SOUND DOWSING 1

An investigation into the improbable phenomenon of

enhancing recorded music by non-physical means

Bill Kenny

and

Nigel Twinn

Strange Meetings

The fabled Sufi Master Mullah Nasreddin is walking home. On reaching his house, he seems to be upset about something, until a young man comes along and sees his distress. “Mullah, what’s wrong?” the young man asks. “Ah, my friend, I seem to have lost my keys,” says Nasreddin. “I know I had them when I left the tea house.”

So, the young man diligently helps with the search for a while, but no keys are found. Then he looks over to Nasreddin, and finds him scouring a very small area underneath a street lamp. “Mullah, why are you only searching there?” the young man enquires politely. “Well, there’s no sense scrabbling around in the dark, is there?” says Nasreddin.

oooOooo

This site is about the arcane craft of dowsing (otherwise known as divining, as in water divining) and how it can help us understand human perception. Our starting point on this journey is sound – specifically musical sound – and the often-uncharted differences between listening and hearing. From this beginning we explore some elements of what dowsing might show us about a wider view of reality.

The idea came about after one of us (BK) heard the other (NT) giving a talk about Billy Gawn, the well-known dowser from Northern Ireland. NT had recently worked with Billy on writing and publishing a biography, Beyond the Far Horizon: Why Earth Energy Dowsing Works: The Life and Work of Billy Gawn.

Unbeknown to NT, BK had been working quietly (note the pun) for some years on ideas developed originally by Peter and May Belt of PWB Electronics in Leeds, UK. They had shown that anyone could improve the perceived sound from almost any domestic hi-fi equipment using unconventional and even bizarrely ‘unscientific’ methods.

The Belts’ breakthrough discovery was that even the most expensive audio equipment under-performed because adverse energies found in almost all modern environments interfered with human hearing – or at least with our everyday perceptions of sound. BK had written some articles about this for the MusicWeb International web site, way back in 2005 and his own researches followed on from the original work with some modest practical success. Sadly, very little progress in understanding how the Belts’ peculiar interventions worked had been made: the means by which the ‘sounds’ from compact discs or radio signals were noticeably improved by Belt ‘devices’ remained a nagging and puzzling mystery.

A Eureka Moment - of sorts

One of Billy Gawn’s important contributions to dowsing theory has been a suggested change of emphasis from trying to find specific targets – like the Sufi’s lost keys, power cables or underground water for example – to searching actively for relevant information about these targets.

Billy is a hugely experienced intuitive ‘deviceless’ dowser – someone who no longer requires rods, pendulums and or hazel twigs. Instead he has taught his eye muscles to show him the ‘informational knowledge’ he needs.

Billy’s idea suggests that information could be a key to understanding why our ‘dowsing for sound’ actually works. The approach has helped us think carefully about human perception – and we now wonder if the actual mechanisms of perception have more than a few elements in common with the sensitivities activated in dowsing than have been considered previously.

Needless to say, in choosing to look in this particular direction, we have stumbled into ever more complicated areas of human experience where good questions are more common than reasonable answers.

Because orthodox science has been very little help here, we have dug fairly deeply into theories and speculations from ‘alternative’ explorers. While most seem reasonably well thought out to us, they are all relatively unusual and fairly hard to digest. To make the task easier, we suggest exploring the site in sequence by opening the pages shown left to right in the ‘sliding door’ images at the top of each page.

With one significant exception, the items in the secondary menu are generally less demanding – and the DIY page contains some little exercises that readers can try out for themselves.

The Journey Continues

A couple of weeks after our first forays into the field, an opportunity arose to play music – with and without labels – to a group of open-minded friends at a meeting hall close to our home in Tavistock. I volunteered to give a talk entitled ‘What is Reality?’ and used the kitchen ghetto-blaster and the pizzica track as my stage props.

I gave a brief résumé of Bill’s work but, without too much of an explanation about what to expect, I went through a similar routine to the process that I had undertaken for ourselves. Dowsing at home the day before the talk, I had been given the indication that at least some of those attending would hear something. What I was not expecting was that just about everyone heard the music to sound differently with one of Bill’s labels in place. Several of my colleagues even used similar words to describe the experience, including ‘greater clarity’ and ‘better tone’ to the female vocals, and ‘a greater separation of the instruments’ in the sound image. I was pleasantly and genuinely surprised.

