What if the voice isn’t just how we speak, but how we heal? I’m deep in the writing of a book to be published next year by Bloomsbury on singing, the voice, and its power to transform. The further I dig into the research, the more it confirms what years as a performer and educator have already shown me. There’s science catching up to what singers have always felt in their bones.

I’ll be sharing conversations with researchers and experts in this field in the next months on my podcast, Hodge Pod, I genuinely can’t wait for you to hear.

Each track is composed to move through an element of nature and a different brainwave state, from grounded, restorative frequencies to lighter, more expansive ones. The journey is designed to support regulation, creativity, meditation, and a sense of coming back to center, depending on where your nervous system needs to land that day.

A few things to know: because these tracks include brainwave entrainment, you’ll want wired headphones rather than Bluetooth. That’s the only preparation required. The whole experience runs about 30 minutes, with space afterward to share, if you’re moved to.

I’ll open each circle with an intention: that we gather with open hearts and let whatever healing we find ripple outward into a world that could use more of it. PLEASE JOIN US!

Join the Elemental Essence Sound Circle here: https://vocalvisions.net/workshops-classes-available

Or check the calendar for upcoming dates: https://vocalvisions.net/calendar

Please help this mission by subscribing to Sound Creativity Journal!

My work with music through the years has made it clear that rhythm plays an integral part in our lives, for that matter all life. As a vocalist and educator, I’m constantly aware of how humans are centered around the rhythm of their breath. As a sound healing facilitator we tend to focus on our heart chakra. These rhythms, especially the heartbeat, are so important to being alive that we monitor them, often on a daily basis. We wear watches that track our pulse rate throughout the day, monitoring our resting heart rate and our rate when we’re exercising. No longer do we get our blood pressure taken only at the doctor’s office. In fact, we’re able to use high tech blood pressure kits to keep track on a daily basis.

Inside our bodies we have circadian, ultradian, infradian, circannual, cellular and molecular rhythms. No wonder we love the sound of drum beats, the groove of a song, the tick of a clock, and a soothing pulsation. Our bodies align to the 24-hour circadian rhythm, the cycle behind sleep-wake timing, body temperature, hormone release, and metabolism. At a faster pace, ultradian rhythms govern cell division, blood pressure, digestion, and heartbeat. Different tissues respond to timing signals differently: the brain is highly sensitive to light, the liver responds strongly to feeding time, and muscles respond to activity, while the immune and hormone systems show daily patterns that shape inflammation, repair, and defense. Then there are the seasonal shifts in mood, energy, reproduction and behavior that fall into the category of circannual rhythms.

Whether we are aware of it or not, the synchronization of these rhythms has effects on our electrocortical brain activity, heart rate and motor coordination. This synchronizing tendency is called entrainment.

It has been told that this principle was observed in the 17th century by the Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens, the inventor of the pendulum clock. He happened to notice that the pendulums of the various sized clocks would gradually fall into sync. This phenomenon occurs wherever coupled oscillating systems share a physical connection. All of this can be observed in nature. Just notice when you are listening to music how you align to the pulse or the groove. That’s entrainment. In nature fireflies blinking on and off, muscle cells from the heart beat together, and starlings in a murmuration flock move together. All of it points to the same thing, an inner rhythm and an outer one, constantly answering each other.

We are a literal percussion orchestra, each rhythm playing its own part, the heartbeat, the breath, the sleep cycle, the seasonal shift, all of them needing to stay in relationship with each other rather than working alone. When one section falls out of time, we feel it before we can name it, as fatigue, as a restlessness we can’t place, as a mood that arrives without a reason. Staying in tune with these rhythms and knowing how to gently bring one back into balance when it drifts is where the real work begins.

Turning Our Own Beat Around

So, can we actually alter these rhythms, or are we simply prisoners to whatever pattern we were born with and the patterns around us?

The honest answer is mixed, and it’s a more interesting answer than a clean yes. Some recent research is encouraging. A tempo range around 60 to 80 beats per minute has been studied for its ability to help the body’s own rhythms sync to an outside sound, improving the balance of the autonomic nervous system and increasing the kind of vagal activity associated with calm. Slow, nature woven soundscapes have been shown to shift the body toward a more parasympathetic, rest and digest state, while faster tempos during exercise do the opposite, pushing us into a more activated, sympathetic one. That much lines up with what most of us already sense intuitively about music and mood.

In my upcoming book, Healing, Harmony and the Voice, I note that singing may be the clearest example of this. It turns out the mechanism has less to do with the sound of the beat itself than with something more structural: breath. Singing demands longer, more deliberate inhales and exhales, phrase after phrase: breathe, sing, breathe again. That patterned breathing has a direct physiological consequence. Heart rate naturally rises a little on the inhale and falls on the exhale, a coupling researchers call respiratory sinus arrhythmia. When a group of people breathe together because a song’s phrasing is organizing their breath for them, that coupling starts to line up across singers too.

This isn’t speculative. A 2011 study found that heart rate variability synchronized between choir members and their conductor, with the effect strongest during unison singing. A follow up study in 2013 went further, finding that unison singing of a regular song structure caused singers’ hearts to speed up and slow down together over time, a synchronization tied directly to the song’s structure and the breathing it demanded. Even non-singers show this. In one experiment, pairs of people who weren’t trained singers showed significant heart rate variability coupling simply from holding long tones together, more than ten seconds, compared to short sounds or silence. Most of that effect came from shared breathing, though some coupling remained even after researchers accounted for breath alone.

It’s worth being precise about what’s actually synchronizing, since “hearts synchronize” can sound bigger than what’s being measured. It isn’t that every individual heartbeat lines up with everyone else’s, or with the song’s tempo. What synchronizes is the pattern, the natural speeding and slowing of the heart within each breath, occurring at similar points in time across singers. That’s still a real and measurable form of bodies falling into rhythm together, just a more precise one than the popular phrase suggests.

But the deeper question, whether a listener’s heartbeat is actually locking into a beat the way two pendulum clocks lock into each other, is far less settled outside of singing’s breath-driven case. A 2026 review looking specifically at this mechanism found that although researchers have long hypothesized that musical rhythm shapes heart rate through entrainment, and that this in turn shapes emotion, the evidence gathered so far has been inconsistent. Those results are likely due to how these studies have been designed and measured. In other words, music clearly moves the nervous system’s overall state. The more precise claim, that your heart is following the beat step for step, doesn’t hold up quite as cleanly, except where breath is doing the structural work, as it is in singing.

My own experience as a practitioner has revealed these outcomes in my singing studio, in groups and in my own professional work as a singer. There is definitely a transformation that occurs that reveals an increase in the areas of calmness as well as joy. I’ve seen clients who felt low or weighed down from a difficult time remark how it changed their outlook, and they even felt physically more energized.

Another area that aligns is auditory rhythmic stimulation. Auditory rhythmic stimulation, including binaural beats, isochronic tones, and structured musical rhythm, may serve as a complementary resource for self-regulation and recovery by influencing attention, arousal, emotion, breathing, movement, and sometimes neural timing. Effects may be strengthened when sound is paired with compatible practices such as slow breathing, meditation, movement, or sleep routines; however, the degree of targeted brainwave entrainment and clinical benefit varies across people and methods. In my current recording project, Elemental Essence: A Neurosonic Journey, I incorporated precision brainwave entrainment frequencies that I wove into compositions built around the five elements of nature. In my collaboration with Shea Thompson, using the technology of Scientific Sounds and Skye Collective, we used cross-frequency coupling. Research found in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience shows that brain rhythms naturally interact through cross-frequency coupling: a slower rhythm can influence the timing or amplitude of faster activity. This is one way the brain coordinates processes occurring across milliseconds, seconds, and longer time scales. For example, a relaxed-attention or meditative practice may involve a changing mix of slow and fast rhythmic activity rather than a pure alpha, theta, or gamma state.

Since the recordings’ release, I have had a multitude of responses on the many physical and mental benefits from these “rhythms.” This specific music, paired with breathing, meditation, environmental cues, and even defined tasks, can show significant positive results.

Holding Our Own Pulse

There’s something about the pendulum clocks that I keep coming back to. Huygens didn’t just notice that the clocks synced to each other. He noticed that the strongest rhythm in the room tended to draw the others toward it. A steady, well-built clock could pull a weaker one into its tempo. And I think that’s true of us too, not just with planetary rhythms, but with each other. Anyone who has been in a room with a truly grounded person, or on the opposite end, someone whose anxiety fills every corner of a space, has felt this. We entrain to the strongest rhythm present. This is, I think, part of what makes a leader a leader, for better or worse. A room can be calmed by one steady presence or destabilized by one erratic one. History gives us both kinds.

My uncle, who practiced astrology, used to say, “you always have a choice.” I used to hear that as something gentle, a kind of reminder. In his telling, a chart could point to what pull might be present, a heavy transit, a difficult alignment, but he never claimed that pull would be your story. The chart described the weather, not the outcome. Now I hear that distinction as something closer to a physics lesson. If planetary or other external rhythms create potential entrainments, personal pulls you're exposed to, then the question becomes how strong your own inner pulse is to shape a different outcome. A centered nervous system, the kind cultivated by lifelong meditators or even musicians who’ve spent years finding their own internal pulse, doesn’t get swept up as easily. It might even do the reverse, and become the clock the room entrains to instead.

I’ve also encountered the opposite: an astrologer who predicted, with certainty, that a particular rhythmic cycle would impose a pattern. There was no room in that reading for the choice my uncle always insisted was there. I also sensed something beneath it. The prediction was not neutral; it served her own interests, and implying there was no alternative helped make that outcome more likely. That is the failure point I keep returning to. The moment any metaphysical framework, astrology or otherwise, tells you that you are merely subject to a rhythm outside yourself, it stops being a tool for self-awareness and becomes a tool for control. It asks you to hand over the very presence and responsibility it claims to cultivate. In entrainment terms, it is someone trying to convince you that your own rhythm does not count, that the external pulse wins by default, and that you might as well stop holding your own tempo. It is a way of talking someone out of their own strength and accountability. That is not how coupled systems work.

I can’t hand you a study that proves this. Some of it lives closer to observation, to the language wisdom keepers have used for centuries, than to a peer-reviewed paper. I’m at peace with that. Science itself often starts this way, a pattern someone kept noticing before anyone had the instruments to explain it.

The Human Orchestra

A 2026 paper out of Temple University made the case that a musical ensemble isn’t just a useful metaphor for how the brain and body coordinate, it’s built on the same underlying architecture. The fastest rhythms (a neuron firing, a vocal cord vibrating) nest inside slower ones: a breath, a phrase, a heartbeat. Those, in turn, nest inside rhythms slower still: a day, a season, a life. Nothing at any of those timescales is running alone. Each one shapes, and is shaped by, the rhythm just above and just below it. It’s the shape of a set of Russian nesting dolls, each rhythm holding a smaller one inside it. Some researchers see something fractal-like here too, patterns in heart rate and breathing that look statistically similar whether you zoom in by the second or by the hour.

That’s true inside a single body. It’s also true between bodies. The same research shows that when musicians play together, their brains actually begin to synchronize at the slower frequencies, the ones tied to breath and heartbeat rhythm, while each individual musician’s faster processing, the split second precision of a passage, stays their own. Nobody loses their part. The coordination happens at the level of the underlying pulse, not by everyone playing identical notes at an identical moment.

I think that’s the truest version of what I’ve been circling this whole piece. We are each our own percussion section, heartbeat, breath, sleep, season, all keeping time with each other inside a single body. And then, whenever we gather, to sing, to play, to sit in a room with another steady or unsteady rhythm, we become part of something larger still.

We are individuals, pulsating together, each one keeping their own tempo. All of us, somehow, imperfectly, in time. Perhaps that’s what the planets are doing too. Out past any room or stage there is one orchestra too vast to see all at once. Each body holding its own tempo inside something larger.

