Dean Carter, a musician and teacher with qualifications including an MA from Oxon and a PGCE from Cantab, discovered the transformative power of Pure Sound as a healing remedy during a period of illness and immobility. Since then, he has passionately shared the healing potential of Tibetan and crystal bowls, as well as vocal techniques, while imparting the knowledge and skills required for self-healing and facilitating healing in others. Through The Centre for Pure Sound, Dean envisions a harmonious space where various wisdom traditions converge to promote personal and planetary healing, meditation, and ascension. MysticMag finds out more.
Can you share your personal journey of how you discovered the healing power of Pure Sound, and how it transformed your life?
In the 90s I was a musician working in the fairly left-field/festival circuit with bands and solo projects such as ‘Psychomuzak’ playing chill-out lounges, so there was already an interest in ambient and environmental sound alongside the noisier stuff! I’d also discovered overtone singing as a practice and started to incorporate some of that into my music.
By the end of the decade however I was severely burnt out from a decade of overwork and over-stimulation, I guess. The ‘burn out’ never got resolved by conventional rest and relaxation or periods away, and it became apparent that there was more at work than this, but it took several years and having come to a complete halt, being unable to function for more than say ½ an hour a day, to finally get a diagnosis of ME/CFS. By this stage as well as no longer being able to play I couldn’t even listen to music.
Now people have encountered long Covid, no-one questions having an ‘invisible illness’ as a reality, but at the time little was understood about ME/CFS, including that it was partly a matter of viral damage. What happens is that the whole endocrine system is out of whack, and the lymphatic system never functions properly. People suffering from it were subject to not merely a lack of sympathy but, I would say from my experience, actually abuse and suspicion, remarkably, of being ‘malingerers’, etc. Since a 2006 Government Green Paper establishing ME/CFS as a physical not a mental illness, this should have all changed, but my suspicion is there are many doctors who still ‘don’t believe in it, although in the wake of Covid and long-Covid this should no longer be the case.
I learnt from the healer Jan de Vries that the only time the lymphatic system actually ‘kicks in’ is when one is in the delta-waves of deep sleep or deep-level meditation, and ME sufferers don’t go deep enough in their sleep pattern, only getting REM sleep, so they are, essentially, poisoned internally. Unless you can go deep enough into sleep, one of your main body systems simply isn’t working…the ‘fatigue’ of Chronic Fatigue isn’t that of a normal situation where activity then generates a need to rest, it’s far more complicated than that…one is chemically, internally burdened at all times by this lack of lymphatic cleansing and/or cleansing of the cerebrospinal fluid, another function which only occurs through being in delta waves.
One day I managed to crawl to a cupboard and dig out a Tibetan bowl I’d bought previously more or less as a curio. I just ‘donged’ it with its stick rather than wanding it in a normal fashion—often the wooden wands you buy with a bowl don’t really work to produce a good tone from wanding. Just this one strike and I rather mysteriously felt better…calmed and cleansed and healed. Obviously from that point as well as pursuing any other form of meditation I could (internal mantra work, etc.) I started using the sound as an aid to meditation.
To this end I trained as a sound healer reasoning that doing what was good for me and then putting it into practice for others was, effectively, the only career option open to me now. Gradually working with the sound I was able to extend my ½ hour period of functioning in the day so that, cautiously, I got to, say, a 2 hr period of functioning, then needing ½ hr rest, and so on. Naturally I was also investigating getting deeper brainwave level sleep and again sound initially was my main form, as well as, actually, Jan de Vries’s sleep essence, which did seem to work to help with delta –wave ‘restorative’ sleep. ME people can ‘sleep’ 20 hours a day and still not feel refreshed on waking—that’s because they don’t go deep enough.
The training I received I felt was very incomplete in terms of either any knowledge of basic musical theory, and any theory as to why the modalities used worked: the body involved (who shall remain nameless) did not know, and to my knowledge still don’t actually know, what they are dealing with: Pure Sound. All sound healing practitioners, if they are using any of these modalities, are using Pure Sound, although they don’t know it!
You can go to my web page www.centreforpuresound.org/whatispuresound for an explanation.
Essentially the tools we use, crystal singing bowls, Tibetan singing bowls, and vocal overtoning all generate Pure Sounds, as do tuning forks (which we don’t use in our work as they lack amplitude and sustain). Nor do we use gongs which although they have some PureSsound element I feel have the ‘white noise’ part of their output, the ‘crash’, working against that—so it’s like driving with the handbrake on. With our sound tools a deeper healing and cleansing experience is achieved. ‘That’s the best soundbath I’ve ever experienced’…the number of times we’ve been told that!
