Why the Right Music Might Be the Best Medicine | John Stuart Reid
What if the most powerful thing you could do for your health today was simply to put on a pair of headphones and press play? Acoustic physicist John Stuart Reid has invested thirty years as a professional acoustics engineer and a further twenty-five years as an acoustic physics scientist, studying exactly this question.
His answer draws on established physics, laboratory research, and a conviction that nature already built the healing systems into our bodies. “Nature routed the vagus nerves from the brain stem straight to your outer ears, for a very good reason,” he says, “a fact that seems to have largely eluded medical science."
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MAGICommons Podcast (00:00)
Pop music provided the very best results. Way, way better than classical music because it invariably has a throbbing, pounding, pulsing ⁓ bass beat. It's those bass beats which are mimicking the sound of a heart. So when those low frequency sounds enter your body from a good quality speaker, those sound beats actually act to give you more oxygen in your body.
MAGICademy Podcast (00:36)
Today's guest is John Stuart Reid He has been on a mission, exploring and sharing his discoveries about the world of sound, what he calls cymatics. It's a visual expression of a single sound. We live in a world where we're surrounded by sound. We hear birds chirping, we hear
wood cracking, hear rabbits shuffling the grass running around, we hear squirrels climbing on the tree, we hear woodpeckers, we hear our voices inside, and according to John, each cell in our body actually creates and generates sounds.
So today's conversation will explore what is sound and how does sound relate to our biology and how can low frequency sound help us to reduce chronic inflammation through the tuning of vagus nerves in our system.
This conversation will be a very dense, conversation.
MAGICademy Podcast (01:51)
BBB, in front of you lands a spaceship. Out walks a friendly alien. If you were to use one sound, one movement, or one word to invite the alien to play, what would that be?
John Stuart Reid (02:05)
Well, I would say a smile, you know, because obviously, hopefully these aliens have been monitoring us humans and they know that is and therefore they know that a smile is friendly. Not only that, you know, from the perspective of what I know about how things work with a smile, a smile actually generates significant energy from our heart. So the electromagnetism that no doubt these aliens are monitoring us, you know, in that
spectrum, an electromagnetic spectrum, they will receive loving vibrations. As as I smile, you smile is a kindly, a kind gesture. If it comes from the heart, then certainly our heart will be radiating love when we smile and therefore they will pick that up. I don't need words, you know, in order to smile. Anyone can smile, even if you don't have a voice box, you can smile and therefore you can radiate love.
MAGICademy Podcast (02:59)
beautiful.
John Stuart Reid (03:08)
music could be used in place of medicine, which was actually a statement made by Pythagoras of Samos, 2500,
years ago, ballpark, right? In ancient Greece. He said that and it is being quoted by his biographer, Ion Blikis, that music could be used in place of medicine. And I thought, well, you know, that sounds very good, very nice. And I kind of sensed intuitively sensed that it's right. But we don't have the evidence, you know, and I would really like to see some evidence of this idea, this concept. So in
I think it was around 2015, I was lying in bed one day, waking up. I get my best ideas when I'm waking up, just waking up. And this idea that we could run an experiment with human blood as the prime biological medium, and we could immerse that human blood in music, and we could test, pre and post the effect on the...
in those days it was purely on the red blood cells, we could do a simple test. Well, you I realized I wasn't a biologist. I'm still not a biologist, although I have a lot of knowledge in biology now. But in those days, you know, I wasn't, I didn't have that level of knowledge that I have today. So I invited Professor Ji to come here. Now, Sunchul Ji
He's now emeritus, by the way, but he was at Rutgers University as a professor of biology. it was his son, Sayer S-A-Y-E-R, Ji is simply J-I, by the way, it was Sayer who actually supported Sangchulji, his daddy, to come here to support my work.
We worked together for several days to develop a protocol for this experiment. Even though the experiment is very simple. In essence, we still had to develop the protocol.
to be sure that it would work.
And the essence of it is you take a test tube of human blood. I can show you one of these little test tubes actually, which I have here. There's a little test tube. You take a test tube of whole human blood and first it comes from the blood bank, very chilled at like a few degrees, very cold. But then you warm it up to normal blood temperature and distill.
the test tube into two smaller test tubes. So you now have the same blood essentially split between two test tubes. One test tube goes into the laboratory Faraday cage, which is electromagnetically screened and also very, very quiet in there.
by the way, it goes into an incubator in the Faraday cage. So it's kept
warm at blood temperature. The other vial goes into another incubator, this time in the main body of the lab here, just on the counter behind me, say, and in that incubator is a small speaker. So now we can play music to that blood, right? So the protocol is 20 minutes immersion. So 20 minutes in the quiet or 20 minutes with music immersion.
And we started off using classical music because Professor Ji and I both thought, we intuitively thought that classical music would provide the best result. And you know, it was a pretty good result. The very first experiments that we ran, we were getting figures like 10 % increase in the viability of the red blood cells. So this is the ratio of dead red blood cells
MAGICademy Podcast (06:28)
you
John Stuart Reid (06:50)
to living red blood cells. So that an increase of about 10 % with classical music. And we were very excited to see the increase because obviously we had no idea that it would actually work, that it would create an increase. some of the little background facts that you need to know here, how it all works, is that when blood comes from a blood bank, we get it the day after it's been.
taken from someone's arm, So literally, we are getting it direct the next day. It's very fresh. Now, even though it's fresh from this person, whoever it was, because they're anonymous, it contains millions and millions and millions of healthy red blood cells, many, many millions that are already dead, which is surprising, but it's the truth. And then many other, many more millions that are in a kind of
transitory stage, they're still alive, but medically they're classed as old, right? And so in the body, that old category, they would be ultimately mopped up along with the dead cells and replaced in the bone marrow and so on, right? So this is just the normal process that's going on in your body right now and in mine and then everybody else who's watching and listening right now.
MAGICademy Podcast (08:04)
So can I
reiterate, so for all the blood that's operating in our body, one third is active, one third is in kind of like a trance state, like semi-dead, semi-alive, and then one third is like dead.
John Stuart Reid (08:19)
Well, you're simplifying it, literally not in third, but in essence, you're correct, right? There is a ratio between the living, the old and the dead, red blood cells. What we are doing, what we were doing with the music was literally changing that ratio simply by converting, let's say, or rejuvenating, is that the right word? Regenerating.