Sources

Elemental Essence: A Neurosonic Journey: (Listen with wired headphones and as a WAV file for best results) Available as a WAV file at: https://ellenjohnson.net/album/3987890/elemental-essence-a-neurosonic-journey or as an mp3 on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2e51KftkTZVcAdh4iAJQpNqq3pTa0QsZ&si=smXbdE0RxjyHw9Cw

Mitrovic, P., & Paladin, A. (2026). Auditory stimuli and heart rate variability: the role of music in cardiovascular regulation. Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine, 13:1841349. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcvm.2026.1841349

Effect of music intervention on heart rate variability: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. (2026). Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1750786

Juslin, P. N., Harmat, L., Barradas, G., Omstedt, G., & Redtzer, V. (2026). Rhythmic entrainment of heart rate as a mechanism for musical emotion induction: A plausible hypothesis in need of evidence? Psychology of Music, 42–62. https://doi.org/10.1177/03057356241302809

Müller, V., & Lindenberger, U. (2011). Cardiac and respiratory patterns synchronize between persons during choir singing. PLoS ONE, 6(9), e24893. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0024893

Vickhoff, B., Malmgren, H., Åström, R., Nyberg, G., Ekström, S.-R., Engwall, M., Jörnsten, R., et al. (2013). Music structure determines heart rate variability of singers. Frontiers in Psychology, 4:334. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00334

Ruiz-Blais, S., Orini, M., & Chew, E. (2020). Heart Rate Variability Synchronizes When Non-experts Vocalize Together. Frontiers in Physiology, 11:762. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2020.00762

Gittelman, A. (2026). Temporal-oscillatory entrainment: a multi-timescale framework for rhythmic coordination from neural to social frequencies. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 20:1806950. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2026.1806950

Unbeknownst to me, early this week Substack announced a feature called Pangram. Its mission, should it decide to accept, is to scan text published by Substack to see how much of it is written by hand or AI assisted. In response I have written my own personal disclaimer in case my articles, poetry or observations become falsely flagged.

I completely understand the desire to retain the human perspective and integrity of the writings on Substack. That resonates with me as well. The reason I write is because I enjoy the process and I am flooded with thousands of ideas that I most likely will never be able to put to paper or keyboard (to be less poetic). I support the idea of transparency.

However, juggling all of the projects in my life clearly is helpful with an assistant. And in all honesty, I can’t afford to hire one. I don’t judge anyone for using the tools available and, I certainly could not do all of the compilation of research to the degree that I do currently without my AI companion. If that is an issue for people then so be it. I certainly respect your decision.

From now on all of my writings will include a disclaimer. You can make your own decision as to whether you find my work worthy of your time. These are extraordinary days and we are all trying our best to navigate our way through. My intention is always to act with integrity and transparency.

I hope that you will remain as a subscriber or choose to subscribe and share with others. I have so much more to share in my limited time on this planet. If anything touches your soul, brings some needed awareness or makes you smile then my work has been accomplished. (Notice that I wrote in 3’s there - not AI just the way I think sometimes).

I am grateful to have this opportunity to reach out to you and I certainly appreciate your continued support. Please contact me with your thoughts if you feel inclined.

Perhaps human destiny is to create, and creating was never limited to the arts. We can be creative in whatever we do, in how we raise a child, run a meeting, cook a meal, solve a problem no one else could see. Maybe that is the inspiration we all need to fully live. Maybe that is the definition of a life well lived: continuous creation, from being born through building new pathways in each season of our life.

Neuroscientists recently found evidence for something we’ve long sensed intuitively. Creative ideas appear to originate in the brain’s default mode network, the same network responsible for spontaneous thought and mind wandering. This isn’t just correlation. When researchers temporarily dampened that network with electrical stimulation, people’s creative responses measurably dropped, while everything else about their thinking stayed normal.

One of the researchers made a point worth sitting with: there’s no single “creativity center” in the brain. It’s distributed, networked, more like a conversation between regions than a spotlight in one place. Which is almost a metaphor for how creativity moves through us and between us. Sometimes you hold only part of the puzzle, and the collective mind brings it together into something greater than any one person could make alone. If you can imagine it, others can too. Often, like great works of art, it takes time and may not be appreciated in your lifetime. But the inner satisfaction of the creation itself is the prize.

When We Shut the Door on It

As a creativity coach, I’ve watched people struggle with what holds them back, and it’s rarely a lack of ideas. It’s fear, self-criticism, the inner critic that shows up before the first brushstroke or sentence even lands. That struggle turns out to have a biological shape. When we’re stressed or afraid of being judged, the brain’s threat response takes over and quiets the very regions responsible for open, exploratory thinking. Fear doesn’t just feel like it shuts creativity down, it measurably does.

There’s also early evidence that the same inner network generating our creative ideas is disrupted in depression, in a way that turns inward reflection from a source of insight into a loop of rumination. Perhaps part of depression, then, is not allowing ourselves to explore our inner selves. Once we find a mindset that lets inspiration move us into new territory, a whole world opens up.

It’s fairly clear that those who create transform not only themselves but the people around them, and sometimes the world. But you don’t have to be recognized to change the world. Each time you lose yourself in something you’re making, the joy it brings you spreads out to others. You don’t need an audience for that to be true.

How to Cultivate It

It starts with noticing what moves you to create. Sometimes that means sitting quietly. Sometimes it means observing, or being inspired by someone else’s work. For me, I have found by listening to music and often doing my vocal improvisations and vocal toning, I allow my default mode network to dance with ideas. However it happens for you, the important thing is staying open to the impulses that find you.

We are in a time when people are searching for meaning. No one can hand that to you but yourself. Find something that makes you fall in love with your own life, not in a narcissistic way, but in a way where the joy spreads outward.

Creativity as Contribution

So we come back to the cake. Every small act of creation you put into the world, a solved problem, a raised child, a song, a garden, a kind word shaped with real care, is not the frosting on someone else’s life. It’s a layer in the cake itself. That is what it means to call creativity a contribution rather than a talent: it isn’t something a few people add on top of living. It’s something all of us are made to bake into the world, one layer at a time, for as long as we’re here to add to it.

Guests: Sherry Finzer & Bobby Hipperson

In this episode, we explore the potential of music to support deep relaxation, nervous system regulation, and genuine quality of life, not as a replacement for medical care, but as a real and often surprising contributor to well-being. I'm joined by flutist and composer Sherry Finzer, along with her friend Bobby Hipperson, a Vietnam veteran, for a conversation about what we've each witnessed music do for people, and why we believe these results deserve real attention and collaboration from the scientific and medical community.

Sherry shares her journey from classical flutist to healing-focused composer, and Bobby shares his own story, including how Sherry’s music became part of his daily life while managing severe tinnitus. We also talk about where the intuitive, lived-experience side of healing music meets the evidence-based side, and where my own project, Elemental Essence, fits into that conversation.

Throughout the episode, you’ll hear music from Sherry’s live concert at The Tank, a stunning underground acoustic space in Colorado that she talks about during our conversation, along with tracks from her catalog and her brand new project.

Watch and listen:

Live from The Tank Concert:

Call of the Wilderness (5 min):

Cherry Blossoms: What Remains When We Let Go (4:33):

More from Sherry:

• SherryFinzer.com:

https://sherryfinzer.com

• Desert Heart Sound Healing, sound healing and coaching:

http://DesertHeartSoundHealing.com

• Find Sherry live on the Insight Timer app:

http://Insighttimer.com

More resources:

• Wellness & Mindful Music Directory, via Higher Level Media: https://www.higherlevel.media/wellness-music-directory

• HigherLevel.media:

https://www.higherlevel.media/

More from me:

• EllenJohnson.net:

https://ellenjohnson.net

• Elemental Essence:

  https://ellenjohnson.net/elemental-essence-purchase

• Elemental Essence on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kdQrUT7ci4NdJo1qn6kNfpKrysAweNuH0&si=ogePE4Ivo3gOsHqv

Watch on YouTube:

and please subscribe to my channel VocalVisions!

This 4th of July weekend, I thought I’d share the many mixed emotions I have through song.

Music often speaks more clearly than words, carrying depth, emotion, and a connection that reaches everyone. I want to remember the purpose of this great American experiment, feel its history, and connect with my own family’s traditions and their contributions to a country that promised freedom and democracy to all who entered its borders.

I hold onto the intentions of those who came before us, who promised a land of opportunity built on the traditions and inclusion of everyone, working toward a more perfect union. I honor the people who understood the mission, the integrity, the honor, and the purpose.

May we all find that greater goodness in the years ahead. And as we do, may we also honor the earth and all other living things.

America The Beautiful: (the song I wish had been our national anthem).

Another beautiful version from a friend. Laurie Antonioli sings America The Beautiful:

God Bless America, another classic:

Our National Anthem, The Star Spangled Banner and one of my favorite versions by Whitney Houston:

And of course, Bruce Springsteen - Born In the USA

The House I Live In - CLICK TO LISTEN

"The House I Live In" closes out a run of politically charged reinterpretations on Kaylé Brecher's 2012 album Spirals and Lines (Penchant Four Records). Written in 1942 by Earl Robinson and Abel Meeropol (under his pen name Lewis Allan) and famously introduced by Frank Sinatra in the postwar short film of the same name, the song has long stood as a meditation on what home, belonging, and the American promise really mean.

Brecher, a Philadelphia based singer, arranger, and composer, strips the tune down to a duo with pianist David Dzubinski and reharmonizes it into a slow, gospel tinged 12/8 groove, letting the lyrics breathe with a quiet, contemplative weight fitting for a day that asks us to reflect as much as celebrate.

In this episode, host Ellen Johnson is joined by Katie Bull, Alexis Cole, Ayelet Rose Gottlieb, and Mary Foster Conklin for a wide-ranging conversation about what becomes possible when women choose to build together rather than compete alone.

The conversation moves through each woman’s own collaborative projects, from Katie’s Group Project and her work with Ayelet on The Hope Etudes, to Alexis’s JazzVoice.com and the Vocal Jazz Summit, to Ayelet’s Orchard of Pomegranates, a creative community rooted in Deep Listening and feminist practice, to Mary’s longtime radio show A Broad Spectrum, which has spent nearly a decade putting women composers and lyricists at the center of the airwaves. Along the way, the discussion traces a thread back to the Jazz Vocal Coalition, an organization founded in the early 2000s to support jazz singers at a time when few such spaces existed, and considers how that early seed of community has continued to grow into the work each woman does today.

Throughout, the conversation returns again and again to the importance of supporting women in music, not as a separate concern from the art itself but as inseparable from it. The guests speak candidly about the growth of jazz vocalists as a field too often treated as secondary to instrumentalists, about breaking free from inherited patterns of competition and scarcity, and about the personal moments of awakening that led each of them to build something new rather than simply work within existing structures.

Woven through it all is the deeper question at the heart of this series: what does collaboration look like as a feminine principle, not just a working method but a way of being in creative life? Drawing on everything from evolutionary biology to decades of lived experience in the jazz world, this episode is an unhurried, honest conversation among women who have each, in their own way, chosen to tend rather than extract, and to build something that outlasts any one of them alone.

Alexis Cole

Alexis Cole is a New York-based jazz vocalist, pianist, and educator with a sophisticated style and warm, resonant voice that has taken her from concert halls to the Kennedy Center to stages across Asia and Europe. A professor of jazz voice at the Manhattan School of Music, her students have gone on to win the Grammy, the Sarah Vaughan Competition, and the Ella Fitzgerald Competition. In 2020 she founded JazzVoice.com, an online educational community connecting vocalists and students with some of the finest jazz singers working today, and co-founded the Virginia Beach Vocal Jazz Summit. She is a woman who has spent her career not just building her own artistry but building spaces for others to grow. www.jazzvoice.com

Mary Foster Conklin

Mary Foster Conklin is a New York-based jazz vocalist and radio host praised by the Washington Post as a “sensitive artist with a wide-ranging boldly colored voice and an open ear for off-beat material.” A multi-award-winning singer with five acclaimed recordings, she has been described as a master storyteller with a rare talent for uncovering lesser-known gems of the Great American Songbook. Since 2016 she has hosted A Broad Spectrum, a weekly radio show on WFDU 89.1 FM which celebrates women composers and lyricists, making her one of the most consistent and committed advocates for women in jazz radio.