So, essentially, and certainly not overnight, working with the Pure Sound has been my way out of, my cure for, ME/CFS.
- The Centre for Pure Sound incorporates various modalities, including Tibetan and crystal bowls, voice work, and Sacred Sound. How do these different elements work together to facilitate healing and meditation?
- You mentioned that Pure Sound has the ability to stop “mind chatter.” Could you elaborate on how Pure Sound achieves this and its impact on meditation?
- Could you explain the concept of overtone singing and how it contributes to the healing process? How can individuals learn this technique?
- In your work, you emphasize the importance of respecting and working with Sacred Languages like Sanskrit and Hebrew. How do these languages enhance the healing potential of Pure Sound, and what role do they play in your practice?
I’ll have to give a combined answer to these questions…wholistically! The modalities all work together as they are pure sound modalities.
If you play or sing a note on a string or a wind instrument, as well as the one main note you hear or are aware of, the sub-vibrations generated by the string or the air column generate ‘harmonics’ or ‘overtones’, but they are usually inaudible as a separate tone to the ear, instead ‘colouring’ the note—what musical ‘timbre’ in an instrument or voice is the absence, presence, or relative volume of the overtones embedded within the sound. With a normal string or woodwind instrument you are never really experiencing a single pure note or tone, but actually a whole scale, the overtone scale or harmonic series. This is a mathematical sacred construct as it were built into the physics of sound itself, and contains all the elements of sacred number and geometry which can then be expressed visually and in terms of space and volume.
In all the esoteric traditions this sacred construct was known and venerated—in the West Pythagoras is credited with having been the first to have this knowledge, but he clearly obtained it from the far older Egyptian/Sumerian canon. Pythagoras was a sound healer, not just a mathematician/philosopher—in fact in ancient times these disciplines were not separate but complementary and integrated. Plato was 9th in succession to the teachings of the ‘Pythagorean’ canon, something that modern academic interpretations of his work fail entirely to understand or acknowledge.
Back to the overtone scale: in normal musical playing overtones and harmonics can be made audible through special playing or singing techniques and these clear, bell-like sounds, when you experience them out loud in this way are Pure Sounds in themselves in that they do not generate further overtones. We believe the whole science of sacred sound in terms of mantra work, incantations magic spells were based on the fact that all these ancient texts were to be SUNG not spoken (the Bhagavad-Gita means ‘the SONG of the Lord or Bhagavan’, for example) and, in fact, sung in such a way that the overtones were made audible—the technique of overtone singing. This is what we teach in our ‘Angels of Sound’ workshops…in fact the entire phonetic Sanskrit ‘alphabet’ consists of sounds which are referred to as being ‘devata’, that is, n their own right, Angels, devas, Divine beings. There is in fact a ‘letter’ in this alphabet which we believe rather than being a separate vowel or consonant is, in fact, the instruction to to make the overtoning-out-loud sound!
The fact that only priesthoods wanted to have control of this healing use of sound led to such injunctions as non-use of the uninitiated into sounding the Divine Name or Names (there are in fact many). Using overtone singing is a form of sound healing where you already have the equipment you need—your voice!
A crystal bowl, like a tuning fork, is the purest acoustic sound on earth technically speaking. It is just that one sound or note all on its own, and the bowls are just much louder and create a far longer sustained note than tuning forks, which can only be helpful at very close quarters (or when used directly on the body). Running the Pure Sound of a crystal bowl’s one-and-only note through an oscilloscope would give you a complete pure sine-wave pattern, unlike the ‘shaky’ graph pattern you would get of a normally sung or played compound note on a normal instrument. The same would be true if one were to isolate an out-loud-sounded harmonic or overtone.
Deliberately sounded harmonics are often incorporated into normal music as a special effect: you can hear them for example on ‘Sea of Tranquility’ on my album SONGS WITHOUT WORDS/TOWARD TOMORROW (on all major digital platforms) at 1.51 especially and at the end of the piece.
Metallaphones, musical instruments made of metal that you strike to produce a sound, such as Tibetan bowls, have the interesting quality of having their overtones come out actually audibly in a more random order, not in the overtone scale. When you hear a church bell striking you may have often noticed that it sounds weirdly like two notes at once—it actually is! Ditto with Tibetan bowls, in fact two or three or even four can be heard simultaneously, and on larger bowls they generate audible undertones even.
