Maybe it is because I have had a little crush on the wavicle—the word coined because energy exhibits both wave and particle properties and behavior, making it hard to say what, if anything, distinguishes energy and matter—that Wayne Perry’s assertions about a world made up of sound didn’t fall completely on deaf ears. The first view I had of my babies was, after all, by ultrasound, so sound can find the shape and structure of things through its reflection signature. Perhaps sound is also one way to understand the world’s component parts. The world may well be abuzz.

Part 1 of Wayne Perry’s book, “Sound Medicine”, a book that is well on its way to becoming the go to book in the field of sound and vibrational healing, leads with this quote: “All matter consists of vibrating waveforms of energy. And though it may not be audible to the human ear, sound is emitted from these wave forms.”

I admit it, though I write for this magazine from time to time, I’m not as New Agey as some. But when I looked at Wayne Perry’s website, I wasn’t put off by him. As I said, something about his life’s work intrigued me, seeming both scientific and mystical, just like life is when you get right down to it. Is it a wave, or is it a particle? Are we spritual beings, or functioning masses of cells we call a body? I’m not super New Agey, but I’m disorganized-ly religious. I believe in God.

When Wayne did voice diagnostics on me, we were a little rushed and he was hesitant to make concrete diagnoses, preferring to have more time if possible. Even so the results were in keeping with psychological and physical challenges that I do indeed have. Wayne even brought up a year in my life, suggesting that it may have been a year of significant change or something unresolved and I’d have to say that year was a very harrowing one for my younger self to go through.

Wayne doesn’t claim to be a psychic. But in his practice of sound therapy, in which he has found the voice to be the door to the heart, he has been led to align himself with the divine healer, the Infinite Tone.

I will offer some philosophical thoughts about his work and gleanings from an interview with Wayne before I return to my personal experiences.

Speaking with Wayne I appreciated his willingness to share the skepticism he had when he first encountered the notion of healing the human body with sound. His stories and details are not the examples of a man who has swallowed some kind of cult teaching. He is willing to explain the process of curiosity, study, experimentation and observation that led to his life’s work and its continuing evolution. He is sensitive both to the skepticism of others, and to the fact that many people who decide to look into sound and vibrational healing have probably never heard of it before. No pun inteded there!

I found Wayne’s book and companion CD to be a fine blending of mind, heart, experience, philosophy and evidence. But there is a paradigm shift required to recognize that just maybe the components of life are units of sound, even if the concept becomes oddly refreshing after awhile. However any busy person with a Western-trained mind would have to take time and effort to give a good hearing to Wayne’s teaching. And yet distress, pain and sickness are good at motivating people to seek relief.

I recall learning in literature courses in college that signt is at the top of the heirarchy of senses for the West since the time of the Enlightenment. And that sight is highly linked to the intellect and judgement. If I reach down and touch the weave of the sleeve of my shirt, I have to close my eyes and spend about a minute touching it before I can really feel it and understand the pattern with my hand-to-mind coordination, because I’m accustomed to taking in information through my eyes rather than my sense of touch. Similarly, I think I have a pretty good ear and yes I have met people who hear more than I do, musicians who can tell me what instruments and vocal sounds are coming of the right and left speakers of my stereo and once this is pointed out, I wonder why I never noticed. I think it is because of a perception heirarchy. But here and there some peoples’ inclinations set them apart from the rest of us Westerners.

Fortunately, if sound healing is a sound practice (so hard to resist all the double entendres in this piece of writing), Wayne is a singer and a songwriter who learned to tune into the world of sound with tenacity and to bring it to the public.

“I like to empower people”, Wayne said. His books and his CDs allow people to do much of the healing on their own, economically. Sessions with him are also reasonably priced and thorough in terms of offering understanding about sound therapy, diagnosis, prescribed exervises to use to find balance and healing and follow up after a reasonable amount of time is allowed for the process to begin working.

Wayne really sees all healing as self-healing. Facilitators of that healing serve others best by getting out of the way and empowering the person to live their own life and truth fully.

The history of Wayne’s Sound Therapy Center of Los Angeles is the history of his own growth as a practitioner and healer, a movement from the head to the heart.