Mary Foster Conklin - Vocalist/Radio Host

http://www.maryfosterconklin.com

Buy These Precious Days -

Listen to A Broad Spectrum on WFDU HD2 -

http://www.wfdu.fm

Link to archived shows - https://www.mixcloud.com/ABroadSpectrum

Ayelet Rose Gottlieb

Jerusalem-born and Montreal-based, Ayelet Rose Gottlieb is a composer, vocalist and improviser. Described by the New York Times as a “commanding vocalist,” her music weaves together jazz, Middle Eastern and Jewish traditions, contemporary composition, and deep improvisation into something that is entirely her own. She is a certified Deep Listening practitioner in the tradition of Pauline Oliveros. She is also the founder of the Orchard of Pomegranates, a feminist creative community and record label dedicated to holding space for artists in their most vulnerable creative moments. She co-produced Katie Bull’s most recent album The Hope Etudes, and her work across more than eleven albums reflects a lifelong commitment to collaboration as a living practice. The name itself carries meaning. The orchard is not one tree. It is many, growing together, tending a shared ground.

Katie Bull

Katie Bull is a vocalist, composer, and bandleader of the Katie Bull Group Project, with an emphasis on the word Group. Katie has built her entire artistic life around genuine collective collaboration. Her band is not backing her. They are co-creators. Her newest album The Hope Etudes, produced by Ayelet on the Orchard of Pomegranates label, is a meditation on mortality, resilience, and what Katie calls hope in action. She is also the founder of multiple led-collectives including the Improvisational Arts Ensembles, TheaterKore, the Bull Family Orchestra, and Whole Body Voice, and serves as Senior Faculty at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. She counts Jay Clayton and Sheila Jordan among her jazz mothers and divine mentors.

Today would have been Rich Wenzlaff’s 73rd birthday.

I still think about that phone call. It was his brother Fred on the line, and for a moment I thought it must be some kind of mistake, some dark joke. Rich was 50 years old. I had spoken with him just the night before. We had been talking about his plans, his love for his family and friends, and the thread that had always run through our conversations across decades: consciousness.

What it means. Where it goes.

What lies beneath the surface of the mind we think we know.

My friendship with Rich began in my early teens, the last day of his high school year. We were kids on the west side of Chicago, in the long golden days of summer, the kind of summer that only exists when you’re young and the biggest lake in the country is right there and nobody has anywhere to be. He was charming, intelligent, and yes, handsome. This was the era of long hair and mustaches and unhurried afternoons, and Rich fit all of it perfectly.

We became boyfriend and girlfriend almost immediately, and we stayed close for years. What we also inherited, together, was a group of friends that became something like a small, beautiful, complicated world. Funny, warm, layered with personality and story, a little like being in a film directed by Albert Brooks. Amusing and sweet and occasionally sad, but always full of love. We all eventually went our separate ways, but the bond held, and Rich was the cog at the center of that wheel, the one who kept it all turning.

Rich had originally dreamed of going into oceanography. He loved the water, and there was always something in him that was drawn to the vast and the unmapped. But even then, I could see that what truly fascinated him was what made people tick. He was, as his friend Rick Matthews would later say at his eulogy, “not religious in a doctrinal sense but highly evolved as a spiritual being, someone who believed in a positive force in the universe, God if you will, as a channel to a higher level of being and consciousness.”

He was endlessly curious about the interior life, what moves beneath the surface of a person the way currents move beneath the sea. I suggested that psychology might be the better fit, and something in him seemed to open up at the idea. He began to embrace it seriously, and he never looked back.

When he moved to Texas to pursue his studies, it was the beginning of a path that would define his life. He earned his PhD in Clinical Psychology in 1983, and by the time of his death he had become a full Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He was nationally known for his research on depression. He was one of the hardest working people I have ever known, and yet he always, always had time for the people he loved.

Rich was blessed with a fantastic and loving family in the Wenzlaffs and he loved them with all his heart. Later, that same devotion found its way to the Eisenbergs, his wonderful wife Ann, and his two children Rachel and Adam. One of my favorite stories, and so very “Rich,” was the time he went to fly a kite with his daughter and there was no wind. He didn’t want her to be disappointed, so he got in his car, put the kite out the window, and drove until he caught enough wind to get it into the air, just to see the smile on her face.

His core finding, the one that his colleagues across the country came to know his name for, was deceptively simple and quietly radical: the harder we try not to think about something painful, the more power we give it. Suppressing negative thoughts doesn’t make them disappear. Under stress, it does the opposite. High suppressors, he found, experienced significant increases in rumination and depression when life got difficult. The mind’s attempt to protect itself was, in fact, deepening the wound.

He published landmark research on thought suppression with his colleague Daniel Wegner, including a comprehensive review in the Annual Review of Psychology in 2000 that remains widely cited. He showed that trying to push away unwanted thoughts can backfire precisely when we need relief the most, when cognitive demands are high, when stress is real, when the pressure is on. He also found that this vulnerability could be hidden, dormant, until the right conditions revealed it.

What he was really saying, in the careful language of peer-reviewed science, was something ancient and human: what we resist, persists.

In the last months of his life, Rich told me something that has stayed with me ever since. He said he was planning to shift his focus. He had spent decades mapping the psychology of depression, and now he wanted to explore consciousness itself. He had a plan, a thoughtful one, because he understood that the more structured halls of academic science didn’t always welcome that kind of inquiry easily. He was going to navigate it carefully, the way he did everything.

Maybe, I sometimes think, he decided to skip the paperwork. Maybe the man who loved puns and stale jokes and metaphysical late-night conversations simply decided to go directly to the source. Consciousness, or the great beyond. Rich went looking for it himself.

Years earlier, when Rich was still in his master’s studies, I told him something that made him think I was, in his words, a little goofy. I told him that sound, music, and color would one day be used for healing. He was a scientist.

He smiled that smile.

Years later, as Chair of his Psychology department, Rich was asked to sit on a committee for a new academic program at UTSA, what would become the university’s Music in Health program, which explores how participation in music and sound can promote healing and well-being across physical, emotional, and cognitive dimensions. None of his colleagues would participate. They considered it, as one did at that time, a bit out there. But Rich remembered our conversations. He chose to sit on that committee and lend it his credibility and his open heart. He even called me to tell me, and to remind me that it was because of me he did it.

I have been thinking about that story a great deal lately, because I have just released a project, Elemental Essence: A Neurosonic Journey, that is rooted in exactly this, the use of sound and frequency as a pathway to process and release what we carry inside us. What Rich spent his career proving from the psychology side is that suppression doesn’t heal us. What I have spent years exploring from the sound healing side is what might.

Two sides of the same coin.

Two people who started out as teenagers on the shore of Lake Michigan, who went completely different directions, and somehow ended up circling the same truth.

I often think about the people who change the world quietly. Not the famous ones, not the millionaires, but the ones whose influence moves through the people they touched, who planted something in you that you only recognize years later.

Rich was one of those people.

He had a wicked sense of humor. Even if, as his dear friend Rick Matthews said in his eulogy, “he told the same jokes at fifty that he’d been telling at fourteen.” But they still landed, because of the twinkle in his eye. “A twinkle,” as his friend Dave Kaderavek wrote, “that could be mischief or kindness or love, or something you couldn’t quite name. But you always knew it was something rare.”

He measured his life in relationships. That was his own private metric, more important to him than any publication or title. And by that measure, he was extraordinarily wealthy.

Happy birthday, Rich. I hope wherever consciousness took you, you found your answers.

And I hope you know that some of us are still here, still talking about the things you loved, still carrying the coin you helped us find.

You can learn more about Elemental Essence: A Neurosonic Journey at www.ellenjohnson.net.

The summer solstice is a sacred time for indigenous cultures, the longest day of the year, the sun at the height of its life giving power. In the western hemisphere we call it the start of summer. Today it also falls on Father’s Day, and in many traditions the sun carries that same energy, the father, the masculine force, the light that gives rather than reflects.

To me, it is simply the day of light.

I honor it with small rituals. Burning sage. Walking in nature. Sitting with what I’m ready to release, what I want to burn away to make room for what’s next.

Each of us carries our own light. The light of our cells. The firing of our brain. The warmth in our bodies, simply being alive. I honor that light today, because it has given me life, direction, purpose, and the ability to transform what no longer serves me.

I leave you with “Sirius Spirit,” to celebrate, to dance, to transform, to inspire.

But mostly, to remember: joy is the emotion of fire.

And our joy is a spark that can light the fires of freedom for all.

I sat down with Shea Thompson, CEO of Skye Collective and Scientific Sounds, and the person who wove the neuroacoustic science into every track of this album. Shea carries forward a legacy built by his father, Dr. Jeffrey Thompson, the pioneering physician and composer who founded the Center for Neuroacoustic Research and holds the patents behind Bio-Tuning®, a system that uses a person’s own heartbeat and nervous system rhythms to generate personalized healing frequencies. Shea’s work bridges neuroscience, music, and biohacking, and his mission is to make sound-based healing personalized, scientifically grounded, and beautifully human.

In this episode we cover:

• What brainwave entrainment actually is and what is happening in your brain when you listen

• The frequency following response and why headphones matter

• How binaural beats, isochronic tones, and harmonic layering work together and why all three were used here

• Why the arc from 4 Hz to 40 Hz across the five tracks works as a complete journey

• The remarkable MIT research on 40 Hz gamma and what it means for brain health

• What separates professionally produced neuroacoustic music from the enormous amount of content freely available online

• What to expect if your experience surprises you

Want to go deeper with Shea’s work?

Scientific Sounds offers a range of professionally produced neuroacoustic systems available as digital downloads at Scientific Sounds

Bio-Tuning® — Personalized entrainment calibrated to your own resonant frequency, based on Dr. Jeffrey Thompson’s patented research.

Delta Sleep System — Deep restoration and nervous system renewal.

Theta Meditation System — Emotional depth, intuition, and inner quiet.

Awakened Mind System — Creativity, focus, and flow state.

Gamma Meditation — Higher states of awareness and universal connection.

Schumann Resonance — The Earth’s own resonant frequency, the pulse of the planet itself.

All available at Scientific Sounds

Watch on YouTube:

“Threads Between the Stars" is the fifth and final track on Elemental Essence: A Neurosonic Journey, a five-track healing album by Ellen Johnson releasing June 12, 2026 on all streaming platforms. Each track is calibrated with research-backed brainwave entrainment frequencies and moves through one of the five elements of nature: Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Ether. The full series is available at the Sound Creativity Journal on Substack.

We have traveled through Earth and Water, through Fire and Air.

And now we arrive at Ether. The fifth element. The one that holds all the others. The space between the stars where everything that exists is threaded together by something we cannot name but can, in certain moments, feel.

A Life Carried by Sound

I have been on a sound journey since before I can remember.

My mother was a beautiful singer. I heard her voice from the womb, and I watched throughout my childhood what that voice could do. When she was struggling, carrying the weight of raising three children through her own abandonment and heartbreak, there were moments when the anxiety and the anger would fill the room. And then she would sit down at the piano and sing. And something would shift. The tension would leave her body. Her face would soften. The whole atmosphere of the room would change.

I was very young, but I understood what I was seeing. This was not coincidence. This was medicine.

That knowing has lived in me ever since, deep and unshakeable, a certainty I carried long before I had the science or the language to explain it. Sound heals. The voice transforms. Music does something to the human body and spirit that nothing else does in quite the same way.