One of the group was the person who first taught me to dowse – a man who has remained both a good friend and a great mentor over the years. He is a free thinker, with his own ideas about the nature of earth energy dowsing – and a man not afraid to speak up when he feels others are talking nonsense. He not only heard a significant difference, but he also felt that the change appreciated over time (and, at that point, I had not described Bill’s idea of building in a repetitive cycling aspect to the labels – which we will describe in a subsequent chapter – that is intended to produce exactly that effect!)

If that wasn’t excitement enough for one short session, another colleague, a local healer and very experienced Cornwall-based dowser, was the one person to say that he was unsure if he had heard anything. He is also someone with his own views on the non-physical, and another fellow traveller, whom I am sure would not agree with my ideas just to make polite conversation.

To confirm whether he had actually dowsed anything using his hearing, he reverted to his more tried and trusted conventional tool – the pendulum. His dowsing indicated that he had indeed heard a slight improvement in the quality of the sound, but only by about 2%. Given that we were in a public hall, listening to a musical style none of those present (except myself) would ever have heard previously, a 2% improvement would have been hard to pin down by hearing alone.

However, his further important input was that his dowsing indicated that ‘typically’ people would experience about a 7% improvement with the use of an appropriate label in such circumstances.

My own subsequent dowsing implies that about 25% of a broad cross-section of people will hear no change, or next to no change, with around 10% hearing an improvement or 10% or more – tailing off to zero hearing around a 30% improvement. (So, this indicates that someone, somewhere, could be receiving almost a 30% improvement in perceived sound quality, just by sticking one of Bill’s labels on the power cable of an aging ghetto-blaster!)

Asking, by dowsing, about my own perception, it seems that typically I appear to experience a 5-6% enhancement, while Ros gets around a 7-8% boost. However, as we all know, dowsing can be a hugely subjective craft. I urge anyone reading this paper to both try out the labels described in the Do It Yourself section, and to apply their own dowsing to the results.

Knowing that dowsing tends to defy repeatability in group situations, I was very unsure if I should attempt even a small-scale experiment such as this. However, my own dowsing indicated that it would be successful, and that proved to be the case. Whether we can scale it up to a room full, or even a hall full of participants, time alone will tell. I will consult the rods when a suitable opportunity presents itself!

Billy Gawn - Dowsing and Information

The work of the renowned dowser from Northern Ireland, Billy Gawn, is pivotal to an understanding of the phenomena described on this website. However, his entry to the debate was somewhat tangential.

Having spent decades looking into the seemingly inexplicable experience of improved audio perception using typed labels on hifi components and power cables, Bill Kenny had filed away his Sound Information dossier in the mental drawer, conceptually marked ‘Interesting, but too hard!’. That was, until Nigel Twinn (NT) came along.

In the autumn of 2014, NT arrived in Chumleigh, in darkest mid-Devon, on a cold Tuesday evening, to give a talk on a biography that he had helped to compile a couple of years earlier. The book was Beyond the Far Horizon – Why earth energy dowsing works – and it concerned the life and work of Billy Gawn.

Billy is a farmer and builder from Ulster, who has been dowsing for longer than most dowsers have been alive. The vast majority of his long dowsing ‘career’ has been spent in the green fields of his homeland and, although his work deserves much greater attention, he is a very modest man.

Consequently, few outside the niche world of divining have even heard of him – and that is a great pity, because his work and ideas are as exciting and thought-provoking as he is humble.

Billy is perhaps best known for his seminal work on the involvement of moving underground water in the generation of detrimental energy – and the subsequent methods of dealing with this negativity, at least in the human realm, by the accurate positioning of (what we would now call) megaliths.

Billy has spent a lifetime developing such practical solutions to seemingly intransigent problems and, almost as a by-product, has also stumbled across some ground breaking hypotheses.

However, he has also developed a unique ability to work through the sometimes laborious process of dowsing by yes/no responses to carefully-crafted questions. He has put down his rods and has taught his eye muscles to do what the wrist muscles of practitioners do when they are employing traditional dowsing instruments such as L-rods or pendulums.

Effectively, this means he can ‘see’ the answers to his dowsing questions (albeit with his eyes shut!). This is actually a lot less weird in practice than it sounds in print – and it has enabled him to raise the platform from which he asks for his information by a whole storey.