MAGICademy Podcast (08:21)
you
Okay.
So maybe the living one is higher, not one third, maybe two thirds.
Revitalizing.
John Stuart Reid (08:47)
Yeah, any of those words, but perhaps regenerate, regenerate is probably the best word. We are regenerating the old red blood cells and making them new again. Do you remember the story, the old story of the genie and the lamp? New lamps for old, new lamps for old, you know? Well, in this case, it's new cells for old. We are literally able to create or to generate
MAGICademy Podcast (08:52)
generate.
John Stuart Reid (09:13)
regenerate those old red blood cells and make them new again. And therefore we use an automatic cell counter machine that counts the blood pre and post music immersion. And we finding this difference in ratio because the music has somehow magically we thought, you know, kind of thinking at the time, cause we didn't understand the mechanism initially. It was like magic
we did very quickly find out the mechanism and it happened pretty quick actually within the same day we figured it out. And how we figured it out was because we had this thought that maybe it was the low frequency content in the music that was causing the red blood cells to absorb
more oxygen. This was the thought that we had. And in order to test that hypothesis, we, instead of using the music incubator with the little speaker in the incubator, we now place some blood, we injected some blood into the cymoscope instrument. Now you see, we have a, this is actually the portable model here of the cymoscope instruments, not the scientific model. It's a portable model.
But that's one of the instruments that we have. And when we put the blood into the cymoscope instrument, which has a low frequency response of three hertz versus the relatively poor frequency response of the little speaker in the incubator, which had a roll-off frequency of about 80 hertz. In other words, very little energy, base energy below 80 hertz. But the cymoscope down to three hertz, right?
So when we put a pure tone, this is just a sinusoidal tone, into that blood in the simoscope instrument, what we saw was a beautiful pattern. Now that's not in itself surprising. Why? Because blood, excuse me, blood is largely water, right? It's almost entirely water. And the instrument, the simoscope instrument,
MAGICademy Podcast (11:10)
Mmm.
John Stuart Reid (11:23)
requires pure water. That's normally what we would inject into the cymoscope as the revealing medium. So when sound, this is the principle I'm talking now about cymatics, when sound enters into water, it immediately organizes all of the water molecules. There are trillions and trillions and trillions of individual water molecules that are just in Brownian motion. In other words, they are randomly bouncing around with no particular
you know, organization. But as soon as sound enters into the water, it beautifully organizes all of those trillions of water molecules, not only on the surface, but right throughout the depths of the water in the instrument. So now think about the blood. When we put blood into the cymoscope, because it's mainly water, we expect it to see a cymatic pattern on the surface. And sure enough,
there was the pattern on the surface, beautiful hexagonal pattern. Now, with cymatics, normally when you inject a sound into water, you get a beautiful pattern, say if the sound is harmonious, it's beautiful, it creates a beautiful pattern. Beauty begets beauty. But as soon as you take the sound away, you bring the slider down, say on the audio mixer, then the pattern is lost and all those trillion...
MAGICademy Podcast (12:41)
Mm.
John Stuart Reid (12:42)
water molecules go back to their Brownian motion. Now with the blood that didn't happen. We injected the 44 hertz into the very low frequency sound into the blood. Beautiful hexagonal pattern occurred. We took the theta down on the audio mixer. The pattern remained in the blood, right? And what had happened was when blood comes from the blood bank
it's very very dark red it's a very kind of a dark maroon color i would call it and ⁓ button
MAGICademy Podcast (13:12)
not as fresh feels like.
not as a fra- not as fresh feels like it's being... ⁓
John Stuart Reid (13:17)
No, it's nothing to do with freshness. It's the
facts of physics because what happens is, as I'll explain, blood in every single red blood cell in your body, there are hemoglobin molecules and the job of the hemoglobin molecules is to attract oxygen molecules, right? If there's no pressure in the blood from your heart, like your heartbeat stops,
no pressure, the oxygen molecules cannot be bound to the hemoglobin. The hemoglobin needs pressure for it to bind and the pressure comes from heartbeats. So let's go back to the simoscope instrument. We put the dark red blood, fresh dark red blood into the simoscope instrument. We inject a 44 Hertz tone.
a beautiful cymatic pattern occurs. And as it's occurring, as it's being created, we can see there are elements in the pattern that are bright scarlet. So this dark red blood suddenly become bright scarlet in certain areas of the pattern. These are the antinodal parts of the pattern. And when we take the theta on the audio mixer down to zero,
The hemoglobin molecules which have received now oxygen due to this low frequency sound are now holding on to it and they're saying, we're not going to let go. We like oxygen, right? And this is why the pattern remains in the blood when you take the sound away it does eventually dissolve away, but it takes about 20 minutes.
Now let's go to this so-called dead person, lying there. Their heart has stopped. They've tried the paddle trick three times and it doesn't work. So now they pronounce them dead.
MAGICademy Podcast (14:57)
Mm.
John Stuart Reid (15:03)
But then some doctor comes through and says, hey, you're forgetting about our new system that we have. yes, of course, the new system. And standing by the bedside is a console that has a big red button on it. And when this red button is pressed, the bed that the patient is lying on now comes to life. This bed isn't any ordinary bed.
This bed has a whole array of tactile, powerful tactile transducers in it from head to toe. And these tactile transducers now start sending low frequency energy direct into this person, this so-called dead person, right? And what that does is it immediately uses the oxygen that's already dissolved in their bloodstream.
It now gives the clinicians more time to get the heart going again or to
some other form of oxygenation, circulation of the blood because this is now going to give them several minutes, more minutes because the oxygen is already dissolved in the blood and even the respiration of the patient can be manipulated through this system.
In fact, they could immediately press that button, put the person on a respirator machine immediately, and they would still be alive. Because the binding of the oxygen is still occurring now, not due to the heart, which has stopped, but due to the low frequency sound coming up into the person's body from the tactile transducers. Now you get the idea, Jiani So this is a...