As a young girl I was fascinated by science, nature, and the universe. I explored different spiritual traditions on my own, drawn by the same thread that seemed to connect all of them: the idea that everything is vibration, that the universe hums with an intelligence we can tune ourselves to. Eventually that thread led me to the early pioneers of sound healing, the remarkable teachers and explorers who were doing this work long before it entered the mainstream.

One of my most significant early teachers was Elias De Mohan, born William David Dumitru, a true mystic and one of the founding voices of vibrational sound and color therapy. He had discovered the healing power of sound himself as a teenager, standing outside a music store in Detroit, stopped in his tracks by music so beautiful it moved him to tears. He went on to study operatic singing for seventeen years and spend decades developing a complete system for personality transformation through sound, color, and voice. Learning from him in the early years of my own practice gave me both a foundation and a permission: this work was real, it was serious, and it was mine to carry forward.

Coming Full Circle

The journey that produced Elemental Essence was not one I chose. The fire of the earlier tracks, the water before it, the earth beneath it all, these were not metaphors. They were my life, dismantled and returned to its elements.

And in the middle of that dismantling, while I was rebuilding my nervous system and searching for solid ground, I came back to the tools I had always known. I worked with two crystal singing bowls, companions I have had for years and chosen with care, the way you choose any instrument that truly speaks to you.

Crystal singing bowls have become popular in recent years, and that popularity has brought both wider access and a great deal of noise. I want to be clear about my relationship with these two bowls: I did not collect them. I found them. Or perhaps they found me. Each one carries a specific energetic signature, a sound that resonates somewhere deep in the body and doesn’t let go.

During my own experience with cancer some years ago, I worked with these bowls throughout my recovery. I am not saying they cured me. But I will say that my doctors described my recovery as, in their words, miraculous. I believe the bowls were part of that. The sound, the vibration, the intention held within each session, it was not separate from my healing. It was woven into it.

The first bowl is the Laughing Buddha, an 8 inch bowl crafted from pure grade quartz combined with iron and opaque quartz. It carries an energy of joy, release, and divine creative abundance. Its resonance speaks to the Sacral and Solar Plexus chakras, the centers of creativity, personal power, and aliveness. Working with this bowl during the darkest period of my life was a reminder that joy is not something earned on the other side of suffering. It is available inside it.

The second bowl is a 6 inch Violet Indium Flame Alchemy bowl, a smaller, higher frequency instrument with a piercingly clear and uplifting resonance. Where the Laughing Buddha bowl grounds and opens, this one ascends and clarifies. It is tuned to the note A and speaks directly to the Third Eye chakra, the center of intuition, spiritual vision, and inner knowing. The Violet Indium alchemy carries the energy of purification and transmutation, the dissolving of what has become dense or stagnant, and what its makers describe as an expanded frequency of enlightenment while remaining grounded in the body. Its iridescent violet sheen is as beautiful to look at as it is to hear.

What makes these two bowls extraordinary together is not just their individual qualities but the relationship between them. The notes E and A form a perfect musical fourth interval, one of the most stabilizing and opening harmonic relationships in music. Their micro-tunings, the subtle ways each bowl sits slightly outside standard concert pitch, place them within a five cent margin of each other, which means when played together they harmonize beautifully without creating dissonance. One bowl speaks to personal power and creative aliveness. The other speaks to spiritual insight and transcendence. Together they form a bridge, translating the cosmic into the embodied, the infinite into the felt.

For “Threads Between the Stars,” these bowls are not decoration. They are the architecture of the track. The sound you hear is the sound of vibration itself, pure and crystalline, floating in space.

The Sound of Ether

Ether is the element of space. Of infinite connection. The invisible medium through which all things move and through which all things are related.

This track was like floating in the stars, allowing myself to feel weightless, carried by each moment and each passing soundscape. The crystal bowls open and sustain. Their overtones linger in the air long after the fundamental note has faded, spreading outward the way light spreads from a distant star. There are layers of sound that drift and intersect, threads that connect and dissolve and reconnect. Nothing is forced. Nothing is held.

The Science: 40 Hz and the Frequency of Consciousness

“Threads Between the Stars” is calibrated at 40 Hz, the gamma frequency that sits at the intersection of neuroscience, contemplative practice, and the oldest questions about the nature of consciousness itself.

40 Hz is not simply a number. It has become one of the most studied frequencies in the history of brain science, and what the research reveals is both rigorous and extraordinary.

In 2004, neuroscientist Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, working in collaboration with the Dalai Lama, conducted a landmark study with long-term Buddhist meditators published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. What they found was that during compassion meditation, these practitioners generated sustained high-amplitude gamma synchrony in the 25 to 42 Hz range, far beyond what was seen in non-meditating controls. The researchers noted this could reflect what they described as a change in the quality of moment-to-moment awareness. Perhaps the most striking finding: the meditators’ brains already showed elevated gamma ratios at resting baseline, before meditation even began. Years of practice had moved the brain closer to that state as its natural home.

Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, and neuroscientist Christof Koch proposed as far back as 1990 that synchronous 40 Hz oscillations may be causally implicated in visual awareness itself, the mechanism by which the brain binds separate streams of sensory information into a single unified conscious experience. Decades of subsequent research have continued to explore this relationship between gamma synchrony and consciousness, making 40 Hz one of the most examined frequencies in the field.

More recently, research from MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory has produced a striking body of work on 40 Hz entrainment and brain health. A 2016 Nature study and a 2024 Nature study both found that 40 Hz sensory stimulation promoted glymphatic clearance, the brain’s own system for removing waste products, and reduced amyloid burden in animal models of Alzheimer’s disease. A 2025 MIT review confirmed that multiple independent laboratories around the world have now corroborated these core findings, and clinical trials in human patients are ongoing. A Harvard Medical School team found in 2022 that 40 Hz stimulation significantly reduced tau burden in human volunteers. Research from Scotland in 2023 used gamma audio and visual stimulation to improve memory recall in over a hundred people. A 2024 study published in Communications Biology showed for the first time that 40 Hz visual stimulation successfully entrains neural activity in the human hippocampus and increases synchronization between the hippocampus and other cortical regions.

It is important to note that this research is active and evolving, with open questions remaining. Not all clinical trials have met their primary endpoints, and the field is working to understand individual variation in response to entrainment. What is clear is that 40 Hz is not a fringe idea. It is one of the most seriously investigated frequencies in contemporary neuroscience, with a growing and convergent body of evidence pointing toward its significance for brain health, memory, and conscious awareness.

What Tibetan monks have accessed through decades of meditation practice, sustained gamma synchrony, expanded awareness, a quality of presence that feels less like ordinary waking consciousness and more like something beyond it, neuroscience is now beginning to map. Different paths. The same summit.

The Culmination

This project began as an intuitive foreshadowing of change. Then it became part of my survival, and something more.

Creating Elemental Essence was not a creative exercise. It was a necessity. I needed to calm my own shattered nervous system and find my way back to solid ground. I used the tools I had: my voice, my knowledge of frequency and vibration, my crystal bowls, decades of study and practice and love for this work.

And somewhere in that process, the healing that was meant for me became something I could offer to others.

My mother healed herself at the piano without knowing the science of why it worked. Elias De Mohan stood outside a music store in Detroit at age seventeen, weeping at the sound of something beautiful, and spent the rest of his life following that thread. I watched a woman’s face change when she sang, and knew at an age too young to articulate it that sound was medicine.

Now I know the neuroscience. The frequencies. The peer reviewed research. The clinical trials and the gamma synchrony and the glymphatic clearance. All of it is real and all of it matters.

Elemental Essence: A Neurosonic Journey releases June 12, 2026 on all streaming platforms.

To Support this work please subscribe to:

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Research References

Lutz, A., Greischar, L. L., Rawlings, N. B., Ricard, M., & Davidson, R. J. (2004). Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101(46), 16369–16373. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0407401101. Landmark study conducted with the Dalai Lama’s collaboration, finding that long-term meditators generate sustained high-amplitude gamma synchrony during compassion meditation, with elevated gamma ratios present even at resting baseline.

Iaccarino, H. F., et al. (2016). Gamma frequency entrainment attenuates amyloid load and modifies microglia. Nature, 540, 230–235. DOI: 10.1038/nature20587. MIT Picower Institute study demonstrating that 40 Hz sensory entrainment reduced amyloid load and activated glial response in Alzheimer’s disease mouse models.

Murdock, M. H., et al. (2024). Multisensory gamma stimulation promotes glymphatic clearance of amyloid. Nature, 627, 149–156. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07132-6. MIT Picower Institute follow-up study showing that combined audiovisual 40 Hz stimulation promotes the brain’s glymphatic system to clear amyloid, with whole-brain effects.

Da, X., et al. (2024). Noninvasive gamma sensory stimulation may reduce white matter and myelin loss in Alzheimer’s disease. Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, 97, 359–372. DOI: 10.3233/JAD-230506. OVERTURE randomized controlled clinical trial using daily 40 Hz audiovisual stimulation in Alzheimer’s patients over six months. Note: this trial did not meet its primary cognitive endpoint; results are one part of an active and evolving research picture.

Tsai, L-H., & Park, H. (2025). Evidence that 40 Hz gamma stimulation promotes brain health is expanding. MIT News. Review summarizing independent corroboration across multiple laboratories worldwide, including human studies from Harvard Medical School and the University of Edinburgh.

Visual gamma stimulation induces 40 Hz neural oscillations in the human hippocampus and alters phase synchrony and lag. Communications Biology (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s42003-025-08766-6. First study demonstrating successful 40 Hz entrainment of neural activity in the human hippocampus via visual stimulation, with increased synchronization between hippocampus and cortical regions.

“Where the Wind Dreams” is the fourth track on Elemental Essence: A Neurosonic Journey, a five-track healing album by Ellen Johnson releasing June 12, 2026 on all streaming platforms. Each track is calibrated with research-backed brainwave entrainment frequencies and moves through one of the five elements of nature: Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Ether. If you missed earlier weeks, the full series is available at the Sound Creativity Journal on Substack.

Air is what we breathe. It’s our life source.

And yet we almost never notice it. It asks nothing of us. It makes no sound. It simply holds us, moment after moment, breath after breath, with a generosity so constant it becomes invisible.

That is, until the wind chimes catch it. Until the leaves begin to sing. Then suddenly it is there, real and alive, moving through the world with a presence you can feel on your skin. The wind reminds us of what has been holding us all along.

That is where this track begins.

After the Fire

If you have been following this series, you know that the previous Fire track came from the middle of everything burning, words written in the heat of a personal transformation I had not chosen and could not control. Air comes from what followed.

The fire burned. Things were reduced to ash. And then the wind came and slowly carried it all away, dispersing it across the ground, seeding it into the earth, returning it to something that could grow again. Not a new certainty. Not a destination. Just a direction. A gentle pull, like a breeze you turn your face toward without quite knowing why.

I was learning to be present with myself again. Learning to listen to my own breath. There was a new sense of something ahead, but I could not name it or see it clearly. I only knew it was there, the way you know the wind is there by the movement of the grass.

I was learning to let the wind carry me reminding me of the Joni Mitchell song I used to sing.

The Sound of Air

“Where the Wind Dreams” opens with the pan flute, and with it something ancient arrives immediately.

The pan flute is one of humanity’s oldest instruments. In the Andes of South America, among the Aymara, Quechua, and the cultures that preceded even the Inca, the panpipe has been played for at least three thousand years. Known as the siku in Aymara, the antara in Quechua, and the zampoña in Spanish, these reed pipes hold within them something that is not easily translated. One writer described their sound as “somewhere between a European flute and a simple tin whistle, with a breath-like quality that evokes the wind of the high peaks.” The traditional siku is played in two rows of pipes, one held by one player, one by another, in a call and response that represents a dialogue between humans and the gods.