Most pertinently to this case, it also enables him ask the critical question ‘Is there anything else I should know about this issue?’ – and to be shown an ‘image’, perhaps a little metaphorically, as to where his research should next be directed. This has made him, arguably, one of the most valuable, and most experienced, dowsers of the modern era.

While the full story of the unfolding of this revelation is described in Beyond the Far Horizon, the relevance to Sound Information is that Billy has dowsed that ‘beneath’ or ‘within’ the level of stuff, there is a level of ‘energy’ (which is very much in line with the direction of flow of emerging science). However, his insight has taken him one stage further, to appreciate that everything – even sub-atomic particles, even energy – are underpinned by a ‘level’ or ‘realm’ of interactive information. This is very much at the cutting edge of scientific hypothecation, but it is just starting to make an occasional appearance on the outer fringes of both scientific and of philosophical thought.

Billy’s conceptual leap could help to forge a workable explanation for the basis of all dowsing i.e. that it is the quest for data from the informational level. In other words we are, potentially, not dowsing for ‘stuff’ at all – but for the information that stuff is there. In the end, we may not be trying to detect and measure some mythical and improbable field of radiation, but we could well be directly divining information about the location and form of the target in question
.
Using this scenario, map dowsing and remote healing suddenly come back out of the ‘too strange to be true’ bin, and take their rightful place in the everyday portfolio of widespread human experience – and Sound Information suddenly acquires a new angle of approach. If we are listening for information rather than simply energetic vibration, could this be the first chink in the armour of the ring-fence that is preventing our understanding of how we might be able to ‘hear’ music more clearly than it might have seemed when originally broadcast or recorded? It certainly re-awakened Bill Kenny’s interest in the subject.

While dowsers and philosophers have an unavoidably laid back approach to ‘proof’, it’s still very welcome to come across a potential validation mechanism for a personal experience; one that is very hard indeed to dismiss merely as repeated misinterpretation!

Consciousness – The Hard Problem

Any speculation about how the ‘Sound Dowsing’ labels might work, would be incomplete without a parallel consideration of human consciousness. How can the labels possibly engage with, and alter, the perception of sound for most listeners? What is consciousness anyway, and how do we come to have it in the first place? What about the relationship between the ‘mind’ – assuming we actually have minds – and the human ‘brain’? These complex puzzles can often make our ‘brains hurt’ – as Monty Python’s John Cleese used to say.

Philosophers, .biologists, psychologists, neuroscientists and even some theologians refer to this matrix of questions as the Hard Problem. Nobody has solved the conundrum completely so far and, while all manner of alternative solutions have been proposed, almost all of them are either woefully incomplete or patently incorrect – or both.

This is actually a very strange state of affairs indeed, since human beings mostly believe that they are conscious, while rocks and house bricks probably aren’t. Most of us are also fairly happy with the idea that we have been kitted out with personal ‘minds’, and we mostly agree that these ‘minds’ seem to be located somewhere inside us, usually in our heads – at least that’s the concept in Western cultures. Surprisingly though, we are also equally untroubled by the fact that these same interior minds can also show us whole worlds – or even complete universes – which are definitely outside of our bodies and brains.

So, explaining (and then understanding) how these things happen – and then describing who or what this ‘I’ might be that experiences the separated inner and outer worlds, is what makes the Hard Problem so difficult to resolve. Yes, we can get superbly detailed pictures of how the bits of the human brain fit together, and how they mesh with the rest of the human body. We can record, with great accuracy, the electrical impulses in the brain (even when we are asleep). We can stimulate particular bits of a living brain electrically, so that the brain’s owner can feel anxious or relaxed on demand. However, there’s also a great deal more that no one yet understands.

Despite some really exciting breakthroughs into understanding brain activity and the brain’s functional mechanisms, we still have little or no idea about how the postage-stamp-sized images that fall on the retinas of healthy human eyes get ‘translated’ into detailed three-dimensional pictures of the ‘outside world’ – and subsequently allow us to do the remarkable things that we all take for granted. We can equally easily pick up a pin from our patterned living room carpet, or watch Test Match cricketers catch a cricket ball coming at them at up to 100 mph. Even more remarkably, we can recognise an object – or a place we have never seen before – from a verbal description of it.

The hardest question of all though asks how humans can translate all kinds of complicated ‘mental’ imagery into precise, useful information that allows us to survive and thrive in some seriously dangerous external worlds? Perhaps the strangest idea of all however is that we can also think about thinking.