So in one of our soundbaths you are on the receiving end of a great deal of Pure Sound energy generated in the ways described above, and the experience and effect is very different from hearing and experiencing normal musical sound. For one example, you can hear the sounds as if you are listening to them on headphones and turning the balance sharply from left to right—due to the purity and integrity of the pure sine-wave. The sounds also seem to come from elsewhere in room than their source as the Pure Sound waves behave quite differently spatially: you know how with modern ambulance sirens you can’t tell from which direction they are coming? That’s because they are electronic pure sound generators. (It would be much safer incidentally for the idiot powers that be to go back to two-tone sirens where the Doppler effect helps the ear place the sound source spatially.)
All of this then works on four levels on the client or participant.
Energetically: with pendulum dowsing we can check in on the chakra functioning of the client before and after the exposure to the pure sound. In 100% of cases our readings show optimisation of the spin of the chakras to bring in the etheric energy into the body-mind system, and a ‘brightening’ of the aura (sometimes actually visible to me.)
Mentally: the sounds generally take the client into the deeper brain-wave states of Alpha, Theta and even the Delta I was talking about earlier, all of which as well as being experienced in sleep in a healthy person can also be experienced while awake and lucid. Thus the phenomena associated with REM sleep such as visionary experiences/journeying, and so on, can be experienced lucidly during a pure sound session. In some cases the highly resistant ‘parasite’ mind of mind-chatter can resist this aspect of the healing, but with repeated exposure the resistance breaks down. Our ‘usual’ brainwave state of beta waves for normal waking functioning can often go up into the higher Beta range which = ‘fight or flight’, and the pure sound usually at least drops the level to lower Beta, so if the mind-chatter isn’t entirely eliminated it is at least reduced. Once one is in higher Beta and ‘fight or flight’ this is of course an extremely unhealthy state. ‘Fight or fight’ is designed in animals to last only for a very short time in which cortisone is released into the bloodstream to facilitate either chasing after the prey or attempting to avoid becoming prey! In humans it can be sustained far beyond its usefulness, and this is what worry is: when you worry, you are killing yourself, chemically.
Emotionally: in the wake of the changes of brainwave state down into lower Beta, Alpha, Theta and Delta of course mood and emotion alter and become relaxed, a good thing all round. Being able to ‘let go’ actually occurs in muscle groups that have become rigidified due to constant stress signals. People experience deep peace, relaxation and healing. Sometimes this letting-go results in deeply buried memories, complexes, emotions and thoughts, sometimes ‘negative’ being released…and in this calm space and theraputic context this too is part of the clearing—sometimes even cell memories of forgotten and old physical traumas can arise to be then finally let go.
Physically: as well as the deep muscle relaxation mentioned below, the very powerful pure sound waves passing through the entire body have a very strong detoxing effect. We often demonstrate this with a special type of Tibetan bowl a Fountain bowl which shows how soundwaves can actually cause patterns in a body of water and then even stir it up into splashing—and what are we but bodies of water? This then literally shakes toxins out of the system and you then must drink plenty of good quality water after any session with us, or you will experience, essentially, the re-absorption of the released toxins as a hangover!
One other aspect of Pure Sound I think I need to explain although not perhaps covered in your initial questions is that of pitching of the bowls in relation to the chakras.
One basic fact that became clear is that a specific pitch of a bowl or instrument does not relate constantly to any particular body area or organ—that would be too simple. Through feedback from clients right from the beginning of my exploration of these modalities it became clear that people feel the same pitched sound in different areas of the body on different occasions, even, sometimes, within the same session. The Pure Sound just seems to go on a physical level where it’s needed.
Then when it comes to ascribing the notes of the Major scale we use in the West to the chakras it is assumed that everybody is in the key of C, so C = root chakra, D = 2nd chakra and so on. This is an untested assumption upon which most ‘sound healing’ is based but we believe it to be a fallacy and an over-simplification arising from the wishful thinking of those non musically trained. Instead we think that everyone is in a different one of the 12 Keys in music –I’m a B flat, for example! While group soundbaths are general and if you encounter a note out of the 12 you don’t like as much you merely have to wait until we move to one to which you are more receptive, in 121 work I find the key of the client through pendulum dowsing and we confine my use of the 12 notes arranged in the cycle of 4ths and 5ths to those notes within the client’s key for a deeper experience still. Thus everyone has a Key Note/Root Tone and if you have a 121 or come to one of our Angels of Sound Modules you will discover what this is in order to work on yourself in your own Key, or, if you take the full training Modules, to then work on clients in their Key. I believe this is one of the ways in which the work of centreforpuresound.org is unique and functions at a greater level of depth than the general run of practitioners in this field.
If you would like to find out more about The Centre for Pure Sound, visit http://centreforpuresound.org/