That call and response is at the heart of this track. My own voices answer the pan flute, a human conversation with something older and wilder, the way a voice might call out across an open field and listen for what the wind sends back. The wind chimes drift in and out, catching the air and releasing it. The sound of the wind itself was made with my own breath. Harp and bass give it a sense of movement and forward journey, a sense of going somewhere, even if that somewhere is not yet known.

At its heart, this is a simple piece. Like the breath itself.

The Science: 38 Hz and the Geometry of Insight

“Where the Wind Dreams” is calibrated at 38 Hz, a frequency that sits at the upper edge of beta and the threshold of gamma. It is a borderline state, like all the most interesting territories in the brain.

At this threshold, something remarkable happens. The brain enters what neuroscientists describe as a state of high cognitive readiness, the frequency range associated with complex, integrated thinking, pattern recognition, and the kind of mental clarity that arrives not through force but through release.

The Reinhart and Nguyen 2019 study published in Nature Neuroscience found that working memory is sustained through the synchronized interplay of theta and gamma circuits across the brain, and that when those circuits become disconnected, as happens with age or stress, the ability to hold and integrate information degrades. The study showed that restoring that synchronization, even noninvasively, could rapidly return cognitive function, in some cases restoring the working memory performance of adults in their 60s and 70s to levels comparable to adults in their 20s. Phase synchronization between brain regions, the gamma-beta borderline, is the brain’s mechanism for binding separate pieces of information into a coherent whole.

The “aha moment” research makes this visceral. Studies have found that the moment a creative solution suddenly arrives, not worked toward but simply appearing, it is accompanied by a specific burst of high-frequency gamma-band activity. A fraction of a second later, a second burst fires in the brain’s reward system, registering the insight as intrinsically rewarding before conscious awareness has even caught up. The brain knows before you know. And that knowing arrives at the frequency of 38 Hz.

A 2016 study by Santarnecchi et al. found that 40 Hz stimulation delivered to the prefrontal cortex of healthy subjects improved their performance on complex logic problems by reducing response latency. The brain, gently nudged into this frequency range, became faster at finding the elegant solution.

There is also something poetic in the neurological mechanics of this range. Research has found that gamma and beta oscillations in the brain are anti-correlated: when gamma rises, beta quiets. It is like an exhale followed by an inhale. The brain clears itself to receive. Then it reaches out to engage.

That rhythm of clearing and receiving is, of course, exactly what breath is.

What Air Knows

Air is the element of letting go. Of trusting what cannot be seen. The invisible gift that holds you whether or not you are paying attention to it.

After the fire, I was learning to trust the air. To breathe through the not-knowing and let the direction find me.

The voices in this track do not know where they are going either. They simply find each other, breath by breath, and move together through the open air.

Elemental Essence releases June 12, 2026 on all streaming platforms.

Next week, Week 5: Ether and Threads Between the Stars, 40 Hz gamma, the frequency of transcendence. The culmination of the journey.

Research References

Reinhart, R. M. G., & Nguyen, J. A. (2019). Working memory revived in older adults by synchronizing rhythmic brain circuits. Nature Neuroscience, 22(5), 820–827. DOI: 10.1038/s41593-019-0371-x. Landmark study demonstrating that theta-gamma phase synchronization underpins working memory, and that restoring this synchronization noninvasively can return cognitive function in older adults to levels comparable to younger adults.

Fell, J., & Axmacher, N. (2011). The role of phase synchronization in memory processes. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 12, 105–118. DOI: 10.1038/nrn2979. Foundational review establishing that phase synchronization between brain regions is the fundamental mechanism by which memory and complex cognitive processing are coordinated.

Yuan, et al. (2025). Cross-frequency neuromodulation: leveraging theta-gamma coupling for cognitive rehabilitation in MCI patients. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience. DOI: 10.3389/fnagi.2025.1541126. Demonstrates cross-frequency coupling between theta and gamma as a mechanism for cognitive rehabilitation, directly relevant to the borderline gamma-beta range.

Santarnecchi, E., et al. (2016). Enhancing cognition using transcranial alternating current stimulation at the individual alpha frequency. Translational Psychiatry. Evidence that 40 Hz transcranial stimulation in the prefrontal cortex improves performance on complex logic problems in healthy subjects by reducing response latency.

Kounios, J., & Beeman, M. (2014). The cognitive neuroscience of insight. Annual Review of Psychology, 65, 71–93. Peer-reviewed review documenting the gamma-band neural signature of creative insight (”aha moments”) and the role of right hemisphere anterior temporal regions in sudden solution finding.

A group of us gathered on Sunday, Wednesday, June 3rd at 4 PM (PDT) on Zoom for and Elemental Essence Sound Circle Journey experience that was profound. Deep personal moments, rich conversations about the music and brainwave science behind each track, and a shared journey through all five elements together.

We left feeling elevated, expanded, and genuinely moved.

Join me this Wednesday, June 3 at 4:00 PM PDT for one last intimate circle before Elemental Essence releases to the world on June 12.

Curious about the music and the science behind it? Learn more at ellenjohnson.net/the-science-behind-the-recording

Hope to see you there.

"Sirius Spirit" is the third track on Elemental Essence: A Neurosonic Journey, a five-track healing album by Ellen Johnson releasing June 12, 2026 on all streaming platforms. Each track is calibrated with research-backed brainwave entrainment frequencies and moves through one of the five elements of nature: Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Ether. If you missed Week 1 or Week 2, the full series is available at Sound Creativity Journal.

I wrote those words from the middle of the fire.

Not looking back on it. Not from the safety of the other side. I was in the middle of leaving behind everything I had known, sitting in a place of not knowing what would come from there. The ground I had stood on was gone. What would grow from the ashes, I could not yet see.

And yet the words came. And they were not words of despair. They were words of gathering. Of rising. Of trust in the fire itself.

That is what fire does.

It does not ask permission. It transforms what it touches, whether we are ready or not. And in the oldest traditions of human knowing, that transformation is not a tragedy. It is a sacred act.

What fire means across traditions

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, fire is the peak of yang energy — the element of the Heart, the organ considered the emperor of all others, governing not only blood circulation but the Shen, the spirit and mind housed within it.

Joy is the emotion of fire. When fire is in balance, we feel intimate connection with our own purpose, our dharma, the deep knowing of what we are here to do. When it is out of balance, anxiety and restlessness move in where joy once lived.

Indigenous traditions around the world hold fire as something far more than heat and light. In many Native American and Amazonian ceremonies, fire is treated as a conscious being, a living presence and sacred messenger. Firekeepers tend the flame throughout ceremony with offerings of tobacco, cedar, and sage. The fire is not merely symbolic. It is a doorway, a means of communication with ancestors and the spirit world, a purifier of body, mind, and space.

What moves me about both of these traditions is what they share: fire is not destruction. Fire is transformation with intention. Something is released so that something new can take form. The smoke carries what was. The embers hold what becomes.

I built this track to carry that understanding in sound.

The music: a sacred circle of rhythm and voice

The Sirius Spirit track opens with tabla drums, their rhythmic pulse steady and alive, the heartbeat of the fire itself. Strings arrive with staccato pizzicato energy, bright and propulsive. Voices blend in harmony while the words of the intention are spoken subliminally, woven so deeply into the soundscape that they bypass the conscious mind entirely and arrive somewhere beneath it. Percussion, vibes, and synthesized vocal sounds move through the piece like sparks.

I wanted this track to feel like a sacred circle. Voices and instruments moving together, circulating the energy of the music and the words, allowing the fire to do its work. Rhythmic but not tense. Illuminated but not frenetic. The energy of the divine spark, of imagination catching light.

And at the very end, the music settles into something quieter. You can almost hear the embers, the smoulder, the coals or the sage still breathing warmth. Something has been burnt. Something new is forming. You are not the same person who pressed play.

That is the intention.

The science: 13 Hz and the gateway to flow

Sirius Spirit is calibrated at 13 Hz, a frequency that sits directly on the borderline between Alpha and Beta brainwave states. This precise threshold is one of the most studied in performance neuroscience.

Alpha waves are associated with calm, relaxed wakefulness: the mind at rest, receptive and open. Beta waves are associated with active, alert focus: the mind engaged, analytical, forward-moving. At 13 Hz, both states are available simultaneously. This is what researchers call relaxed alertness, and it is the neurological signature of what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi first described in 1975 as “flow.”

Flow is not a wellness buzzword. It is a rigorously studied state of consciousness. Csikszentmihalyi defined it as full absorption in a task where action seems to occur smoothly and automatically, accompanied by a sense of effortlessness, clarity, and deep engagement. EEG research has since identified its neural signature as a combination of increased frontal theta and moderate frontocentral alpha activity, sitting precisely in the borderline zone where 13 Hz lives. Importantly, researchers have also noted that flow involves reduced activity in the brain’s self-monitoring regions, the part of us that second-guesses and evaluates. The inner critic quiets. The doing becomes pure.

The 13 Hz range, known in neuroscience as the sensorimotor rhythm or SMR, has been consistently described across the research literature as the state of relaxed alertness. Clinical neurofeedback research notes it as the frequency the brain uses for what researchers call “active intelligence.” Studies on elite athletes have found that expert dart players show significantly higher SMR power in the two seconds before releasing a dart compared to novices, and research on golf putting has found similar results: higher SMR correlates with better precision performance. A 1996 EEG study by Jaušovec found that gifted individuals showed higher alpha power during problem solving than subjects of average ability, suggesting what researchers described as neural efficiency, the brain accomplishing more with less apparent effort.

A 2025 meta-analysis by Yu et al. in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports, synthesizing 25 controlled studies, confirmed that neurofeedback training in the SMR range of 12 to 15 Hz produces significant improvements in sports and motor performance. The research is growing and promising, and entrainment through sound is one of the accessible pathways in.

What I find most resonant about this science in the context of fire is the quality it describes. Not striving. Not forcing. The fire does not strain to burn. It simply burns. Fully present, fully engaged, and fully free. That is 13 Hz.

That is flow. That is what Sirius Spirit invites.

Why Sirius?

Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky, the star the ancient Egyptians aligned their temples to, the star whose rising marked the flooding of the Nile and the renewal of the land. It is a star associated across cultures with illumination, with the divine, with the moment when light arrives in darkness.

The story of how Sirius entered my life is one I have never forgotten.

Years ago I was singing with a professional choir in a concert of Frederick Delius set to the poems of Walt Whitman. The music was extraordinary, the kind that lifts you out of yourself entirely. I remember feeling carried into a state of heightened awareness, something beyond the ordinary experience of performance. That same week I found myself sitting with Timothy Leary, yes, that Timothy Leary, and in that moment a passage from one of Whitman’s poems rose up in my mind completely unbidden:

I told Leary what had just come to me. He paused and asked whether I knew about the star Sirius. I told him I didn’t. He said I should learn about it. That it was important.

I have been learning about it ever since.

That is what I was reaching toward when those words came to me in the middle of everything burning.

Fire of Change, transform us. Fire of Spirit, carry us home!

Elemental Essence releases June 12, 2026 on all streaming platforms.

Week 4 arrives next Friday: Air and Where the Wind Dreams, 38 Hz gamma-beta, and the clarity that only arrives after the fire has done its work.

Research References

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1975). Beyond Boredom and Anxiety. Jossey-Bass. Foundational work introducing the concept of flow as an optimal experience of full task absorption and effortless performance.

Jaušovec, N. (1996). Differences in EEG alpha activity related to giftedness. Intelligence, 23(1), 159–173. EEG study finding higher alpha power in gifted individuals during problem solving, associated with greater neural efficiency.

Sterman, M. B. (1996). Physiological origins and functional correlates of EEG rhythmic activities: Implications for self-regulation. Biofeedback and Self-Regulation, 21(1), 3–33. Early foundational research establishing the SMR (12–15 Hz) as a biomarker of focused, relaxed attention.