MAGICademy Podcast (16:53)
So they
have the oxygens that the body needs to generate
John Stuart Reid (16:57)
Yeah, what this so-called dead person is missing right now is circulation. They've got no blood circulation because the heart has stopped, okay? So it's stagnant. The blood that's in their vascular system is stagnant. But because the low frequency transducers can be modulated like in a kind of wave-like action, that can create flow of blood to some degree.
throughout their vascular system, not as efficiently as a heart, but it can also cause the oxygen that's already dissolved in their bloodstream. It's already there, but it's not getting bound to the hemoglobin anymore because there's no heartbeats. We can replace those heartbeats with low frequency sound from these transducers, from these tactile transducers. This gives the clinician some time now.
you know, another two or three minutes to save this person's life long enough. In other words, it keeps the brain oxygenated a little bit, right, enough to keep them alive. Now they put them on a respirator so they can be respirated automatically, right? If their breathing has stopped, which it probably will have done by now, it can get their breathing going again. Meanwhile, they're getting this oxygen from, because the respirator is going.
And because they've got the low frequency sound coming in into their vascular system, the person is still alive now where they would have been dead. Right? So this is really important work.
One of the other really exciting aspects to all of this work that Professor Ji and I did, by the way, is concerning the fact that pop music provided the very best results.
way, way better than classical music. And now you know the reason. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
MAGICademy Podcast (18:41)
What? Why? I
always feel like the pop music is so loud and I tend to listen to like a very mellow, quiet... Oh my god!
John Stuart Reid (18:48)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know,
that's all to do with... the reason that many people don't like pop music, you know, some people, a lot of people don't like pop music, is because, the volume level that it's played at is often, you know, painful on the hearing. So it becomes a pain rather than a pleasure. And then the other aspect to it is the quality of the sound.
MAGICademy Podcast (18:59)
I'm one.
Yes.
John Stuart Reid (19:12)
If it's coming out from some pathetic little speaker, like from your phone or whatever, it has this very thin, poor quality sound relative to what it would come from a really high quality system. there are aspects to pop music, obviously, that some people don't like. But in this case, what we discovered is that pop music, because it invariably has a throbbing, pounding
MAGICademy Podcast (19:22)
Yeah, very loud. It's painful,
Hahaha
John Stuart Reid (19:38)
pulsing bass beat, it's those bass beats which are making the sound of a heart. So when those low frequency sounds enter your body from a good quality speaker, Those sound beats actually act to give you more oxygen in your body. So all the young people that go to music concerts where they've got these massive PA stacks, 10,000 watts or whatever sound.
MAGICademy Podcast (19:41)
Bass! ⁓
John Stuart Reid (20:04)
These, when you, you know, if you're a person at one of these concerts, when you leave the concert, no wonder you're feeling energized, right? Because you've had so much oxygen in your body, right? Every breath you take is then super oxygenating your bloodstream instead of the normal levels of oxygen, right? This is, one of the counterintuitive aspects to the work that Professor Ji and I did.
MAGICademy Podcast (20:13)
Yes!
Hahaha
Yeah, and I also have just like a basic kind of coming from like, because for all the research we look at like limitations and future research. So in your paper, what is the current limitations of this research and moving forward as the next step after this paper, what's the next step to be taken?
John Stuart Reid (21:00)
Well, the next step is for sure is all of the experiments that we've conducted so far have all been in vitro, so all in test tubes basically. So the next step is obviously to translate that into the in vivo environment. And that's what we're now looking into, you know, how to be able to conduct a study. Your studies are expensive and they take a long time as well, but we are now planning ⁓ to conduct a study. And part of the...
Part of that work, and
one of the initial steps that we are taking, it concerns some so-called caves in India, north east India. They're not really caves at all. These are called the Barabar, B-A-R, B-A-R, Barabar, yeah. Anyway, these are called the Barabar caves, but like a lot of things in history, you know, they get mislabeled.
In this case, these are actually chambers that have been man-made from granite. So this is a huge area of granite in Northeast India where men, we think, we don't know because nobody really knows how they made these caves given the fact that granite is a very hard, very dense stone. But if you look this up online, Barabar Caves, say on YouTube,
you'll find there's a video, a very good documentary actually, of scientists who have studied these so-called caves. One of the really amazing aspects to them is that the walls are absolutely dead flat. Now, it's one thing to carve out, to hollow out, you know, a room, a chamber.
from granite and that is not just one by the way there are multiple of these chambers, separate chambers. It's one thing to be able to do that. That in itself is extremely challenging work. But then to finish the walls to the degree that they are perfectly flat. When I say perfectly, I'm talking about optically flat. So you can take a device that's called an optical flat and you can put it, if you put an optical flat
against say some window glass you will find or a mirror say for example you will find that there's no if you shine a flashlight behind your optical flat you will find no light coming through this is because it's literally perfectly flat or at least you know to the degree that there's no light can come through your optical flat device and it's the same in the Barabar caves
There is no light coming through the optical flat. This is how flat these walls are, which is absolutely mind blowing how people, according to the history, 2000 years ago, were able to achieve this degree of perfection. Then the other question that arises, and I come to the research that we'd like to conduct in these so-called caves, the other question that arises
Why did they go to this degree of difficulty to make these walls optically flat? And the answer, the only answer that I can come up with, and it makes perfect sense to me, I was originally, you know, I'm now an acoustic physics scientist, but I was originally, my first career was that of an acoustics engineer. So for almost, well, it was 30 years I was an acoustics engineer. So I know a lot about acoustics.
One of the aspects of acoustic, if you want to create a space that has a very, very high level of reverberation, what you need to do is to make the surfaces absolutely flat. Because the sound bubbles, there's a sound bubble coming out of my mouth now. People talk about it as a wave. It's not a wave. There's no waves coming out of my mouth. Bubbles are coming out of my mouth right now. And that bubble, as it expands,
MAGICademy Podcast (24:47)
bubble.
John Stuart Reid (24:53)
at the speed of sound is oscillating in and out with all the modulations of my vocal folds. When that bubble strikes a wall, if that wall is dead flat, perfectly flat, then almost all of that energy is reflected from the wall. If the wall has undulations in it, you know, not so flat, then some of that energy will get absorbed by the wall. Much more of that energy will be absorbed.
