Don Campbell, the author of 22 books, has been a leader in music’s transformational powers for 30 years. His journey in the spirituality of sound as an interfaith minister includes a degree in church music and choral conducting; and as director of the Institute for Music, Health, and Education, he has taken students to Tibet, Russia, France, Jerusalem, Bali, and England to explore the powers of chant, tone, and sacred music. He is presently the director of Aesthetic Audio Systems, a company that provides music in health-care facilities. Don Campbell's latest book, entitled Sound Spirit: Pathway to Faith has just been released by Hay House.
RockOm's Tom Crenshaw had the privilege of speaking with Don Campbell and adds, "Don has been a hero of mine for many years. His experience and expertise in matters of music education, therapy, and healing; along with his writings, research, and books on the connection between music and spirituality is remarkable. We have much to learn from Don about music and how it affects our lives in ways far reaching; more so than we ever consider. Don and his ground- breaking book The Mozart Effect were major inspirations to my wife and me while our child was in utero. We even placed headphones on my wife's swollen belly and played a wide assortment of music--everything from Mozart to the Beatles for our developing baby boy. With Sound Spirit Don guides us further along the path of music appreciation--even deeper into how we use music to connect with each other and with that which is greater than ourselves."
RockOm: Tell us about your latest book, Sound Spirit: Pathway to Faith, and what prompted you to write it.
Don Campbell: Sound Spirit is my 22nd book. I have spent time researching, writing, speaking, and teaching on the healing and educational aspects of sound and music and how the world itself, not only emotionally and mentally and physically, but how the world around us is modified by our perceptions and sensations with music. It was time for me to write a book that was much more personal about my inner life, my sense of what is going on from sound and music that actually activates a sense of transformation, a sense of expansion, a sense of inward focus. In writing Sound Spirit, which has just been released by Hay House Publishers, I began to reexamine why I could sense and feel throughout my life how music was really transformational. Different from just the art, the entertainment and the function of music, I began to explore what were the events, not only in my life but what has happened around the world in different communities, in different religious contexts, that allows the community or an individual person to explore this inner world. I call it spiritual archaeology through sound.
How does this work? Is it just emotional, is it just artistic, or are there elements within music, whether it be drumming, the chanting, or the hymn singing that bring people to a fuller sense of really being human, of being able to expand the perception outside just ourselves and our community, how we feel that spirit of life? It’s not particularly a religious book and it’s not a New Age book, it’s a book about how music affects us in a horizontal sense. How we serve each other, how we grieve and celebrate; how we worship. In a more personal sense, how do we go to the deeper places within ourselves? How does music serve to assist our meditation or prayer life? How does music take us to transformational aspects of a higher place that’s outside that human judgment? The journey of being able to unfold some of music’s qualities in this context was really wonderful for me.
I continue in my profession to work with health and education and teachers as well as hospitals and all of that for me is--how do we give people that sense of harmonic spirit, the spirit that gives them courage, that gives them discipline and focus that gives them that extra energy to be motivated and at the same time, or at other times, to calm down, to relieve that sense of stress in the world around us? That’s Sound Spirit. It has a CD in the back and that CD has different types of music used in different contexts for each and every person’s own spiritual exercise; to say, how can I listen to the world, how can I listen to this beautiful form and get more out of it for my own soul and spirit?
RO: You write in Sound Spirit about learning how to "charge the brain," with sound being central to effective prayer and opening a clear channel of divine communication. Can you expand on this and tell us what you mean by “charging the brain?”
Don Campbell: This goes back to my relationship with Dr. Alfred Tomatis, whom I had the privilege to meet about 25 years ago. Dr. Tomatis, an ear, nose, and throat specialist, was very, very clear about the ear itself operating in a number of ways in the mind, in the body, and that the real core of the ear in an auditory sense was that of listening and listening being not just hearing, but being able to filter out sounds or filter our thoughts and to be able to organize communication, not only with the outer world and through speech and communication but in the inner world. To begin to sense how do we listen to our intuition, how do we listen to inspired thoughts? He tells a wonderful story which I have spoken about at length in my books The Mozart Effect and Music Physicians where he was asked a number of decades ago to go to a Benedictine monastery in south France where the monks were not feeling healthy. The monks were becoming sluggish and not quite as motivated as they had always been before. This was probably ten or 15 years after Vatican II, when the chanting, the music, and the prayer changed in many sacred communities. He listened to what they said, he listen to how they prayed, how they chanted, and he said, "You know, you really changed your whole auditory diet by not singing the Gregorian chants; these long phrases, the beautiful vowel sounds, these melodies in very small ranges that are modal- not all over the melodic horizon." After physical examinations and auditory test he suggested they go back to a very strict diet of Gregorian chant and Psalmody prayer and within a few months everything was back in order once again. They were revitalized, healthier, and were able to take their task in that very generous, serving, flow that had always been there.
