat That Purred in B Flat appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.

How Music Entrains our Minds for Positive Well-Being

Humans respond to music emotionally and science shows us that it does something unique to our brain. Ultimately music promotes wellness and well-being. Brainwave entrainment is the phenomena that neural waves synchronize to a new pattern in response to stimuli, and music is a powerful tool for this.

In essence, entrainment is the biology of rhythm and how it causes gradual synchrony. It’s the way the body gradually syncs with either a biological or external rhythm and the magic is that it happens unconsciously. Entrainment is a concept first identified by Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens in 1665 through the study of clocks. He found it took less energy for them to become synchronized then to beat separately when in close proximity. This has been found to occur in many instances throughout nature.

Ancient Wisdom of Rhythm & Repetition

The use of this science dates back thousands of years and ancient cultures were aware of how the brain could be entrained through sound repetition well before modern science was able to prove the process.

If we look back through history, we find many examples of music being used as medicine and therapy. The ancient Greeks used music to ease stress, promote sleep, and soothe pain. The Native Americans and Africans used singing and chanting as part of their healing rituals. These sacred practices of course were not at the time referred to as brainwave entrainment, but what they did know was that sound had powerful healing properties.

In almost every ancient culture, repetitive beat formats have played an important role in wellbeing and prosperity. Through the use of repetitive drumming and chanting, Tibetan monks, Native American shamans, Hindu healers and master Yogis have been able to induce specific states of being for deep meditation, transcending consciousness and healing.

The Science Behind Synchronous Harmony

Music has a unique power to interact with the body and mind. The physical body is a vastly complicated universe. Like the systems of the universe, it is composed of many layers of nested systems each operating in different cyclical patterns. Some of the most easily identifiable cyclical patterns include breath, the beating heart, the sleep cycle, cycles of menstruation and the cycles of brain waves.

Music is also composed of interlocking cycles. Rhythmic music, punctuated by the beats of drums, claps, voices or other percussive instruments, mark clear beats, periodicities and tempos. Rhythms found around the world can be widely diverse and variously correspond to heightened or relaxed experiences of activity. All melodic tones are comprised of vibrating waveforms defined as cycles per second or hertz frequencies. By vibrating a waveform at a specific frequency, for example 440 times in one second, we get a note generally agreed upon as “A”.

The way biochemical processes in the body and music interact is not only an ancient phenomenon of world cultures but also a blossoming new field of scientific research.

Ritual drumbeats of shamans have been identified to often occur at 4.5 beats per second. This pulse would correspond to a BPM (beats per minute) of 270, which would be quite fast for modern music. The loud, repetitive and pulsing nature of the drumbeat leads to experiences of deep trance states. Interestingly this cycle is similar to the brain wave state classified as Theta.

Brain waves are neural oscillatory patterns that correspond to different states of consciousness. They are also measured in cycles per second (hertz) and occur in frequency bands. The range of Theta occurs between 4-8 Hz and is associated with REM (dreaming) sleep and meditation.

Brain Wave    Frequency         Associations

Delta Wave              0.1 – 4 Hz                    Very Deep Sleep, repair immune system
Theta Wave             4 – 8 Hz                       REM (dreaming) sleep, deep relaxation, no thought meditation Alpha Wave             8 – 15 Hz                     Relaxed focus, daydream
Beta Wave               15 – 31 Hz                    Thinking actions, anxiety, stress
Gamma Wave         31 – 100 Hz.                Increased mental activity, problem solving, consciousness

Different activities can stimulate different states in the brain. The practice of meditation can drop activity in the parietal lobe, which governs sensory awareness. Music has been used to stimulate the brain waves to follow the pattern of a desired state. For instance, someone with a lot of stress could benefit from channeling the brain waves into a frequency of alpha, theta, or delta. This is called “frequency following response” and can be achieved through different methods.

An effective way is through the use of musical tones. Isochronic tones (from Greek iso- equal and chrono time) have been found to strongly entrain the brain to the desired wavelengths. These tones turn on and off rapidly creating a pulsating sound similar to that of the shamanic drumbeats. An example can be heard here (Headphones are not required).

Another method involves Binaural Beats. Primarily used with headphones, a strong stereo signal feeds two different tones into each ear. The listener then “hears” a resulting frequency, which becomes the entraining tone. Binaural beats have been used in psychotherapy to improve sleep, reduce anxiety and enhance cognition and creativity. An example can be heard here (Headphones required for best effect).

How Music Promotes Wellness and Helps us Find Rhythm that Supports our Lives

Music plays an important role in our lives. All of our journeys are highly individual and there is a unique personal soundtrack that mirrors all our personal journeys. Music evokes vivid memories and emotions, past experiences, future desires and dreams.

If you have ever been moved by a piece of music or experienced a life changing live musical performance; if you’ve created music or have found solace in playing an instrument or listening to your favorite artist, you have experienced the power of music and now we know that science shows that it can support us to heal. Using music in combination with movement practices, pranayama, meditation can assist in helping people become more “in tune” to their own rhythm and the rhythms of the world around them.

Tuning into Rhythms

“The interlinking rhythms of breath and heart give us the primary embodies experience of the pulse of life. This in and out, rising and falling, contracting and expanding, is mirrored in all of life, from the subatomic pulse of the atomic-quantum world to the pulsing vibration of the stars.”

– Shiva Rea
Tending the Heart Fire

Natalie Macam co-wrote this article. Natalie is a regular contributor to LA Yoga and Namaskar magazines and she has been one of Shiva Rea’s Senior Assistants for 6 years.  Her public classes are offered in LA and she is also a classical Indian music devotee studying with Kamini Natarajan.

Joss Jaffe

Joss Jaffe is a Vocalist, Tabla player, multi-instrumentalist, composer and record producer. He has 4 albums of original music. His most recent album “Meditation Music” debuted at #3 on the Billboard New Age Chart on October 4th 2019. He has collaborated with Grammy Nominated Artists Jai Uttal, Silvia Nakkach and Dave Stringer as well as Grammy Award winning Reggae artist Mykal Rose of Black Uhuru.

www.jossjaffe.com

The post Music Promotes Wellness, Health and Well-Being appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.