So this is why in my logic, I'm suggesting that these people, whoever they were that created these chambers, created them for
acoustics purpose. clearly, you know that the Indian sages, one of their healing mechanisms was focused on mantra, still is today, right? Mantra. If you express yourself vocally,
then you are actually self-healing because when your vagus nerve first leaves the brain stem, it's actually two nerves, it goes first to the pinna of the ear, the outer ear, then it branches straight to the pharynx and the larynx. And this is the way nature has arranged it in order to keep your vagus nerve system well-tuned literally every
Just as we're talking now, we are helping to tune our vagus nerve system, right? And the other aspect of this is now, if you think of it from a healing perspective, okay, you make your own vocal sounds and most of that energy does actually radiate down into your thorax and into your body and help to tune the vagus nerve. But now there's another aspect to it in relation to the Baraba.
so-called caves, right? Which is the pinna of the ear. Because as I've said, the vagus nerve goes straight to the pinna of the ear. Now, why did nature arrange for this to happen? Right? This is nothing to do, Jiani, with hearing. This is nothing to do with hearing. Hearing is via the auditory nerve. So the pinnas of your ears, you can think of them as like mini
parabolic dishes that are there to collect sound from the environment, not for one reason, but for two primary reasons. The first is so that you can hear if you've got normal hearing, if you're blessed with normal hearing, the pinners collect sound from the environment, send it through the auditory canal, and ultimately ends up in the cochlea of left and right cochlea, which then produce signals that go to the brain so you can
interpret the world through sound, right? That's one very important aspect of the pinna of the ear. But the second aspect that's equally important, you could say even more important actually, is that the vagus nerve goes to the pinna of the ear. Why did nature take the vagus nerve to your left and right pinnas? The reason is
Because the sounds of nature going back millions of years when we were evolving as creatures, the vagus nerve system is crucial in the body because it innovates all of the major organs of the body, including not only the pharynx and the larynx, but also the lungs. So your breathing comes from your vagus nerve. Your heart comes from your vagus nerve.
your liver, your kidneys and so on, even your gut, everything comes via the vagus nerve, right? Vagus nerves, plural. Without that vagus nerve, you would not be alive. So this is why it's so important from nature's perspective to keep your vagal system well-tuned. And the way that nature decided to do that is twofold. One, to collect sounds from the environment via your mini parabolic dishes.
Right? So now we're talking about perhaps the sound of the ocean waves crashing on the seashore, the sound of the wind and the trees, the sound of birdsong, the sound of whitewater rivers, the sound of waterfalls, whale song, all of these different forms of sound all help to tune up your vagal system automatically. You're not aware of it, but it's going on all of the time.
And then of course the other aspect to it was, is your vocal apparatus. If you have a normal, if you're blessed with a normal voice box, larynx, then of course that's also helping to tune up your vagal system, particularly if you like to sing, that is really excellent. People are very, very healthy if you sing because of this.
MAGICademy Podcast (29:41)
Mmm.
We do
a lot of karaoke in the past and like ⁓ so happy happy times
John Stuart Reid (29:51)
Yes, even carry on. So
this is really, really important to know that the vagus nerve is so important to be tuned up in this way. so I kind of forgotten the trend of my thought process here, but the important part that I'd like to share here is that there's something happening in the world today.
Nobody really knows the real reason for this, but it's chronic inflammation. And chronic inflammation is a precursor to cancer. If you have chronic inflammation in your body and you do nothing about it, almost certainly you will succumb to some form of cancer. And so now we're talking about a huge body of the population of planet earth, people that have chronic inflammation.
MAGICademy Podcast (30:33)
Hmm.
John Stuart Reid (30:41)
and also of course people that have then gone on to develop cancers. Now, the exciting thing here is that many groups of researchers around the world, medical researchers, have discovered, lo and behold, that if your vagus nerve system is optimally stimulated, chronic inflammation goes away. Now, this is really exciting because
There is nothing in mainstream medicine, there's no pharmacology, no substance you can take that will reverse, permanently reverse chronic inflammation if you're unlucky enough to have it in your body. And yet...
MAGICademy Podcast (31:19)
Is that statement validated or is that statement a hypothesis?
John Stuart Reid (31:23)
No, it's not a hypothesis.
No, it's not a hypothesis. You know, there are papers, many studies on this. And the sad thing is here that this knowledge, medical, know, clinical knowledge has not yet been implemented in mainstream. And there's a huge gap in the timing between evidence, you
acquisition of evidence and the application of it in medicine. mean, it's a long, it's about 17 years I learned recently, but it may even be longer than that. And one of the reasons for this, of course, is because mainstream medicine is entirely focused on evidence. It's called evidence-based medicine. The problem with that is, or the challenge with that really, is that the cost
MAGICademy Podcast (31:47)
application.
John Stuart Reid (32:12)
of running trials to provide that evidence is huge. know, these trials are, it costs millions of dollars to run these trials. Well, you know, if you're someone who has made a discovery, in my case, for example, I've made a discovery to tune up your vagus nerve system. That system, which is essentially
music, using music to tune up your vagal system, that could not be used in mainstream medicine. Why? Because where's the evidence? You know, the clinicians would say, show me the evidence, right? Well, for evidence to be provided that is so bulletproof and robust, it would cost millions of dollars to run those. Who's gonna put the money into music?
MAGICademy Podcast (32:46)
Mm.
John Stuart Reid (32:59)
being used as medicine. You see,
is the challenge. And yet the researchers have found, and I can send you many different papers on this, show that music, well, not music specifically, but low frequencies can optimally stimulate the vagus nerve system to the point where in someone that has chronic inflammation,
MAGICademy Podcast (33:16)
Please. Yes.
So.
John Stuart Reid (33:29)
What that usually means is that there's a cytokine storm going on in their bloodstreams, two types of cytokines that are literally battling with each other out way out of balance and causing the inflammation, causing the chronic inflammation. know, inflammation in the body is a good thing. It's used for healing as a healing part of the healing process. It's critical in the healing process. But chronic inflammation is a very, very bad thing, right?
MAGICademy Podcast (33:53)
She's always fighting because so.
John Stuart Reid (33:58)
Short-term acute inflammation, great. Long-term chronic inflammation, very bad. And ultimately, unfortunately, leads usually to cancer. So this is a system where if you know how to optimally stimulate your vagus nerve system, then you can rebalance your cytokines gradually over a period of weeks. The chronic inflammation goes away and
MAGICademy Podcast (34:04)
Mmm.