After discovering that labels placed on audio equipment could instantaneously improve listeners’ perceptions of recorded and broadcast sound, BK felt compelled to look for some plausible explanation as to how this could happen.

A theoretical connection between the messages on the labels and Rupert Sheldrake’s ‘Morphic Resonance’ had been suggested by Mrs. Belt and seemed to offer a partial cause-and-effect relationship. However, a theory of consciousness that could link all such ideas together seemed vital to a more coherent understanding. Something extra was certainly needed to show how listeners (who knew nothing about the existence of ‘Morphic Message’ labels – let alone the content of their messages) could develop the greatly enhanced auditory sensitivity that they so regularly seemed to experience.

Finding some over-arching theory of consciousness that made the missing connection – especially if applying the theory itself to the labelling system could be shown to improve perceptions still further – would be a very useful step forward. After reviewing most of the popular theories concerning the Hard Problem, BK found himself revisiting the ancient idea of ‘pan-psychism’ – although mostly against his better judgement at the time – because of its self-evident appeal to dowsers.

Pan-psychism is: ‘… the view that mind or soul (Greek (’ψυχή’) is a universal feature of all things, and the primordial feature from which all others are derived. The panpsychist sees him or herself as a mind in a world of minds.’ (Wikipedia)

Hypothetically, this would imply that essentially everything in the universe has some form of consciousness (and that may well include rocks, although house bricks may seem rather less likely!) However, a corollary concept is that potentially all minds might actually be connected in some way.

It turns out that a surprisingly large number of historically important philosophers, from ancient Greek pre-Socratics, through to Bertrand Russell have flirted with versions of pan-psychism. Furthermore, there are a significant number of well-respected scientists who have taken the idea seriously too. The Nobel Prizewinning Physicist, David Bohm, whose book ‘Wholeness and the Implicate Order’ explains the reasons for doing so.

In the UK, the philosopher Professor Galen Strawson, is one of the theory’s most prominent modern exponents: he contends (as did Bohm) that, ‘experience is present all the way down’ from humans to sub-atomic particles.

It is inherent in the theory of pan-psychism that everything in the world has both physical and mental properties – and there is nothing that has no element of either.

In Part 2, we explore this idea in more detail, and ask if it could actually be true.

Douglas Hofstadter and his ‘Strange Loops’

Some initially attractive ideas can begin to feel slightly unacceptable after further consideration and, despite the obvious and romantic appeal of pan-psychism for dowsers, BK’s mind (or the thing ‘he’ still thinks of as his ‘mind’ anyhow) couldn’t quite accept the notion wholeheartedly. It felt ….. well, rather too easy a solution.

Somewhat surprisingly, a more comfortable alternative came to light from the work of the American mathematician and cognitive scientist, Douglas Hofstadter. His books – I Am a Strange Loop (2007), and the Pulitzer Prize winning study Gödel, Escher, Bach : an Eternal Golden Braid (GEB) (1979) – have both made important contributions to the study of consciousness, even though Hofstadter is essentially amaterialist scientist, as indeed most ‘respectable’ enquirers seem to be these days. Many materialists think that minds originate within our physical brains and somehow emerge from them.

What makes Douglas Hofstadter especially interesting, though, is his unique assertion that paradoxes – logical inconsistencies leading to impossible conclusions – are fundamental to the process of that emergence.

Hofstadter says that each human being is really an individualised point of view, with individual perspectives, which can exist in other media – like a composer’s written out scores, for example – outside of the brain. The most important element in Hofstadter’s argument is that a continuous process of self-reference is critical to the development of consciousness.

This is most significant when it leads to the formation of paradoxical statements, which in turn become what he calls ‘active symbols’ or ‘neurological patterns’. These symbols can be arranged – or else they arrange themselves – into the ‘tangled hierarchies’ of ideas that Hofstadter calls ‘Strange Loops’ and he finds prime examples of them in all of the arts and sciences.

The Dutch artist MC Escher’s famous ‘Waterfall’ lithograph (above) is a good graphical example of a visual tangled hierarchy. The water falls perfectly naturally from the apparent top of the picture downwards through a waterwheel only to continue to flow – once again apparently completely naturally – uphill – to provide the energy for a perpetual motion machine.