In the early 1990s Wayne had a band and hosted and produced several radio shows. For one of his shows, Heart Touch on KCLA radio, he said, “I was interviewing cutting edge shamans and psychics. I ran across a lady at a health show who had pioneered the study of bio acoustics. I was kind of skeptical. I couldn’t concieve of how sound could help people with cancer and things like that.”

Wayne had her on his show, and because of his curiosity and desire to see if there were genuine results, he contacted several people whom she said had been healed by sound.

One of these was a welder who had breathed in toxic chemicals, causing a white-out condition in the lungs. The man was in a coma, and his parents placed a bio-acoustics sound machine in his room. After a day of the sound emissions in his room, he came out of the coma.

Another example was an 18 year old who had a shattered kneecap. A bio acoustics maching was set for the frequency of calcium and magnesium and placed near his knee. In this case, Wayne said, “photos taken over six months showed a piece of bone actually growing.” He said that the doctors called the healing of the young man’s knee “rogue cartilage”, but Wayne was becoming convinced there was something very real and worth pursuing in the concept of healing with sound.

Wayne listened to these families’ stories, read the notes and viewed photos and x-rays first hand. Meeting with him, I found him very analytical. He is not analytical in a cold way, but he seems genuinely intent on laying a foundation ofr each level of investigations he makes and each level of results he builds upon.

He started experimenting with sound frequencies and vibrations at the same time he took his Heart Touch show to television. His shows were getting a good response. People were writing in and telling him they liked the segments he dovoted to his own thoughts about sound healing, which he was so excited and challenged by he couldn’t help but speak of from time to time.

He invited the bio acoustics healer on his TV show also and they became friends, which led to Wayne being invited to the first practitioner training in the field.

“It was a lot of scientific data. A lot to wrap my mind around: periodic tables, frequencies, the use of the sound machine.”

Wayne decided to attend the next training session in Phoenix, Arizona because he really wanted to grasp all of this left brain material. “I wanted to get a handle on it. It was too profound to pass up”.

He was able to settle into the science of the practice and at that point, he said, “I set aside my band. I was a music and film critic on KCLA. I gave that up, as well as producing and hosting most of the shows I did. I invested almost all my time and savings into bio acoustics diagnostica voice analysis.”

The machine Wayne and others were working with is called a SMAD, or Self Management Auditory Device and Wayne invested in speakers, woofers and sub woofers to have the best possible system.

“I did it for free. Most people said it was beneficial and accurate. In 1992 I made up business cards and brochures. I developed a system of fair payment for my time.”

Wayne said that he only used the bio acoustics procedures as a starting point. He was always in the process of finding his own path, to a certain extent, following his intuition and attending to the results of the people he was treating.

Wayne had chronic kidney stones in those days and he experienced one of his attacks. He did not get benefit from the machine, though he tried, but he began to meditate and ask God what he needed to learn. He was doing deep yogic breathing with the meditation and suddenly sounds came through him. “I just kind of went with it, multiphonic sounds, multiples, overtones.”

“I was an improvisational jazz singer in Chicago. I trained people to use their voice as an instrument. But this was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. It sounded like it was coming from behind me, but there was nothing behind me but the wall.”

Wayne said, “The import didn’t hit me immediately”, but when he saw his doctor at UCLA he was told he must have passed the kidney stone. “My body doesn’t create these stones anymore.”

He has also been able to heal himself from left knee pain, TMJ and allergies with his own voice.

Meanwhile, about a year and half into his new career he was privy to some research that caused him to abandon the machine altogether in favor of natural sound. The research measured three variables in 100 test subjects who were exposed to different kinds of sounds.

The sounds were different wave form patterns from different machines, musical instruments, amplified instruments using acoustic and electric amplification, environmental sounds and the voice. What was measured were brain wave movement, fluctuation of blood pressure and oxygen saturation in the blood. Wayne already had some concerns that artificial sound could be harmful to some people and there was evidence that it was ineffective with others.

“Far and away the most profoundly effective sound on the body are the multiples or overtones of tones present in the human voice. As a singer I was gratified to hear this, but I had invested in the machines and quite frankly, people don’t have the respect for the human body and voice that they have for blinking lights. People are more impressed with technolody than the voice. We’ve become so mechanized.”

And while Wayne said that once he put the machines away, it was not fun to run up against people who discredited his practice, he hung in there. “I started experimenting with my voice. I started making recordings and started doing expos.”