As we look at the brain and charging the brain there are many ways in which to do that. Naturally all sound stimulates the brain through the cranial nerve, but Tomatis felt there were ways in which we could use the voice, ways by which we could use the vowels to inwardly stimulate the brain. If you were to put your hand on your cheek and just hum for a moment (hums), a very simple sound such as that, you’re going to feel vibration in the palm of your hand, in your fingers because the sound of the voice actually vibrates the skull. It’s very different from when you’re singing a song with lots of different words and being able to sing melodies that are fascinating, fun and interesting. It’s different when you stay within a very short range (slowly hums a melody consisting of four notes) that kind of vowel sound really does stimulate the whole neural cavity. That was one of Tomatis’s primary ways of charging the brain. Other ways that I talk about at length in The Mozart Effect is how Tomatis found that certain kinds of music, the way it patterned the brain, helped organize the brain. There have been literally dozens and dozens of research projects looking at Mozart’s music, his slower music, his faster sonata allegro forms and variations and rondos, and seeing that they help organize time-space perception. In these different ways of testing and researching there would be times of heightening the spatial perception or spatial intelligence. In other times it would relax the body and allow the heart beat, blood pressure, skin temperature, and the breath to settle into much more healing and deeper breathing patterns.
It’s not that every person would experience these ways of charging the brain in the same way, but that there are ways in which listening to music in certain postures, listening to certain patterns of high frequencies through the form of music, and even stimulating the brain through bone conduction--putting little speakers behind the ear into the bone to help stimulate the rhythmicity of the perception. The fields are still continuing to grow. There are major studies in Europe . Some studies challenges the hypothesis that it works and others begin to open new was to say this works very effectively. None of this is about listening to a piece of music and it completely changing your life. You can listen to a piece of music and in one context it will be very effective and the same piece of music will not be so effective such as listening in your car, a restaurant, at home, when you’re in bed listening, listening through your iPod- all of these have different postures of listening and they charge and they balance the brain--the brain waves in so many different ways.
It’s very difficult to make generic statements about this, but music can be a type of sonic caffeine or sonic sedative and everything from rock music to very passive New Age styles--everything has a place. It’s about learning how music has different nutrients within it so that we can begin to modify our own sound diet that we’re not just cluttering our world with music or with more sound. It may be a combination of diet, exercise, and learning to be quiet and using music just as you would different forms of vitamin supplements.
RockOm: You write in Sound Spirit that one of your goals is to enhance the reader’s feeling of connection to the unseen through music. Would you say all music has a quality of spirit present or is some music more or less spiritual than others?
Don Campbell: I think that’s a very personal kind of assessment and I think there are many schools of thought. I like to go back and look at my definition of spirit. You look at the source of the word in many, many languages around the world. For instance, in Hebrew the word ruach means "spirit," but it also means "breath." The sense of breath within sound, the pneuma, the esprit--all of these imply a life force and a duality with inhaling and exhaling. For me, spirit means the movement of life, it means the manifestation. Certainly there is a phenomenal repertoire of music that has been composed, improvised, performed for spiritual usage whether it be in a church or drum circle or different form of ritual, praise, or ceremony.
I think there is a spirit. I think that a simple pattern of a drum beat motivates us. I tried in Sound Spirit not to insist that everybody needs to believe in the same way because I have seen music in its magical transcending qualities in unbelievable forms throughout the world. I’ve had the privilege to be in over 40 or 50 countries. My books are translated into 26 languages. I’m always learning about new, amazing experiences through sound and music. I want to give a positive sense of spirit with Sound Spirit.
I think the only negative music that I really will herald as being such is that which is too loud for too long of a period of time because it can do damage to the cochlea of the ear, to the ability to hear. It can cause tinnitus. It can also bring us into a place that we do not listen or we’re not able to hear the world around us. Naturally, being a classical musician--I grew up in my high school years in France studying at the Conservatory and studied conducting and performance--I love what I call quality music, but I have seen and felt the most spontaneous music coming out of people throughout the world that is still just as powerful. I’m not trying to be an elitist in any form.