We know of course that this is an impossibility in the real world, but somehow there is a compelling ‘rightness’ about what we see. Verbal examples of self-referential paradox abound too, and often have an appealing whimsical quality about them. For example:

‘Do NOT read this sentence!’

and

‘The sentence following this one is false. The previous sentence is true.’

Or perhaps

‘This sentence no verb.’

Thoughts like these somehow stick in our heads and can develop a curious attractiveness of their own, which is often quite difficult to resist. Other forms of the arts, and even the sciences, are not immune either. JS Bach’s Musical Offering and The Art Of Fugue apparently contain deliberate Strange Loops according to Hofstadter, and in his masterful literary tour de force Gödel, Escher, Bach, he describes how the young and relatively unknown Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel managed, in 1931, to prove that the mighty Principia Mathematica, published by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead between 1910 and 1927, was itself riddled with self-reference, the very thing it was trying to expunge from mathematical theory.

The Principia’s primary purpose had been to make mathematical theory completely and consistently logical. However, Gödel said that all complex arithmetical and logical systems contain propositions that simultaneously refer both to the mathematical ideas themselves and to the symbol systems being used to describe them. This runs against even commonsense logic and so paradox is everywhere – including the formation of consciousness according to Hofstadter.

The Emergence of ‘I’?

To cut two very long stories short – and Hofstadter’s two volumes run to almost 1200 pages between them – Hofstadter claims that self-referential elements are inevitable consequences of the complexity of the symbols generated in the human brain.

The self-referring elements combine with the multifarious ways in which the brain symbols interlock to allow us to make comparisons between ideas that seem to have nothing to do with one another at first sight.

So Hofstadter argues we are not born with a sense of ‘I’-ness, but rather that this psychological sense of personal identity emerges gradually as we develop the enormous sets of symbols that we use to construe the world as we grow. Most importantly however, it is only when the symbol sets become rich or dense enough to begin to twist back on themselves (and become Strange Loops) that we form any sense of self at all.

Hofstadter says that in a way we hallucinate ourselves, but hallucinations, of course, can seem completely real to those who experience them.

As a well-worked out theory of consciousness, Hofstadter’s ideas certainly provide hefty amounts of food for thought – but that’s by no means the end of the story. Hofstadter spends a lot of time discussing the idea of soulfulness, and the possibility that the symbols and associations he describes can be somehow shared with other consciousnesses.

In an exceptionally moving account of the sudden death of his wife from a brain tumour, he explains that in some very real sense he had assimilated her points of view into (or even alongside) his own, on so many matters and so thoroughly, that they ceased to be independent perspectives at all. They were so close that the couple became able to see the world, almost literally, through each other’s eyes.

Similarly, Hofstadter also believes that the same phenomenon may arise through reading about another person’s thoughts.

It seems then that we may not be completely alone, or wholly isolated, from specific elements of other consciousnesses across both space and time. Perhaps it is true that in some yet undefined fashion, there is something (but only ‘some’ thing) of the pan-psychist lurking quietly in all of us even in double-dyed materialists. BK’s own inclinations are certainly leaning that way more than formerly so, here are some ideas that potentially support this point of view.

Firstly, on discovering Hofstadter’s work, BK noticed (and later discovered that Hofstadter himself had also noticed) a curious similarity between the impact of self-referential sentences and Zen Buddhist ‘koans’ – the Japanese spiritual exercises designed to raise and develop students’ self-awareness or self-consciousness. The well-known koan ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’, to which there is no immediately obvious answer, is perhaps not a million miles away from ‘This sentence no verb’.

There is a curious similarity too, at least at first sight, between the idea that our sense of self is a kind of hallucination and the commonly held belief in some Eastern religions – including Buddhism – that ‘the entire world is nothing more than a continuous illusion, which we must shake off in order to discover our true nature’.

And finally, to continue with the Buddhist theme: as far as BK can see, neither the messages on Tibetan Buddhist prayer wheels and prayer flags – some of which fly in his garden for personal reasons – nor the messages on the ‘Sound Dowsing’ labels have any physical connection with their intended recipients. But the intentions behind each of them (and, for all we know, their ultimate effects) do seem vaguely similar.

Looking at this situations from a dowser’s perspective, Albert Einstein’s statement that ‘we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them’ certainly seems to be another insight into the potential depth of these ideas.