He explained that the recordings, which he made in a very creative analog process rather than a digital copy, are sonic tapestries of frequencies and are able to provide brain wave entrainment that the body will pick up on. So a person deficient in a certain frequency can get the equivalent of an aural vitamin. But this proces, Wayne explains, is better than that, because the body can begin to produce the needed frequency without need for the constant outer supply.

That is much of what Wayne means by his desire to empower people. He also says, “I’m of the belief that one’s own voice is the best to heal one’s own body. I wanted to teach others.”

On the CD included with “Sound Medicine”, Wayne acknowledges that the harmonics and overtones he makes and teaches sound a bit alien and he good humouredly assures listeners that we’re all still on planet earth and the strange sound does not equate to a bizarre experience.

Wayne also found that as he worked at healing his own and others bodies, there was emotional healing that would come into play also. He would do his toning into the cranium of a client and the client would ask, “Will you do that wierd thing with your voice again?”

Sound going in and sound coming out both became important.

“People think relaxing sounds are healing sounds. They calm and soothe the body, which is not a bad thing. It is a good thing, but they are not healing sounds. They create an environment for healing sound.

“There are release sounds that cleanse and open energy, like sighs and groans. These keep the body fluid. I suggest adding a liggle more sound to your sighs and moans”, he said.

“Regenerative sound is different. These are harmonics and overtones and they have to come from the heart, rather than the ego. I just had to try to be present, open, supportive and compassionate and to try to get the person into that space as well.”

So how does Wayne diagnose what a person may be lacking in? For this he dows use a machine, but only to create a detailed pattern of what is going on in a person’s voice. The tool is a sophisticated piano tuner, with 440 cycles per second as the baseline. You speak into a microphone which is plugged into this tuner and Wayne observes the keys or frequencies of your normal speaking voice. He asks a series of enough varied questions to get a good sample and he draws dots on a graph, mapping where your tones are strong and where they are weak or non-exisent. He takes into account differences between typical male and typical female vocal ranges.

When he spoke respectfully of his findings, he surprised me with what seemed to me to be an accurate picture of some of my underdeveloped traits and areas of sluggishness. It is a mirror that is both welcome and unwelcome, if you know what I mean. If I decide to try therapy it might mean listening to and learning to make some sounds that are rather unusual. Not unpleasant—actually I gave it a little try and I agree with Wayne that it is like “an inner massage” —but unusual. I was a little worried my neighbor might hear me through the wall. I’ll just try to observe when their car is missing from our front for my next attempt.

Wayne can make multiple tones over and over each other in ways that I cannot understand. It seems he’d have to have more than one nose, mouth and set of vocal chords to do what he does, adding a harmonic tone to the music he creates while the other tone is still sounding and then adding another. I forgot to ask Wayne if other people can do this to the degree that he can. It is powerful to see and to be around. It is a strange form of kindness, the human voice directed in such a way to maximize and accelerate the healing of the human body, heart and spirit. Like blood rushing to the site of a wound and doing its magic of coagulation and reparation, the body heals the body often. Like how only love can really heal a broken heart, a heart to heal a heart. Sound to heal a body, heart and mind made up of sound. Is it so hard to hear the world?

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God&elips;” the Judeo Christian Bible proclaims. Wayne calls attention to this verse and to “this idea that the first anything is sound. For example, the Big Bang, the mantra healing in India, the Ohm, primordial sound.” His book abounds with quotations from many of the world’s spiritual practices testifying to the sacredness of sound.

In my life, as I’ve done emotional healing work and come up against the West’s typical distaste for strong emotional expression, I’ve sometimes wondered if a culture that permits a wailing wall, or some means of moaning or crying out deep pain would be a healthier culture. Strangely, when I used to think of this I was thinking of the emotion without really thinking of the sound, as if the sound was a by product of what was really going on, the emotional release. Wayne has invited me to consider that the two modalities may be one.

Here is another interesting thing to contemplate, while I ask myself if another session with Wayne Perry is in order and I face my fears of who I would be if I really got a “tone up”. Mathematician Brian Swimme said, “The earth, once molten rock, now sings opera.” After meeting Wayne Perry, I am captivated by the suggestion that the universe, molten rock and all, may just be opera through and through.

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