John Stuart Reid (34:23)
Also, there are papers I could send you where showing that there's a roughly about a 50 % increase in prognosis for any cancer that you have if you stimulate your vagal system optimally. So that in itself is also fantastic news, you know, and with the system that I've discovered, fortunately, to optimally stimulate the vagus system.
Vegas Nerve system in a person is simply a matter of experiencing beautiful music through good quality headphones. Now the music that I've discovered, I mean this is like, it sounds crazy, I know. But now come back to this.
MAGICademy Podcast (34:59)
That sounds so easy.
We go all
the way and then we come back to listen to high quality good music.
John Stuart Reid (35:08)
Yeah, if you come back to this idea of nature, nature created
this situation. It was a big clue, wasn't it? Nature took your vagus nerve straight to the left and right pinna, also sometimes called the oracle of the ear, the outer ear, in other words, right? And the main density of the nervous fibers, the vagus nerve fibers, go to what's called the tragus of the ear, which is this little...
MAGICademy Podcast (35:17)
you
John Stuart Reid (35:35)
flap of tissue that overhangs your auditory canal, where you press on it if you don't want to hear what somebody's saying or you're trying to protect your hearing from a loud sound, you press on your tragus. If you touch your tragus or anywhere actually on your outer ear with your fingertips very, very lightly, my goodness, you get shivers down your spine, you know, because basically it is a doorway, it's a portal.
MAGICademy Podcast (35:46)
I do that intuitively.
John Stuart Reid (36:02)
into your vagus nerve system and it's exquisitely sensitive. And this is also why, of course, the ears are known as an erogenous zone for the same reason, because they're exquisitely sensitive to touch. And so this is nature telling us how to stimulate the vagus nerve system with sound, right? Now, the discovery that I made, the
discovery, I should start by saying,
that the medical researchers who made these discoveries about rebalancing the cytokine storm and abating the storm and abating the chronic inflammation comes from very, very low frequencies between five hertz and 10 hertz. Now these frequencies are so low that they're not even audible to humans. The lowest frequency that humans can hear is about 16, one six hertz.
So these are sub audible, but nevertheless have been discovered to be optimal for vagus nerve stimulation. I'm guessing the reason for this is again, going back to ancient times when humankind was evolving on the planet, there would have been sounds in nature, such as I've already mentioned from waterfalls, whitewater rivers, ocean waves and so on, that actually if you look at those sounds on a spectrum analyzer,
you'll find a huge body of energy in these very low frequency bands, five to 10 hertz. So this is, I'm just guessing, I don't know this is just hypothesizing, but probably that's why nature now requires these very, very low frequencies to optimally stimulate your vagus nerve system. Now come back to music. If you know anything about recording a music in a recording studio environment,
you will know that the frequencies below 20 Hertz are usually very steeply rolled off. And the reason for this is because music when it's fed to speaker systems in particular is challenging for speakers to deal with any frequencies below about 20 Hertz. Even big speakers cannot handle frequencies below 20. So therefore the recording your CD or your digital media player
does not have those frequencies in the music. They're not present. They've been taken away automatically or at the press of a button in the recording studio, right? So when I made my discovery, I was very, very surprised because I took an album. It's called Dream of the Blue Whale and it's by Anders Holt. That's Anders A-N-D-E-R-S. Holt is H-O-L-T-E.
and his wife, Kachina Miyadu, they created this beautiful album called Dream of the Blue Whale in which Anders, who is a man and he has a very beautiful deep resonant voice, is kind of mimicking the sounds of blue whales. And Annalise and I very often at breakfast time, we listen to that music at a background level. It kind of just washes over us as we're eating and just enjoying a start to the day.
So it's very, very beautiful. And knowing that Anders has this gorgeous deep voice, one day I thought, you know, I'm going to have a look at these frequencies on my lab spectrum analyzer, just to see how low, knowing about these facts of the vagus nerve and how, you know, low frequencies help to tune it up. I thought, let's have a look on the spectrum analyzer. And what I found, Jiani really, really surprised me.
what it was, the very lowest band on the analyzer is a 12, it's called a 12 Hertz band. And the shape of the filter curve for each of the filter, that is one sixth of an octave wide, these bands on the analyzer. So quite narrow band, but the shape of the filter curve is like a bell jar shape. What this means is when the 12 Hertz band, if you see the 12 Hertz band merrily dancing up and down,
It means there are frequencies present down to five and six hertz, right? So this is why I was so excited and surprised is to see when Anders is making his beautiful deep whale, mimicking whale sounds, the 12 hertz band dancing up and down, right? And then there are times, if you listen to this album, there are times when Anders stops singing and Kachina with her beautiful keyboards carries on.
making these very long, gorgeous key chords. And even there, the 12 Hertz band merrily dancing up and down, right? So I'm thinking, how is this possible? Well, it turns out, to cut a very long story short, it's entirely possible. And it comes about not because these frequencies are
the CD.
when the album plays, let's say in this case a CD, frequencies are coming out from the CD player, from the RCA connector, say on the back of the CD player, on a cable that then goes to an amplifier and ultimately to a speaker system, say, right?
that signal that's coming out of the RCA connectors, the stereo output, is not sound, is it? It's electrical. This is an electrical signal. So the laser of the CD player in this case, picks up the signal, which is a digital signal. There's a digital to analog converter in your CD player, if you have one. days, not many people have them these days, right? That then converts it to an analog signal, but that signal is electrical.
It's not sound. It's still in the electrical domain. It doesn't become sound until first it's amplified further by an amplifier. And then at the end of the amplifier, you have a speaker system. When the electrical signal enters the speaker system or headphones, right, then it becomes sound. So what's happening is in the electrical domain,
Frequencies that are coming off the CD player or could be a digital media player, it makes no difference. Those signals are mixing together, creating new frequencies, some of them higher, some of them lower, right? And it's these lower frequencies which are so important for vagal stimulation. Now, the other great surprise about all of this, Jiani, is that it's not every album that has this effect.
And this is a bit of a mystery. It's a delicious mystery that I will get to the bottom of at some point, but not every album. So what I did this day, so excited, you know, I went up into our home because our lab here is connected to our home. I went up into the home, brought down a whole bunch of CD albums and tested many, many albums and a tiny fraction have this effect, this audio effect and all the rest don't have it.