Cheng, M. Y., et al. (2017). Superior performance and brain activity in expert dart players: A combination of SMR and pre-shot routine. Biological Psychology, 124, 178–187. Documents significantly higher SMR power in expert dart players in the seconds before performance, compared to novices.

Egner, T., & Gruzelier, J. H. (2004). EEG biofeedback of low beta band components: Frequency-specific effects on variables of attention and event-related brain potentials. Clinical Neurophysiology, 115(1), 131–139. Peer-reviewed evidence for SMR neurofeedback improving sustained attention and cognitive performance.

Alamia, A., et al. (2022). The brain in flow: A systematic review on the neural basis of the flow state. Cortex, 154, 375–395. Systematic review identifying the neural correlates of flow, including reduced self-monitoring activity and alpha-theta borderline brainwave patterns.

Durcan, O., Holland, P., & Bhattacharya, J. (2024). A framework for neurophysiological experiments on flow states. Nature Mental Health, 2, 791–803. Recent framework paper synthesizing best practices in flow neuroscience research, confirming flow as a rigorously measurable state of consciousness.

Yu, C. L., Cheng, M. Y., An, X., Chueh, T. Y., Wu, J. H., Wang, K. P., & Hung, T. M. (2025). The effect of EEG neurofeedback training on sport performance: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports, 35, e70055. Meta-analysis of 25 controlled studies confirming significant performance improvements from SMR (12–15 Hz) neurofeedback training in athletes.

What if the leadership model the world desperately needs has been here all along?

In this Mother’s Day month episode of Hodge Pod / Feminine Frequencies, Ellen Johnson and Katie Bull sit down with Susie Fishleder, founder of Rebel Leaders, for a conversation that feels both urgently timely and deeply ancient.

Susie is an ICF certified executive coach and activist scholar with a Master’s degree in Women, Gender, Spirituality, and Social Justice. After fifteen years leading high stakes projects in male dominated industries she hit burnout and began asking a different question: why are we playing a game we were never allowed to win? That question sent her back to school to study how patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism created the very systems we are told to succeed within. As a Gestalt trained coach and certified yoga teacher she believes true leadership begins in the body, in our values, our intuition, and our embodied wisdom, not just our minds. Since 2020 she has been coaching leaders, mothers, cycle breakers, and organizations who are ready to dismantle outdated structures and build something better.

In this episode we explore:

Stay Connected

If this conversation sparked something in you, we would love to have you as part of our growing community. Hodge Pod / Feminine Frequencies is a series dedicated to exploring the intersections of creativity, healing, wisdom, and the feminine in all its forms. We bring together voices from across disciplines to find solutions, ask better questions, and imagine a world that works for everyone.

Please Subscribe at soundcreativityjournal.substack.com and never miss a conversation. And if this episode moved something in you, please share it with someone who needs to hear it. That is how these ideas find the people they belong to.

Amphitrite’s Longing” is the second track on Elemental Essence: A Neurosonic Journey, a five-track healing album by Ellen Johnson releasing June 12, 2026 on all streaming platforms. Each track is calibrated with research-backed brainwave entrainment frequencies and moves through one of the five elements of nature: Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Ether. ***If you missed Week 1, the full series begins with Earth at Sound Creativity Journal.

We stand at its edge and feel something we cannot quite name. A pull toward the vastness. A recognition of something ancient in ourselves. The surface shimmers and moves, beautiful and knowable. But beneath it lies a world we have barely touched, depths that remain largely unmapped, mysterious even now, even with all of our science and technology. The ocean floor holds more secrets than the surface of the moon.

Water is like that. It flows and yields and finds its way around every obstacle. And yet it carves canyons. It shapes continents.

Its strength is not loud. It is patient, persistent, and profound.

Track 2: Amphitrite’s Longing

In Greek mythology, Amphitrite is the goddess of the sea, queen of the ocean depths, wife of Poseidon. She is not a gentle figure. She is sovereign. She rules the tides, the creatures of the deep, the vast and restless waters of the world. And yet her name carries longing. That tension between power and yearning is exactly what this track holds.

“Amphitrite’s Longing: An Oceanic Dreamscape” moves very differently from Track 1. Where Earth opened with the primal voice of a didgeridoo and the grounded community of land, Water arrives with strings, harp, and voices that flow freely in and out of each other like currents. Dolphin calls and seagull cries woven from the human voice itself. This is feminine energy in its fullest sense, not soft or passive, but deep, intuitive, and autonomous. The kind of strength that does not announce itself.

The kind of knowing that lives beneath the surface.

On A Personal Note

I wrote this piece before my life changed dramatically. Before I knew what was coming. Before the betrayal and coercive abandonment that eventually led me to being faced with rebuilding everything from the ground up.

And yet listening back now, I hear it. The longing is in every phrase. The reaching toward something just out of reach. The bittersweet pull of a love that appeared whole but was already deceptively moving away.

I did not know consciously what I was expressing. But at 6 Hz, in that theta state where intuition moves faster than awareness, some part of me already knew. The music held what I could not yet hold in words.

What I also know now is that as I kept returning to this track during the mixing and mastering process, which happened in the immediate aftermath of my loss, when the world I had known had not yet fully dissolved, I was doing something I had no name for at the time. The listening became a practice. A daily returning. And I believe now that I was, without fully knowing it, orchestrating my own way through the pain.

What makes this more than intuition is what we now understand about this particular frequency. 6 Hz sits in the same sweet spot frequently used in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, the trauma therapy known as EMDR. When paired with alternating bilateral sound, which this track provides through its panning between left and right ears, it helps the brain do what it most needs to do after a rupture: file away the difficult emotional material rather than endlessly relive it. It guides the nervous system out of the high-alert state of fight or flight, reduces cortisol, and encourages the kind of deep emotional processing that mimics what happens in some of the most effective trauma therapies we have.

My nervous system may have been doing exactly what nervous systems can do when given the right conditions. Finding its way through, even when the conscious mind had not yet caught up.

I share this not to invite pity but because I believe it is important to say: our creative work often knows more than we do. When we allow ourselves to compose, paint, write, or move from that deep intuitive place, we are not just making art. We are doing the work of the soul.

We are bringing what is hidden beneath the surface into the light.

The Science: What 6 Hz Mid-Theta Does

The brainwave entrainment frequencies woven into this track were prepared by Shea Thompson of Scientific Sounds under the Skye Collective, whose father Dr. Jeffrey Thompson founded the Center for Neuroacoustic Research in Carlsbad, California. Having studied directly with Dr. Thompson myself, and now collaborating with his son on this project, I feel a deep sense of continuity in bringing this lineage of research into the music. The science behind these frequencies is not incidental. It is the foundation.

At 6 Hz, this track works in the mid-theta range, one of the most therapeutically significant brainwave states we know of. This is the frequency where the conscious mind begins to quiet and something deeper starts to speak. Where images arise unbidden. Where the subconscious stirs. Where the brain becomes most receptive to change.

The research behind this frequency is substantial and growing. (See the sources listed at the end).

Here is what the science currently supports:

Memory and learning. Research from UC Davis found that theta entrainment significantly improved episodic memory performance, the kind of memory tied to personal experience and emotional meaning. A 2023 NIH study confirmed that artificially enhancing theta waves increased memory performance in volunteers, with researchers noting that theta waves appear to be internally generated by the brain and are crucial for memory consolidation.

Creativity and whole-brain activation. A 2024 study published in Scientific Reports tracked participants who listened to 6 Hz binaural beats daily for a month and found measurably increased cognitive processing markers after just two weeks. A study in Frontiers in Neuroscience found that 6 Hz specifically activates frontal midline theta activity, the brain region most associated with creative insight, integrative thinking, and the intuitive leaps that happen when we stop trying so hard.

Anxiety, PTSD, and emotional healing. Peer-reviewed research published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience found that theta range oscillations in the hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex are directly engaged in emotional regulation, and that disruptions in theta activity are linked to anxiety disorders, depression, and PTSD. Clinical applications of theta entrainment have shown measurable reductions in hypervigilance and improved emotional regulation in PTSD populations. Research also indicates theta states lower cortisol levels and support the nervous system reset that allows emotional processing to happen more safely.

Sleep and restoration. Theta waves facilitate the brain’s natural transition into deep and REM sleep, making this frequency range particularly supportive for those navigating insomnia, chronic stress, or the exhaustion that comes from carrying things too long.

Grief, loss, and emotional memory. This is an area where the science is still emerging, and where it is important to speak carefully. What is established is that theta waves are deeply involved in episodic memory, the kind of memory that holds our most emotionally significant experiences, and that theta states support emotional regulation and the processing of stress-related conditions including anxiety and PTSD. What researchers are beginning to explore is whether this same mechanism may extend to grief and loss, given that grief is, at its neurological core, a process of emotional memory reorganization. The connection is scientifically logical and the early evidence is suggestive. Definitive studies on theta entrainment and grief specifically are still needed, but the potential here is real and worth watching.

Each Track as Its Own Micro Session

Like all five tracks on Elemental Essence, “Amphitrite’s Longing” works beautifully on its own as a standalone neurosonic micro session. If Water is calling you right now, if you are moving through grief, creative longing, or a season of your life where something important lives just below the surface of your awareness, this track was made for that moment.

Put on your headphones. Let the frequencies do their quiet work.

Or listen to the complete arc when you are ready for the full journey, from Earth’s deep grounding all the way to the transcendent awareness of Ether.

The Online Pre-Release Sessions

There is still time to join one of the two online pre-release sessions where you will hear this music before it releases to the world on June 12.

Harmonizing with the 4 Elements: A Path to Healing & Balance

• Sunday, May 31 at 4 PM (PDT)

• Wednesday, June 3 at 4 PM (PDT)

Using the music of Elemental Essence as guided meditation and sonic exploration, we will move through the elemental forces within and around us. The brainwave entrainment woven into each track deepens the meditative experience, supporting genuine nervous system rest and the kind of integration that most of us rarely find. No musical experience needed, just an open heart.

REGISTER HERE: EARLY RELEASE SESSIONS

Next week: Fire

Track 3 is “Sirius Spirit,” named for the brightest star in the sky and calibrated at 13 Hz beta-alpha for peak performance, flow states, and focused creative energy. Fire transforms. We will talk about what that means, and why transformation is never as comfortable as we hope it will be.

And always with gratitude, love, and sound,

Ellen

"Roots Beneath the Horizon" is the first track on Elemental Essence: A Neurosonic Journey, a five-track healing album releasing June 12, 2026 on all streaming platforms. Each track is calibrated with research-backed brainwave entrainment frequencies and moves through one of the five elements of nature: Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Ether. This is Week 1 of 5. The full series runs weekly through the release date at SoundCreativityJournal.substack.com

Some of you have been reading my writing here for a while now. Others are newer to this space and perhaps found your way here through Hodge Pod, the Feminine Frequencies series, or my music. Some of you know me from my years as a jazz singer, vocal educator, and sound healing facilitator. Others have followed my articles and the biography Jazz Child: A Portrait of Sheila Jordan, or my workshops on the transformative power of music and voice. That lifetime of immersion in sound, its science, its healing properties, and its capacity to reach places in the human nervous system that words alone cannot, is what makes my work possible. However you arrived, I am so glad you are here, and I want to share something personal with you today.

I want to tell you something I haven’t said publicly before.

After nearly twenty years together, I discovered a web of deception and betrayal that shattered my marriage without warning. The trauma of that sudden rupture left me with losses that have challenged every fiber of my being. Now in the senior years of my life, I am forced to navigate profound uncertainties around work and income, housing, and healthcare. And I am doing it alone, without the promised support or the future I worked hard to count on in my retirement years.

In the process of calming my own shattered nervous system and finding solid ground again, I created an album project, Elemental Essence. This musical recording and neurosonic journey through the five elements of nature is woven with precision brainwave entrainment frequencies to support deep healing, from grounding to transcendent awareness. A project born directly from that journey, with the hope that what helped me might also help others working through their own personal traumas.

