The Potential of Sounding and Movement: adapting a movement-sonification approach to enhance body-awareness

by Elizabeth Dare Andes

On the movement of octopuses, Emilie Conrad writes: “I WANT TO MOVE LIKE THAT! Who wouldn’t want to have the extraordinary ability to shift their molecular structure and keep inventing themselves on an ongoing basis? Talk about creativity!… Without my experiences with sound I would never have thought of this nor would I have had the foggiest notion of how to go about doing it.” 1.

Are we already moving to our own music? Humans have always moved to internal and external sounds without much thought about how it affects us, let alone how we can work with the power of sound to open our perceptions. Scientists are studying the sounds made by movement, from the movement of our bones to the murmurations of large groups of fish and birds. They are discovering how sounding enhances our information processing through opening spatial and temporal perception. Movement makes sound and, whether we know it or not, we are always listening. As it turns out, the ambient sounds of background ‘noise’ encodes information about perception and adaptation, merging auditory perception with enhanced embodied awareness.

An interesting study on the impact of proprioceptive loss on motor control and learning showed that auditory input enhances learning speed and fluidity. The study also translated some movements into synthetic sounds and then amplified them to be audible. As it turns out, we are already listening. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are already hearing those sounds and our movement is already being informed by them. The feedback loop is still there.

Human Resonance Chambers
If sounds evoke movement and sound improves motor function, why explore your voice? Why make all sorts of preverbal sounds? Why open the resonant chambers of the bones and sinuses? Why call up the fluid presence of your body and undulate like an octopus? Even if we enjoy going there ourselves, how can we make it safe enough for our clients to penetrate through stiff layers of habit and tap into flow and resiliency?

Like marine mammals that use sonar for measuring distance and communication in a fluid medium, sounds inform proprioception. Sound in a liquid body communicates through resonance. Sound propagates wave fields that shape the possibility for enhanced movement and more internal space. More space allows us to go deeper into our own bodies, feelings, insights and timelines. We can hold more awareness, empathy and polarities. Sounds ripple through us, patterning themselves in wavy octo-movements that somehow resolve in the greater flow. The capacity to open internal spaces helps us digest and integrate our experience.

Morphogenetic Fields and the Liquid Crystal Network of Fascia
A lot is written on the relationship of liquid crystals to morphic fields and their ability to hold patterns. Rupert Sheldrake proposes that morphic fields are organizing forces that can go beyond genetic instructions to form intricately beautiful and complex geometric structures. As he says, “This is done by rhythm, not by law and by resonance, not by enforcement.” 2.

At play in the crystalline fields…
I invite you to explore this on your own. Make sounds as you move. What sounds does your heart make in the ocean of heartbeats in your life? Can you roll back in time to the sounds she made in grief or in joy? Give it time. Be scientific. Take a beginning and ending baseline. Try three rounds of sound combinations and watch what changes emerge. Tap the wisdom of your biointelligence. Knowing about Nature’s bias to self-organize elegance from chaos, to shape beautiful crystalline forms that influence behavior and connect me to radiant fields that extend far beyond my body, provides me with the safety I need to explore the intersecting fields of biology, personal, collective and cosmic influences. As the inner spaces open, I become aware of what is there and in the spaces in between. I have a conscious choice to digest and integrate my experience and to move into more possibilities.

References:

1. Life on Land, The Story of Continuum, by Emilie Conrad.
   North Atlantic Books 2007, pg. 212
2. Myofascial Release Perspective-Therapeutic Insight: Fascia, A
   Liquid Crystalline Matrix, by John Barnes, MassageMagazine,
   August 5, 2009.) https://www.massagemag.com/myofascialrelease-perspective-therapeutic-insightfascia-a-liquidcrystalline-matrix-5708/

A fuller version of this article appears in the Members’ Area. For details of membership to The Fascia Hub, click here.