For & Against Humming

By Atom Bergstrom

Atom’s Blog

A recent Facebook dialogue …

Me: “Humming a tune activates both brain hemispheres.”

GJ: “Show me. I want to see where you got this.”

Me: “Gordon Stokes and Daniel Whiteside, in the 1980s.

“Poetry does the same thing, according to other sources.

“And, of course, the split brain isn’t as simplistic as some people posit.”

CG: “Do this often; bet whistling does same thing!”

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GJ: “You mean the book, One Brain? I’ve read this book and I can’t recall anything like this mentioned about humming and hemispheric activation.”

Me: “Or from Stokes. I never met Whiteside.

“Might be time to find my copy of One Brain and read it again.”

NK: “I tune my entire being every day and free of expressions any time of the day!! Melody and pitch are so important as well.”

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Me: “Also, George Goodheart used humming in combination with the gamut spot (on the back of the hand) to accomplish the same thing.

“And who was it that used the Humming Bee Breath for a similar purpose?

“Supposedly, snoring does the same thing (at least the rarer kind associated with delta brain waves).

“Many Muscle Response Testers use combinations of tapping, humming, and eye movements to connect various parts of the brain, similar to the Gurdjieffian “Work” exercises to remove the “buffers” from all the isolated “boxcar little I’s” that make up the ordinary human persona.”

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KS: “Have you heard of Robert Monroe? He was into Hemi-Sync.”

Me: “Friends made copies of Hemi-Sync for me. I never used them because of the human voice. The stresses in learning words from someone are transmitted to the listener when learning a language — one way of transmitting disease states —so I avoid any kind of voice-overs while I’m in a relaxed state. It’s a type of unintentional (the speaker) and unsuspected (the listener) hypnosis or trance formation. Half-awake half-asleep states leave us vulnerable to both conscious (speech) and unconscious (phonemes) programming.”

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Me: “I once met a Yogi who could hum (and even sing) with his tailbone. Not his anus like certain Japanese entertainers, but by resonating his tailbone.

“I wrote a One Radio Network blog entry about it — “Nada Yogi (& Master of Taan) Meets Nitty-Gritty,” Apr. 25, 2011.

“His name was Swami Nadabrahmananda (1896-1993).”

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Not everyone’s a fan of humming,

Hilda Deighton & Gin Palermo (Singing and the Etheric Tone: Gracia Ricardo’s Approach to Singing based on her work with Rudolf Steiner, 1991) wrote …

“Humming is the consonant ‘m’ prolonged. It closes the lip and draws the sound into the nasal cavities. It is sometimes considered helpful in relieving tension in the throat, but when ‘m’ is used in this way the teacher is correcting one vocal fault by replacing it with another. The resonance, which some seek through humming, must be attained not by activating the resonating cavities of the head with the ‘m’ consonant, but by coming to an understanding of the natural focusing resonance of the vowel ‘e’ in every intoned word. It is impossible to sing a tone on a consonant. The singer can produce no musical tone except through the medium of a vowel. Though many teachers believe that humming helps to focus the voice, the effort of consciously directing the voice through the ‘m’ sound can be a cause of strain. Tone is not a material substance and it cannot be put or placed anywhere. It is not mere sound, which can be measured according to its vibrations.”

According to the same source …

“This ‘ee’ resonance lifts the voice out of heaviness, giving it a quality of light. The ‘ee’ should live in every word that is sung and rise into the resonators of the head. But this ‘resonating ee,’ which resonates through all the vowels, should not be confused with the simple vowel ‘e.’ The simple ‘e’ vowel should, of course, also contain the ‘ee’ resonance.”

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The ‘ee’ is also the death rattle.

On the subject of “eee” before “aaah,” instead of “aaah before ‘eee,” Adano Ley (Swami Nitty-Gritty) said …

“Donkey will get you to Heaven, but those who have buttocks and don’t know how to fart through it may end up in Hell.”

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Obviously, Adano wouldn’t have approved of Wayne Dyer’s “aaah” before “eee” meditation technique.
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