What carries me through is what has always carried me: the act of creating through music, writing, teaching, and building community. Through my Sound Creativity Journal on Substack, my podcast Hodge Pod and its Feminine Frequencies series, and a new book to be published by Bloomsbury, Healing, Harmony and the Voice: How Singing Transforms Lives, I have found ways to give meaning to an experience that could have completely broken me.

Having survived cancer in the past, I understand the importance of support and purpose during the renewal process. It is not a concept. It is a daily practice. Music, sound, spirit, and voice have become my medicine.

What I am sharing with you today does not come easily to me. Showing up for others has always been at the heart of who I am. But I have come to understand, perhaps through music more than anything else, that receiving is also an act of grace. That allowing others to give is a gift you offer them.

So here I am. Asking.

What is Elemental Essence?

Elemental Essence: A Neurosonic Journey is a five-track album releasing on June 12, 2026, on all streaming platforms for everyone.

Each track moves through one of the five elements of nature, Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Ether, while incorporating precision brainwave entrainment frequencies developed from over four decades of neuroacoustic research. I have had the privilege of studying directly with Dr. Jeffrey Thompson, founder of the Center for Neuroacoustic Research in Carlsbad, California, one of the world’s most celebrated sound healing researchers and brainwave entrainment pioneers. His son Shea Thompson of Scientific Sounds collaborated on the preparation of the frequencies for this project. To have carried that lineage of research directly into this work has been one of the great gifts of its creation.

Each track works beautifully as a standalone micro session, a focused neurosonic experience you can return to whenever a particular element or its brainwave frequencies speak to what you need in that moment. Listened to in sequence, the five tracks form a complete transformational arc, moving from the deepest grounding of low theta all the way to the expansiveness of gamma. Headphones are recommended for the best listening experience.

Week 1: Earth · “Roots Beneath the Horizon”

Track 1 · 4 Hz Deep Theta / Theta-Delta Borderline · Grounding

This track opens with a didgeridoo, one of the oldest instruments on earth, used for thousands of years in ceremony, healing, and the marking of sacred journeys. It begins like a primal walkabout. A discovery of self.

From there, the music opens into the community of life. Animal voices, birds, human voices, drums, and instruments whose sounds come from the earth itself: metal, horn, skin, breath. A reminder of our connection to each other and to every living thing we share this planet with. And then, at the end, the didgeridoo returns. Not a circular journey but a spiral one. We do not arrive back at the same place we began. We arrive at a new level of awareness, having done the active work of growth.

At 4 Hz, this track works in the deep theta/theta-delta borderline range, a brainwave state associated with deep memory consolidation, neuroplasticity, and the kind of emotional-physical integration that happens when we finally, truly feel safe. Peer-reviewed research from the University of Arizona confirms that theta oscillations activate the brain’s own memory-retrieval processes, supporting what ancient healing traditions have known for centuries: that grounding is not passive. It is deeply active work.

The roots beneath the horizon are doing something.

Even when we cannot see them.

Harmonizing with the 4 Elements: A Path to Healing & Balance

Using the music of Elemental Essence as guided meditation and sonic exploration, we will move through the elemental forces within and around us. The brainwave entrainment woven into each track deepens the meditative experience, supporting the kind of genuine nervous system rest and integration that most of us rarely find. No musical experience needed, just an open heart. Headphones are recommended for the best listening experience.

There is something extraordinary that happens when people listen and meditate together.

Science is beginning to document what ancient traditions have always known: when a group gathers with shared intention, brainwaves gradually align, heart rate variability patterns synchronize, and alpha wave coherence can increase by as much as 40% compared to solo meditation. Researchers call this physiological resonance, a shared neural rhythm that emerges when people tune in together purposefully, creating stronger coherence across brains, hearts, and nervous systems. The HeartMath Institute has shown that individually generated coherent waves are more likely to couple to a larger collective field, amplifying the healing effects for everyone in the group. When we listen to Elemental Essence together, we are not just individual nervous systems receiving sound. We are a field in resonance, magnifying each other’s healing.

Healing work like this needs your support to survive

So I am asking for your support to get these projects out into the world. Your contribution supports Elemental Essence, Healing, Harmony and the Voice: How Singing Transforms Lives, and sustaining Sound Creativity Journal and Hodge Pod as free community spaces where people can explore the intersections of music, science, creativity, and healing, and together find pathways through the challenges we all face in an ever-changing world.

• Share the GoFundMe campaign or this post with anyone who might connect with this work

• Attend or share Elemental Essence Sound Circles — register at vocalvisions.net/workshops-classes-available

• Subscribe to Sound Creativity Journal on Substack at SoundCreativityJournal.substack.com, free always, or as a paid subscriber if you feel moved

• Subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@VocalVisions

DONATE GO FUND ME

Next week I’ll post about the 2nd track: Water

Track 2 is “Amphitrite’s Longing,” named for the Greek goddess of the sea, and calibrated at 6 Hz mid-theta for creativity, intuitive insight, and whole-brain activation. We’ll go deep.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for reading this far.

Whatever you are able to give, a donation, a share, a kind word, or simply your presence on June 12, I receive it with a full and grateful heart.

With Gratitude,

Ellen

Two years ago, I lost my mother. I think about her almost every day. She gave me so much, and in the years since, I have grown to appreciate even more her tremendous courage through adversity, her strength and determination, and her unwavering love for her children.

None of us would be here without our mothers. Not just the physical exertion of bringing a child into the world, but the lifelong dedication to nurturing one.

It is that devotion we honor today.

We need to honor other forms of mothers too.

Those who nurture through mentorship, teaching, and communal care. Those who protect, lead from wisdom, and offer compassion. Any of us can carry mothering tendencies when we come from love, kindness, and generosity.

And our earth is the oldest mother of all.

Life-giving, fertile, interconnected. A sacred feminine force of nature.

May we honor her, and all the mothers, today.

It is in that spirit that I am so moved to share two things close to my heart. The first is a conversation coming this month of May, on the Hodge Pod podcast. In our Feminine Frequencies series, co-host Katie Bull and special guest Susie Fishleder join me to explore Matriarchal Leadership: The Mother We’ve Been Waiting For, an inquiry into what it truly means to lead from wisdom, nurture, and the deep feminine. Please subscribe and join us!

The second is something I created long before I understood how much I would one day need it. From a Mother’s Heart is a 2008 compilation I am proud to have brought into the world, eleven tracks written by various artists of jazz, world music, poetry, and song, each one an offering to a mother’s spirit. Among them is a song I wrote, “With Every Kiss,” and sang myself, a gift to my own mother, who was also a singer. Music passed between us the way love does: quietly, completely.

There is Sheila Jordan’s rendition of “Dat Dere,” that tender classic capturing the pure wonder of a child’s questions and a mother’s patient, joyful presence. And there is guitarist John Stowell’s luminous piece “For My Chacoan Ancestors,” a guitar soundscape woven together with poetry by Anson Wright in quiet celebration of the earth as mother, ancient and enduring.

The music moves through grief and joy and ancient memory, and on a day like today, I hope it finds you.

Every spring in my Vocal Visions studio, the same conversations begin. A student walks in a little congested. Another mentions their range has narrowed unexpectedly. Someone asks whether a particular medication is safe before a performance. Allergy season and the singing voice have a complicated relationship, and there is quite a bit of interesting, relevant science behind what is happening and what options exist.

This piece is a compilation of what current research and clinical literature have to say about the intersection of seasonal allergies and vocal health. It is meant to inform and spark conversation with your own healthcare providers, not to direct any particular course of action. As always, that conversation belongs with your doctor and for singers, with a laryngologist who understands what the voice is asked to do.

WHAT IS HAPPENING PHYSICALLY

How Allergies Reach the Vocal Folds

When the immune system detects an allergen such as tree or grass pollen, it triggers mast cells to release histamine, a chemical that produces the inflammation, mucus production, and irritation familiar to anyone who has suffered through allergy season. For singers, this process reaches several critical systems at once.

The vocal folds (vocal cords) are covered in a delicate mucous membrane. Their optimal state is warm and moist. That thin protective layer of mucus allows the folds to vibrate freely and meet cleanly to produce tone. Allergies are understood to disrupt this in several distinct ways.

THREE PATHWAYS OF IMPACT

Direct inflammation: Allergens can trigger swelling of the vocal folds themselves, making it harder for them to vibrate at their normal frequency. Clinically, this often presents as hoarseness, a lowered pitch center, and a reduced upper range.

Postnasal drip: Excess mucus draining down the back of the throat coats the vocal folds and disrupts the clean closure needed for tone production. Persistent postnasal drip has been associated in the literature with altered fundamental pitch and vocal quality changes.

Mouth breathing: Nasal congestion can shift a singer toward mouth breathing, which bypasses the nose’s natural warming and humidifying role. Air reaching the vocal folds this way tends to be cooler and dryer, increasing potential for irritation and faster fatigue.

The cumulative experience for singers tends to be a narrowed range, reduced tonal clarity, precarious high notes, and faster vocal fatigue than usual. Many describe it as singing through a layer of gauze.

MEDICATIONS AND THE SINGER’S VOICE

What the Literature Says About Treatment Options

One of the most important things the literature points out for singers is that the medication chosen to address allergy symptoms can itself create vocal complications. The most extensively documented case involves diphenhydramine (Benadryl), a first-generation antihistamine that has been in wide use for decades.

Multiple leading medical organizations, including the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, the American Academy of Otolaryngology, and the American Geriatrics Society, have published guidance moving away from recommending first-generation antihistamines as a first-line option. A central concern is that diphenhydramine crosses the blood-brain barrier and produces significant anticholinergic effects, which dry mucous membranes throughout the body. For singers, this includes the very mucous layer that protects and lubricates the vocal folds.

Second-generation antihistamines represent a meaningful step forward in this regard because they do not cross the blood-brain barrier, though they are not without any drying effect. ENT specialists working with professional voice users have noted in the literature that topical nasal medications are often preferable precisely because their localized delivery results in far less systemic impact on the vocal folds. The following medications are among those discussed in the clinical and voice-health literature in this context.

Loratadine (Claritin)

SECOND-GENERATION ANTIHISTAMINE

Does not cross the blood-brain barrier. Research indicates less impact on vocal mucosa compared to first-generation options. Generally non-sedating.

Cetirizine (Zyrtec)

SECOND-GENERATION ANTIHISTAMINE

Studied for effectiveness with congestion and postnasal drip. Some individuals report mild sedation. Like all antihistamines, systemic drying effects are possible.

Nasal Steroid Sprays

TOPICAL (FLONASE, NASACORT)

Noted in ENT literature as often preferred for professional voice users. Topical delivery is associated with significantly less systemic drying effect on the vocal folds.

Fexofenadine (Allegra)

SECOND-GENERATION ANTIHISTAMINE

Generally considered among the least sedating antihistamines in clinical literature. Frequently referenced in discussions of voice-friendly allergy management.

NATURAL AND PREVENTIVE APPROACHES

What Research Suggests About Working With the Body Earlier

There is a growing body of interest in integrative and naturopathic medicine around approaches that focus on immune regulation rather than symptom-blocking alone. For singers, this framing is particularly interesting because it opens the possibility of reducing medication dependence during performance-heavy periods of the year.

THREE COMPOUNDS DISCUSSED IN THE LITERATURE

Quercetin is a plant-based flavonoid found naturally in onions, apples, berries, broccoli, and green tea. Research suggests it may help stabilize mast cells, the cells responsible for releasing histamine, which could theoretically modulate the allergic response at an earlier point than conventional antihistamines. Studies suggest it may be most relevant when introduced before peak pollen season rather than after symptoms are established. Research in clinical nutrition indicates that its bioavailability is meaningfully enhanced in combination with Vitamin C.