RockOm: At the age of 13 you were accepted as the youngest student ever at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, in France. How did that experience shape your growth as a musician?
Don Campbell: I was the youngest at the time and I was there two and a half years and studied in Paris through those years. It was a phenomenal experience. I came from San Antonio , Texas, and sang in a wonderful church choir and played in the school band and just loved music. I knew that’s what my life would be. My father took a position near Paris and the next thing I knew we were moved to France . Fortunately my music teacher in San Antonio had heard of Nadia Boulanger [head of the Music Conservatory in France and a famed composer, conductor and musician who instructed such notable musicians and composers such as Aaron Copeland, Elliot Carter, Quincy Jones, Phillip Glass and others], and I had a little, incredible audition and was received.
I think what was amazing about those years, being 13, was that my whole world changed suddenly from south Texas to the refinement of studying in the palace of Fontainebleau with some of the finest musicians in the world. My ear and my life and what I saw in the outside world; these magnificent cathedrals and museums, brilliant gardens and great sculptures, art (food completely was a new experience) that going into a very structured, disciplined musical regime at that time probably changed my life radically.
RO: Speaking of another radically life changing experience, tell us about Haiti--what you experienced when you went to Haiti in the late '60s and how that changed you.
Don Campbell: When I graduated from college and graduate school I took time and volunteered at the Grace Children’s Hospital in Haiti. I found, because I spoke French, that I could work with the kids fairly well and get around. The next thing I knew I was playing the organ at the Episcopal Cathedral in Port-au-Prince . It was absolutely fascinating to be in that culture; very heartbreaking, very inspiring. The people could sing like no sounds I had ever heard in my life. I remember a friend taking me one night to a Voodoo ceremony where there was drumming and trance work. This was so entirely out of context with my world, my inner world, my outer world. It was absolutely fascinating and phenomenal. It’s pretty easy to go through conservatory and very strict training and never sit down and have a drum night (laughs) even though I did listen to a lot of pop music in those years.
I watched these transitions, I watched the change of the whole mentality of movement, I saw people going into trance states of dancing and singing that was unlike anything I had ever seen. It wasn’t very scary, I didn’t find it threatening in any way, I just found for these people that the spirit meant something very different to them. I didn’t feel either evil or holy, I was more of a fine listener in saying, “Something is going on here.”
A few years afterwards I moved to Japan and taught for seven years in a school with students from foreign countries. That’s when my brain started putting all of this together and in a more conscious form I began realizing how children from different cultures, languages, different ways of expression could use music to play. They could use music to learn language, to reformat the way they were learning. This was in the 1970s, before everybody had Walkmans or iPods. I became very interested in what I could do to help these children learn English. I would say in the earlier years half of them came in not speaking English. Even though it was an English-French speaking school I found that I could help develop their ESL programs very proficiently through patt-ern and rhy-thm and learn-ing to speak and rhyme in rhy-thm (speaking in a pattern with measured words). In my own way, I was rap-ping to be able to get them refined to pay attention and to move- in- a- way that they were interested and be able to remember things in a much easier form than speaking. That part of my life then led to me coming back to the States. I settled down and begin to write about the brain, to research on the brain and language and creativity, but always doing it from the standpoint of a musician. I’m not a scientist but I always have been interested in how can we look at the art as an essential part of our self, our well- being, our spiritual life… and to know how to regulate and how to assemble musical experiences that will have long term value in our lives.
RO: Do you think science will ever fully explain the effects of music on the brain and body?
Don Campbell: I think there are leaps and bounds. Every year there are three or four major books and wonderful publications. I tried to capture a lot of that in The Mozart Effect. I think that the great scientific mind looks at this incredibly powerful stimulation of the brain in one or two aspects at a time. I know that unless you regulate and really understand how people receive sound--their listening: are they hyper-sensitive to high frequency, do they have very low yield and bone conduction, is there hearing loss at a certain range? I think these are very essential in being able to ask these other questions and to develop the kind of dialogue that Tomatis was quite brilliant about doing. I think those are very interesting and I know that the research in Europe is going quite fast on looking at the relationships of auditory stimulation in relationship to auditory perception. The ear is much more than the hearing and listening. It regulates all of our balance in our body, our sense of spatiality; up and down, left and right, forward and backward, and with the eyes and the ears we really know where we are in the world. As we begin to explore many forms of autism, dyslexia, ADD, ADHD, we’re finding that the auditory component is very fundamental in looking at how we can help a young child or student be able to self- regulate their speech, their pattern of thinking and how they express themselves in this world.