MAGICademy Podcast (42:39)
Hehehehehe
John Stuart Reid (43:01)
So what I've done, and I'd be happy to share it with you and with your viewers, is to supply this list, this PDF document, which contains all of the albums that I've so far found that have this very important effect. Now, the other aspect of this, which is crucial, is that you must listen. If you want optimal vagal system stimulation, you must experience this music, any of these albums.
via high quality headphones that have a published frequency response that starts at 5 Hz. It has to be published. Now most headphones, if you look at them, particularly the wireless headphones, the Bluetooth headphones, the bone conduction headphones, none of those have, well you'll find they're all published at 20 Hz. Published from 20 Hz up to some high figure, right? But never below 20.
If you want to get headphones that start at 5 Hz, which is what you need for optimal vagal stimulation, you must buy cord attached headphones. even then, you've got to look at the published frequency response and make sure it starts at 5 Hz.
Now, most downloads, unless you make an inquiry with the artist, most of them are MP3 these days. And the reason that
the MP3 compression is simply because they don't take up so much space on your media player, it's so much memory. But the problem with that is that MP3 is a hugely compressed form of audio, which unfortunately these days, you know, a lot of people have got used to that muddy kind of sound, it is muddy, there's no doubt about it. But I very, I remember...
going back a long time now, when I very first heard MP3, I was absolutely shocked how bad it was. And then as the years go on, I've become kind of like everyone else, to some degree, maybe not so much with other people, but a little bit more immune to the, I used to it, in other words, I'm used to the muddy sound. But if you listen to the difference between, if you have a comparator system,
where you play the same music, right, from MP3 through, one speaker, and then a moment later, you hear the same music on a wave file from the other speaker. my God. It's like, woo, it's so much better, right? Well, your body knows this, right? It's not just your consciousness now making that choice and saying, yes, I like
MAGICademy Podcast (45:33)
you
John Stuart Reid (45:49)
wave file sound far better than the MP3. Your cells know it at a very deep level.
MAGICademy Podcast (45:55)
Yeah. And I have a follow up question actually. Is there, cause you were talking about there are CDs or music that's already been produced that has such an effect. Is this possible into the future that we can generate, create those type of music that
is of at lower hertz directly
John Stuart Reid (46:21)
the answer is that it's actually very easy to create albums that have these very low frequencies already embedded in them. It would be very easy for a music producer to be able to do that. And so I don't see any issue with that at all in a recording studio. The only thing I think the challenge with it would be
that anyone who's creating albums that have these very low frequencies embedded in them would have to give a warning, I guess, to users not to use these with a speaker system because you would blow the cones out on the speaker system, right? If you had these five hertz frequencies on them and you're using them through a 10 kilowatt sound rig or whatever, you know, it would be...
MAGICademy Podcast (47:07)
Why
low frequency will blow the speaker system?
John Stuart Reid (47:12)
Well, for
two reasons. know, one is that the resonant frequency of the very large speakers, would cause them cause these very low frequencies would cause destruction basically of the resonant medium, you know, the cone and the coil, the voice coil and so on. It would literally cause them to explode. Well, not explode, just not explode. I'm using a wrong word there. It would.
MAGICademy Podcast (47:34)
Explode?
⁓
John Stuart Reid (47:38)
it would cause them to destruct basically. other linked to that is that you have to know, and I think this is common knowledge, that low frequency sound carries far more energy than high frequency sound. So the lower than the frequency, the more energy, literally the more energy in that sound. So obviously, if we're talking five hertz to 10 hertz, there's a huge amount of energy that's
literally feeding into this case into a speaker system and it was just it would just destruct basically they're not designed for it you know the design 20 Hertz lowest frequency because
MAGICademy Podcast (48:13)
When you
lower.
When you say energy, what do mean by that?
John Stuart Reid (48:19)
Well, what does anyone mean by energy? know, energy is the amount of power, you know, whatever word you want to use. But basically, energy is power. You know, it's watts. If you're talking about literally, you know, the units, it's watts, which is volts times amps. And how much voltage and how much current is going into the speech coil of the speaker is how many watts the speaker can handle.
And that is a unit of energy, basically. And so too much energy equals destruction of the speaker. In other words, if you turn the volume up too high, any speaker will blow, wouldn't it? If it's too much energy for the speaker, it will blow. Well, but it's not only a function of volume, it's also a function of current. Voltage times current equals power, equals watts.
MAGICademy Podcast (48:54)
me.
Mmm. Mmm. Mmm.
John Stuart Reid (49:09)
And so the overall amount of energy will ultimately destroy a speaker if there's too much of it. so this is why, anyway, this is just one thing I'm mentioning relating to, there'd have to be warnings on music files to say, do not use this file with speaker system.
MAGICademy Podcast (49:26)
Mm-hmm. see. also, sorry, I just have another follow-up questions about this, because we wanted to come back to the focus of the vagus nerve system. So I did see one
where, because coming, using vagus nerve systems is kind of
going ⁓ the mainstream a little bit like people have been talking about it like Vegas nerve Vegas nerve resets and things like that and so I see there's a product where it's kind of like a small vibrator like they have like two lines and you wear it and then they generate those physical vibrations to massage your
your vagus nerve at the back of your neck and there are people doing live demonstration where I can definitely see that she, I think it's genuine, it's from like very nervous all the way to like super relaxed. So is this similar to sound?
John Stuart Reid (50:30)
Yes, because the
vagus nerve system, like all the nerves in your body, can be stimulated either sonically or electrically. And this is the piezoelectric effect in humans is interchangeable. So, you know, there was a discovery made in 2005 by the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark, Copenhagen, that the primary role of nerves in the body is to conduct sound.
The primary role of nerves in the body is to conduct sound. However, the sound, any sound that's flowing in your nerves automatically creates electricity due to the myelin sheath and the piezoelectric effect. So just as I'm saying, you can put sound into the pinnars of your ears and create stimulation of your vagus nerve system.