Vitamin C is a well-studied antioxidant that has been examined for its potential role in lowering circulating histamine by supporting the activity of the DAO (diamine oxidase) enzyme, which the body uses to break histamine down. It has also been studied for its role in maintaining the integrity of nasal and sinus membranes. For singers specifically, Vitamin C’s antioxidant properties have been discussed in the context of protecting delicate vocal fold tissues from inflammatory free radical damage.

N-Acetyl Cysteine (NAC) is a precursor to glutathione, one of the body’s principal antioxidants, and is used in hospital settings as a therapeutic agent for various conditions. In the context of respiratory and sinus health, NAC has been studied for its ability to thin and break up mucus, a property that is directly relevant to singers dealing with the heavy, sticky mucus that allergy season can produce. Research also suggests NAC supports the metabolic pathways that quercetin relies on, making the three compounds potentially synergistic.

The combination of quercetin, Vitamin C, and NAC is supported in the clinical nutrition literature. Research confirms that Vitamin C recycles quercetin back to its biologically active form, effectively extending its usefulness, while NAC supports the glutathione status that helps the body process quercetin through safer metabolic pathways. Some practitioners also discuss bromelain (an enzyme derived from pineapple) and stinging nettle leaf as complementary additions, both of which appear in commercially available formulations designed for allergy support.

OBSERVATIONS FROM VOICE-HEALTH PRACTICE

What Singers and Voice Specialists Have Noted

💧 Hydration is the single most consistently cited factor across every corner of the voice-health literature. The vocal folds require moisture systemically from adequate water intake and environmentally from ambient humidity. Research on antihistamines specifically notes that singers using these medications may need significantly higher water intake to counterbalance the drying effect on mucous membranes.

🌊 Nasal rinsing with saline systems such as neti pots is noted across multiple clinical and practical sources as one of the more effective mechanical approaches for singers. By physically flushing pollen and allergens from the nasal passages, rinsing can reduce the allergen load before it reaches the throat and vocal folds. Voice-health sources consistently emphasize the importance of using distilled or sterile water rather than unfiltered tap water, due to documented infection risk with certain waterborne organisms.

🌡️ Ambient humidity is regularly discussed in vocal health literature as a meaningful environmental variable. Indoor heating and air conditioning are noted to remove moisture from the air significantly, and cool-mist humidifiers are frequently referenced as a practical counterbalance, particularly in sleeping environments where the vocal folds rest for extended periods.

🚿 Pollen exposure reduction through showering and changing clothes after outdoor time is mentioned across several sources as a practical way to reduce the cumulative allergen load the body is responding to, targeting the underlying triggering of the immune response rather than only its downstream symptoms.

🏠 Indoor air quality through HEPA filtration is consistently noted in allergy management literature. Pollen adheres to surfaces, clothing, and pets, meaning indoor environments can carry meaningful allergen loads even without open windows or doors.

🍵 Warm herbal teas including slippery elm, licorice root, chamomile, and green tea appear in multiple voice-health sources as supportive options. The steam inhaled during drinking carries its own humidifying benefit. Voice specialists consistently note that products containing menthol warrant caution specifically for singers, for the reasons described in the medication section above.

🎵 Warm-up care during allergy season is a topic that arises frequently in professional voice contexts. When vocal fold tissue is inflamed or congested, it is understood to be more vulnerable to the mechanical stress of singing. Voice scientists generally note that inflamed tissue fatigues more quickly and is more susceptible to strain when pushed beyond what symptoms are indicating.

🥗 Dietary quercetin through foods like onions, apples, berries, broccoli, capers, and green tea is referenced as a meaningful baseline by practitioners interested in natural allergy management. Food-based quercetin occurs alongside a range of other plant compounds that may have complementary activity, something supplement formulations alone cannot fully replicate.

Hydrating Sprays and Nebulizers for Singers

Two distinct categories of hydration devices have gained traction in the professional voice community and are worth knowing about.

Throat sprays designed specifically for singers function as topical hydrators rather than medications, delivering moisture directly to the tissues of the throat and vocal folds. Well-established herbal options include Vocal Eze (glycerin-based, alcohol-free, with marshmallow root, licorice root, and aloe vera), Singer’s Saving Grace by Herbs Etc., and Clear Voice.

Entertainer’s Secret takes a more clinical approach — developed using fiberoptic laryngoscopy and voice analysis technology, its formula is designed to mimic the body’s own natural mucosal secretions and has been stocked at professional music retailers for decades. Across all of these, voice-health sources consistently flag alcohol and menthol as ingredients to be cautious of, and note that propolis (found in several herbal formulas) can cause reactions in people with honey sensitivities.

Portable nebulizers represent a step beyond sprays. VocalMist, the most widely referenced among singers, delivers a fine cool mist of isotonic saline (0.9% NaCl) directly to the airways. Research cited by the company (Fujiki, 2014) suggests nebulized saline may reduce the pressure required from the vocal folds to produce sound and shows potential as a laryngeal lubricant supporting surface hydration. It also clears allergens and mucus from the nasal passages, making it particularly relevant during allergy season. One clinical note worth knowing: voice specialist Dr. Anthony Jahn has observed that nebulizers carry particles deeper into the lungs than steamers, which warrants some consideration for regular use.

As with everything in this article, none of these products are evaluated or approved as medical treatments. Individual responses vary, and they are best understood as one part of a broader vocal maintenance approach.

A LESS-DISCUSSED DIMENSION

The Gut-Histamine Connection

An area of growing interest in allergy research involves the gut microbiome’s relationship to histamine metabolism. The DAO enzyme that breaks down histamine is produced primarily in the intestinal lining, which means gut health may have an upstream influence on how effectively the body clears histamine from circulation.

Research in this area suggests that a compromised gut microbiome can reduce DAO activity, meaning histamine from allergens and from certain foods may remain elevated longer. Some practitioners working in integrative medicine have begun incorporating gut microbiome support into seasonal allergy management, though this remains an evolving area where more research is ongoing and conclusions are not yet firmly established.

WHEN TO INVOLVE A SPECIALIST

What the Voice-Health Literature Recommends

Allergy immunotherapy is also documented in the literature as a longer-horizon approach worth understanding. Unlike medications, which address symptoms as they arise, immunotherapy works by gradually retraining the immune system’s response to specific identified allergens over time. Clinical literature documents meaningful reductions in both symptom severity and medication use for patients who complete a full immunotherapy course.

A FEW COMMON QUESTIONS

Topics That Come Up in the Studio

Is it possible to perform when the voice is affected by allergies?

This is a question the clinical literature does not answer with a single rule, because the degree of involvement matters enormously. Mild nasal congestion with otherwise full vocal function is a very different situation from genuine hoarseness, where vocal fold tissue is swollen and inflamed. Voice scientists note that pushing mechanically stressed tissue toward the limits of its range carries a greater risk of compensatory tension and potential injury than pushing healthy tissue in the same way. This is ultimately a question best evaluated by a laryngologist who can actually look at the tissue.

Is there research on whispering as a form of vocal rest?

Interestingly, the voice-health literature fairly consistently notes that whispering is not a neutral or restful activity for the vocal folds. It tends to require a pressed, effortful posture of the folds that increases mechanical friction. Complete vocal silence is generally described in this literature as more genuinely restorative than whispering, which may feel easier but places its own demands on the tissue.

What does the research say about steam inhalation for singers?

Steam from warm water sources such as a shower or personal steam inhaler is mentioned positively across multiple voice-health and laryngology sources as one of the few approaches that directly delivers moisture to the surface of the vocal folds. Sources consistently note the importance of not using boiling steam, which can irritate tissue, and of being cautious with added essential oils or menthol, which may be additionally irritating to already inflamed mucous membranes.

How does allergy immunotherapy differ from medication approaches?

This distinction comes up in the allergy and voice literature with some regularity. Antihistamines and nasal sprays work downstream, after the immune response has already been triggered, managing the resulting symptoms. Immunotherapy works upstream, by gradually exposing the immune system to increasing amounts of a specific allergen in a controlled clinical setting, with the goal of recalibrating the immune response itself over time. Studies have documented meaningful reductions in both symptom severity and medication use for patients who complete a full immunotherapy course.

References and Sources

The following sources informed the information presented in this article. This is not an exhaustive academic bibliography but a transparent accounting of the clinical, practitioner, and voice-specialist literature consulted during the research for this piece. As noted throughout, medical understanding continues to develop and readers are encouraged to explore current peer-reviewed literature alongside consultation with qualified professionals.

1. American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. Position on first-generation antihistamines and preferred alternatives for allergic rhinitis. aaaaai.org

2. American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery. Clinical practice guideline: Allergic rhinitis. Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, 2015.

3. American Geriatrics Society Beers Criteria Update Expert Panel. AGS Beers Criteria for potentially inappropriate medication use in older adults. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 2019.

4. Colunga Biancatelli, R.M.L., Berrill, M., Catravas, J.D., and Marik, P.E. Quercetin and Vitamin C: An experimental, synergistic therapy for the prevention and treatment of SARS-CoV-2 related disease. Frontiers in Immunology, 2020.

5. Wilhelm, K. (ND). The quercetin paradox: The secret to preventing toxic quercetin metabolites. Lifestyle Matrix Resource Center, 2024. lifestylematrix.com

6. De Flora, S., Grassi, C., and Carati, L. Attenuation of influenza-like symptomatology and improvement of cell-mediated immunity with long-term N-acetylcysteine treatment. European Respiratory Journal, 10(7), 1535-1541, 1997.

7. Grandjean, E.M., Berthet, P., Ruffmann, R., and Leuenberger, P. Efficacy of oral long-term N-acetylcysteine in chronic bronchopulmonary disease. Clinical Therapeutics, 22(2), 209-221, 2000.

8. Heavner, S.B. (MD, Otolaryngologist, CEENTA). How can allergies affect my voice? ceenta.com

9. City Allergy and Immunology. Allergy and the vocal performer. cityallergy.com

10. Lewin, M. (MD, Allergist). Singer with allergies: Interview on vocal health and allergy immunotherapy. Via pianoandvoicewithbrenda.com, 2025.

11. Levy, T. (ND). Your spring allergy guide: What you should know. Tara Natural Medicine newsletter, April 2026. taranaturalmedicine.com

12. Florida ENT and Allergy. Can allergies affect your voice? floridaentandallergy.com, 2025.

13. Sing Orlando. How allergy medications affect the singing voice. singorlando.com, 2023.

14. HeyAllergy. Allergies and singing: How to protect your voice. heyallergy.com, 2024.

If you are interested in vocal coaching please contact me at: VocalVisions.net

This episode of Feminine Frequencies has been one of the most joyful and nourishing conversations co-host Katie Bull and I have had on this show. Our guest is Kristen Nordstrom who is an educator, author, and one of the most passionate voices I have encountered when it comes to the living world and what it has to teach us.

Kristen is the award-winning author of Mimic Makers: Biomimicry Inventors Inspired by Nature, winner of the AAAS/Subaru Prize for Excellence in Science Books and a National Science Teachers Association Best STEM Book. She is a founding member and full-time teacher at a Title One STEAM Academy in California and most recently, she has been teaching on a 245-acre certified biodynamic farm, the very farm at the heart of the documentary The Biggest Little Farm. Hired by the Rodale Institute, Kristen helped develop a companion curriculum for the film spanning grades 3 through 12, now being piloted in classrooms across the country and available free of charge to any teacher, school, or school system.

Contact her at: KristenNordstrom.com

In this conversation we explore what it means to learn from nature rather than dominate it. We talk about biomimicry, biodynamic farming, the feminine principle alive in the way ecosystems actually function, and what it looks like to build communities — and classrooms — that are truly rooted in the living world.

Kristen has a phrase that has stayed with me:

On this Earth Day, that feels like exactly the right place to begin.

Listen now. And if this episode moves you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. And in the meantime, do something good for the earth today.

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