RO: What do you believe we’ll be able to accomplish through music in the future that we are limited in accomplishing today? Is it a function of better science or more understanding of music?
Don Campbell: I’m not sure of understanding of music in the music appreciation way, although that, I love. I’m the lecturer here for the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra (Colorado) and I get to speak about great classical music before every concert. We’ve develop a super listening club. If people are interested in this they can go to my website, www.mozarteffect.com, and it links to lots of different resources. I think there are over 500 resources linked. I think the bottom line of my work is how do I help people listen to sound and music differently and give each person the empowerment of the type of selectivity that allows them to utilize music in a variety of ways. For the last four years I have been part of a team with a company, Aesthetic Audio Systems, and we install music in hospitals throughout the United States in a very curious way. We put music in the public spaces, the staff paces, the administrative spaces so that family and visitors, people in waiting rooms have quite a different experience than watching two or three televisions at a time or just hearing the radio. We look at the times of day, how long people stay in different areas, how to help relax the stress of being in a health care setting. Simultaneously, we ask how to give a little energy and help people to not be overly sedated by sound.
We have been examining this work very closely on the difference between people who just walk through a hospital to those who are in emergency waiting for 30 minutes to two hours versus the family and friends in surgical waiting where they’re there sometimes three to eight or nine hours. By putting different styles of music, from soft jazz to Bossa nova to light classical music to guitar music- I think we have 15 different ways and varieties of music- we can help bring harmony to the health care situation. I just returned from Los Angels where we’re developing a new program called The Children’s Playroom; a room in the hospital where parents and children can go and literally play with the music. They’re able to sing along and do activities and it’s a very up and refreshing kind of a place and yet, when they go back into another room it helps relax and calm parents and children.
RO: Why do you think it took us so long to understand and discover that sound can influence so many different aspects of daily life- why are we just now getting to this point where we’re going, aha!
Don Campbell: Well, I think it unfolded in a kind of an interesting and natural way. One hundred years ago music was always powerful… because it was alive. It was in real time. It was in real space. I don’t think there was any question about music’s spiritual connection because you went into a church or synagogue or ashram and the singing took you there. It was a major, major part of the way worship took place. When you went to a recital or when you joined around the piano with the family and sang popular songs- it was always real time. Something inside the brain just absolutely motivated and activated us in remarkable ways. I think as we started having more auditory input, not only radio and television and now, iPods and computers--when you add air conditioners and refrigerators and car engines and sounds of blowers, our houses can be absolutely noisy, even when there is nothing else seemingly going on.
The brain has had to work very hard to filter out sounds and find deep, relaxation within this overly stimulated world. It has been the role of many music therapists, many music researchers and classical musicians and doctors and nurses, in their own intuitive manner, to say, hey--this can be very helpful. In a way I don’t think it has been a long time. When I started to dedicate myself to consciousness, music, and health and well-being about 30 years ago stress wasn’t even considered a disease. Now, we do know, the public at large knows that music can help reduces stress and can give us a sense of better well being. We know that in many head injury patients as well as dementia and Alzheimer's patients that they remember the songs of their youths and their childhoods, even though they may not remember their own names and who is around them. The music itself is still there in their body, evident by the way they respond to it and sing along with the words often. I think we’re becoming more observant and looking at how we connect the notes, so to speak. Again, it’s just this fundamental context of: in every aspect of life, how do we slow down and how do we get meaning out of our free time?
Don Campbell’s latest book is called Sound Spirit: Pathway to Faith and is published by Hay House.
http://www.mozarteffect.com/
Aesthetic Audio Systems: http://www.aestheticas.net
[Edited by Andrew Hoogheem]
For now, however, we're very pleased to be bringing you several new features for your reading and listening pleasure. To kick things off, we've posted two new Feature Articles (in the middle column of the main page) - "More Fully Alive: An Interview with Over the Rhine's Linford Detweiler" and "Don Campbell and the Spirit of Sound."
Secondly, California-based artist John Staedler provides this week's Featured Track of the Week with his "nihilist reggae" tune - "I Believe in Nothing." You can listen to the streaming audio of "I Believe In Nothing" on the RockOm homepage from now until October 7th. In addition, also check out an audio interview with John during last week's podcast.
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