Equally, if you want to access your vagus nerve as it goes down the left and right side of your neck, if you want to access it electrically, you can do so with these various devices that you're talking about. However, you what I would say about that is it's nowhere near as pleasant as listening. I mean, who wants their neck to be tingled? know, it's nowhere near as pleasant as listening to beautiful music, specifically
Music that you have chosen yourself, right? You love this music So you look at my audio list and you say ⁓ I don't like that. Don't like I love this music Right you choose that music so you're not only going to be stimulating your vagus nerve optimally you're also going to be getting the hit of dopamine because Dopamine is produced in your brain and in your enteric music enteric nervous system your gut in other words
when you love the music. If you love the music, you get dopamine, get serotonin, you get oxytocin, all of these beautiful feel-good, you know, hormones are flooding your bloodstream and making you feel wonderful. Not only that, but there's a direct correlation between dopamine levels and T cells, the white blood cells in your blood. So in other words, if you...
MAGICademy Podcast (52:18)
Hahaha
John Stuart Reid (52:42)
If you have high levels of dopamine, you also have a proliferation of white blood cells. In other words, your immune cell count is going to go up. So you're getting that as well as the Vagal stimulation, you know, which you wouldn't get with tingling your neck. Right? So I'm not saying that those things are, those devices are useless. Of course, they're very efficacious. If you're okay with tolerating your neck being tingled, it's not the way that I would prefer to do it.
MAGICademy Podcast (52:58)
Hahaha
Right, because when I feel like this, my body is sending me the signal like everything's very tense and I'm kind of going into this defense mode and then wait until physical things come and then we relax by physical measures. But when I'm thinking of listening to music, I get a sense that my body is opening, my mind is opening. I'm in a very opening and relaxing, joyful state, welcoming the music into my system. Yeah, it's two different...
John Stuart Reid (53:32)
Exactly.
Absolutely.
I mean, you know, to be totally fair, mainstream, there are mainstream medical, there's an FDA approval on a device called Alpha Stim. I think Stim is S-T-I-M, Alpha dash Stim. And this medically approved, FDA approved and other, you know, other medical associations approved for stimulation of your vagus nerve system. And in that case, you put too little
electrodes on the, on your ear lobes, right? And that sends very small microcurrents into your, into your pinners basically, and therefore, you know, down into your vagus nerve system. Very well documented, great studies available and so on. But you know, do you really want to stimulate your vagus nerve system with tingly ears? You know, personally, no, I'd rather listen to beautiful music. So anyway.
MAGICademy Podcast (54:28)
yeah
for sure music and and tinkling yes music more sustainable by
as when you were little, when you were a little kid, what did you enjoy doing and creating so much that time disappeared for you?
John Stuart Reid (54:52)
I loved creating sound, you know, this is, I this is one of the reasons I became an engineer in sound, I became an acoustics engineer and ultimately became an acoustic physics scientist. So this is obviously very much in my DNA. So even as a child, you know, I would play with sounds. In fact, it was at my third birthday party, third birthday,
MAGICademy Podcast (54:56)
Hehehehehe
John Stuart Reid (55:18)
that my parents, I don't know how they knew this, but they must have had a reason to know that I was fascinated by sound even at three, because they bought me a spinning top, one of those where you pump it up with a handle, you know, and it makes this beautiful chord, musical chord. And I played with that spinning top so much that eventually I unfortunately broke it and then I was in tears, you know. And then I went on to discover many other ways of
creating sound like for example, little tumbler glasses, you know, filled with a certain degree of water that I would play with a spoon. You tap each glass with a different, create a different frequency of sound, things like that. Time just disappeared for me when I was making any kind of sound. And I loved also going across the open top of a pop bottle, you know, like the embouchure effect is.
MAGICademy Podcast (56:04)
you
John Stuart Reid (56:12)
what I now know of course. When I was three and four years old I didn't know what it was I just knew that I liked the sound of that ombushure effect you know. So anyway that was the way that I enjoyed my childhood making sounds.
MAGICademy Podcast (56:25)
What role do you childlike wonder play in your
John Stuart Reid (56:29)
Well, it plays out every day of my life. You know, I come into my lab here. I get the joy of seeing sound made visible in the cymoscope instrument almost every day. And the beauty, you know, I'm moved. I'm physically, I'm emotionally moved by beauty. I always have been. And it can often bring tears to my eyes. I just, you know, love beauty of any form in nature.
MAGICademy Podcast (56:32)
Thank
John Stuart Reid (56:53)
And so seeing sound made visible, I'm so privileged, Jiani, to have had the opportunity to create, to invent the Simoscope instrument and to see that beauty almost every day from sounds that people send me or whatever it is that I'm working on research-wise. I get that great privilege of seeing sounds made visible. And so that's a really important part of my life.
MAGICademy Podcast (57:19)
So beautiful. So as for us, the listeners, the people who are carrying our own lives and everywhere over the world, what is one simple suggestions or actions that we can do a daily basis that will help us anchor back into this tranquility, this beauty of everyday, what we call life.
John Stuart Reid (57:43)
gratitude, have gratitude for all the blessings in your life. You know, there's an old saying, isn't it? Count your blessings. And I think it's very, very true. It's very easy in this busy world that we, busy lives that we all have to forget, you know, that we have so many blessings in our lives and just be grateful because when I go into my heart and I,
MAGICademy Podcast (57:44)
before. ⁓
John Stuart Reid (58:06)
really think about all the blessings that I have, the gratitude, I conjure up that sense of gratitude, then any little, you know, challenges just go away, basically melt away, because I then go into a place of tranquility because of that great sense of gratitude.
MAGICademy Podcast (58:19)
You ⁓
so beautiful. Oh my goodness. Thank you, John, for sharing your gratitude, your beauty of being you, the research that you have been doing, your deep quest for truth, your deep quest for finding ways that we can help.
John Stuart Reid (58:31)
Thank
MAGICademy Podcast (58:46)
what we hear normally music to help us heal, help us fine tune our vagus nerve systems and even to save lives. And so I'm sharing and I'm sending you a lot of gratitude for I see you, our audience see you and we're holding space for you.
to continuously explore and discover and finding ways to apply what you have discovered into our daily, what we think is ordinary but actually extraordinary life we all have and we all share. And it's such a great pleasure to have you at the end in this space.
John Stuart Reid (59:30)
Thank you so much for those
beautiful words. Thank you so much, Jiani. It's been a great pleasure and many blessings to you and to everyone watching. Bye bye.
Your Vagus Nerve: The Body’s Master Regulator
The vagus nerve — a pair of nerves that leave the brain stem, first branch off to the pinna of each ear (your outer ears), then pass down either side of your neck and connect with almost all major organs: your pharynx, larynx, lungs, heart, liver, kidneys, pancreas and gut. And if a person suffers an accident that severs their spinal cord, paralyzing part of their body, the vagus nerve is the reason they can go on living because autonomic breathing and heart functions can continue, along with other essential organs.
When the vagus is well-tuned, the body operates in a calm, integrated balance. When it is not, the consequences run deep — most seriously in the form of chronic inflammation. Reid is precise about the distinction: “Short-term acute inflammation is an essential aspect of the healing process, but long-term chronic inflammation is a slippery slope that may result in cancer if it is not reversed.” The mechanism that underpins chronic inflammation is known as “cytokine storm”, an imbalance in pro and anti-inflammatory cytokines.
While there is no magic pill that a doctor can prescribe to reverse chronic inflammation, a growing body of published medical research has found that optimal vagal stimulation can rebalance the cytokines, causing the storm to abate, balance to be reestablished, and the body to return to homeostasis. Reid references studies citing up to 50% improvement in cancer prognosis with optimal vagal stimulation, and studies that show promise for treating a wide range of medical conditions, including Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Parkinson’s disease, Sickle Cell disease, Diabetes type 2, in addition to benefits for those suffering from depression, epilepsy or cancer. One study mentions that optimal vagus stimulation even slows the rate at which we age, something we are all interested in!
Why Your Outer Ears Are the Gateway to Healing
The studies show that extremely low frequencies are needed to optimally stimulate the vagus system. Returning to why Nature connected the vagus nerve to the pinnas, Reid points to the sound of wind in the trees (psithurism), white noise from rivers, waterfalls and ocean waves on the seashore, all of which contain extremely low frequencies, sounds that were present for millions of years during the evolution of life on Earth. It seems that Nature leveraged these sounds to help ensure optimal vagal tone. Today, the electronics industry has given us a marvellous way to create a copious amount of extremely low frequencies: music. But the barrier to develop music-based medical systems, as he sees it, is economic: “Who’s going to invest into music as medicine?”
The densest concentration of vagal fibres sits at the tragus, the small cartilage flap at the entrance to the auditory canal. This is not a hearing mechanism. It is a direct portal into the vagal system. Touch the tragus lightly with your fingertips and, as Reid puts it, “my goodness, you get shivers down your spine”. The ears are so sensitive to touch they are often thought of as an erogenous zone.
Although regular stereo systems produce high fidelity music, frequencies below 20 Hz are routinely filtered out during music production to protect speakers, and frequencies below 16 Hz are inaudible, so standard audio systems are not ideal for delivering optimal vagal stimulation. However, while analysing the album “Dream of the Blue Whale” by Anders Holte and Cacina Meadu, he observed frequencies on his lab spectrum analyser below 12 Hz — frequencies that were not present on the recording itself, precisely what medical researchers have identified as optimal for vagal stimulation.
Not every album produces this effect — only a small fraction do, for reasons Reid describes as “a delicious mystery” that he intends to investigate. He has compiled a curated list of confirmed albums that create the healing effect, which he shares freely.
His separate blood research adds supporting context: in experiments immersing human blood in music, pop music — with its “throbbing, pounding, pulsing bass beat” — outperformed classical music in increasing red blood cell viability, consistent with the idea that low-frequency bass energy is the active ingredient.
The Listening Protocol: Four Things That Matter
Wired headphones, 5 Hz response. Bluetooth and wireless models publish responses from 20 Hz up — they cannot reproduce the sub-bass range and therefore are not suitable for optimal vagal stimulation. (welcome to email John for some recommendations)
No MP3. Compression strips the harmonic detail that heterodyning depends on. Reid’s blood experiments showed measurably weaker results with MP3 versus uncompressed WAV. Use CD, WAV, or FLAC.
Music you love. Genuine enjoyment triggers dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin — and dopamine correlates directly with T-cell proliferation, reinforcing the immune benefit of the vagal stimulation itself.
The Simplest Practice You’re Not Doing
Reid listens to “Dream of the Blue Whale” at breakfast most mornings. “It gently washes over us and is a great start to our day,” he says, although it is one of many albums on his curated healing list. He also notes that singing is another natural route to vagal tuning — the nerve branches directly to the larynx. “People who sing are generally very healthy because of this.” The blood research underpinning all of this, conducted with professor Sungchul Ji (emeritus, Rutgers University) that began in 2018, is at the point of being submitted for peer review. In out-of-lab studies are in planning. The science is still early. But the mechanism is grounded in established physics and consistent with what medical researchers have already published on vagal stimulation and inflammation.
⭐John & MAGIC
Asked what made time disappear for him as a child, Reid does not hesitate: sound. A spinning top at his third birthday party — the kind you pump to make a musical chord — kept him absorbed until he broke it, at which point he moved on to tapping tumbler glasses filled with water and blowing across bottle tops for that low round tone he now knows as the embouchure effect. That wonder never left. Today he comes into his lab, watches sound made visible in the CymaScope — an instrument he invented — and is still moved by. “I’m physically and emotionally moved by beauty,” he says. “Witnessing beauty often brings tears to my eyes.” For Reid, wonder is not separate from science. It is the source of it.
John Stuart Reid is an acoustic physics scientist and inventor of the CymaScope instrument. His music-blood research with Professor Sungchul Ji (emeritus, Rutgers University) is in the process of peer review. Readers are encouraged to consult the primary sources on cytokine rebalancing and cancer prognosis, which are cited in Reid’s article: Sound Therapy 201, available via this link:
Sound Therapy List: https://soundmadevisible.com/product/sound-therapy-201-pdf-download/
CymaScope App: https://soundmadevisible.com/product/cymascope-app/?v=7885444af42e
Healing album list: Not all music generates the necessary sub-bass frequencies regardless of playback quality. Reid’s curated list is the essential starting point and his available on request from: john [at] cymascopefoundation.com
Creative Process
Discuss Potential Outlines: Human + ai
Create Initial Drafts & Iterate: Human + ai
Ensure Guest Alignment: John Stuart Reid
Ensure Final Alignment: Dr. Jiani Wu
Initial Publication: Mar 21, 2026
Disclaimer:
AI technologies are harnessed to create initial content derived from genuine conversations. Human re-creation & review are used to ensure accuracy, relevance & quality.
