SOUND DOWSING 2

Hearing and Listening

The sound is part of a famous auditory illusion called the Shepard-Risset Scale or sometimes the ‘Sonic Barber’s Pole.’ What we seem to hear are musical tones that continually rise in pitch, but which actually never get any higher or lower. You may be able to hear through to the true sounds if you listen to the excerpts a second time while looking at the optical illusion above.

Wikipedia explains that ‘the tones as heard above….were first published as the ‘discrete’ Shepard scale. Jean-Claude Risset subsequently created a version of the scale where the tones glide continuously, and it is appropriately called the ‘continuous’ Risset Scale or the Shepard-Risset glissando.

The scale does seem to rise in pitch, yet never actually deviates from its starting frequencies. According to Wikipedia, ‘Risset has also created a similar effect with rhythm in which tempo seems to increase or decrease endlessly.’ The glissando also happens to be an example of what the American Cognitive Scientist Douglas Hofstadter calls a ‘Strange Loop’, which we will discuss in some detail in our section on Consciousness.

Darkness and Light versus Noise and Silence

One of the more curious aspects of thinking about sound (and to some extent, thinking about almost all philosophical thought), is that a good deal of the language used to describe experiences – at least in English – uses terms that are actually visual in nature. We ‘see the light’ when we finally understand something after struggling to work it out, and differences in pitch between musical tones are often described as ‘the distances’ between them – not to mention one sound being ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ than another. Likewise, discrete sections of musical works such as symphonies or sonatas are often called ‘movements’.

Now, however, we want to ask whether Goethe’s ‘Theory of Colour’ has any implications for thinking about sound – the main topic in this section. In fact, we can speculate that it might have, at least in terms of its methods and procedures, which we suggest have some marked similarities to those of dowsing.

Goethe’s method of carrying out a scientific enquiry was to attempt to discover or mentally grasp the essential nature of human experiences (as in, ‘Yes, I’ve got hold of that now’), rather than being content with fitting them into existing theoretical frameworks. According to Henri Bortoft in ‘The Wholeness Of Nature – Goethe’s Way With Science’ Goethe was trying to reach more intensively into our natural sensory capacities to reveal the intrinsic understandability of the thing under investigation. He was, in fact, interested in developing our capacities for perception.

Since Goethe had discovered that the human eye reacted in very different ways when exposed to total darkness – when the eye’s innate ‘propensity towards light’ seemed likely to be dominant (or to very bright light, when ‘an inclination towards darkness’ was activated), we wonder if there might be a similar pair of opposites within the behaviour of the human ‘ear.’ Can we say anything sensible for example about ‘the ear’s’ reaction to Noise and Silence? If we can, what (if anything) might that have to do with music?

There are clearly some marked differences between visual and auditory activity, especially within the mechanics of how we experience our vision and our hearing. Vision, naturally enough, is mediated essentially by the eye, but hearing – especially the processes by which we hear our own voices – is mediated both by the ear, but also by conduction through the bones and sinus cavities in our skulls. This is why our voices sound unfamiliar when we hear recordings of ourselves. It is also why the extremely loud music heard at rock concerts and discos uses – and needs – the visceral quality generated by high acoustic volumes to provide its emotional effects. The excitement we feel comes, in part, from our bodies literally vibrating when exposed to sustained high levels of loud noises.

If we think of sound then, as ‘the perceived summation of noise and silence’ the possibility of a parallel ‘Goethian’ Theory of Sound seems worthy of exploration – as long as we remember that it is theexperience of sound that we are trying to grasp here, rather than the physics of the transmission of sound, or of acoustics. Once we begin to do this, sound is revealed as having some important characteristics that we might not otherwise notice or rank as especially important.

Some examples may help to explain this concept. Sound alone can tell us about the shapes of things – for instance when we have no visual clues to follow. (Imagine the sound of a small solid cube rolling around inside a closed wooden or cardboard box, contrasted with the sound of a sphere inside the same box.) Sound can also help us think about our breathing, when other noises around us are quiet enough to allow us to hear it. This is a process often used during meditation.

Sound can even be self-referencing. (once again see the section concerning Consciousness to understand more). As evidence of this, BK first discovered his age-related hearing loss, through the so-called ‘Cocktail Party Effect’, whereby the inability to filter out loud background noises prevents a listener hearing what someone close-by is saying.

Listening To Silence

By contrast, in 1952 the American composer John Cage devised a concert piece called 4′ 33″ (four minutes and thirty three seconds), in which a performer sits in front of a grand piano, raises the cover from the keyboard and remains completely silent and motionless for the designated time period. There are no sounds at all, except those that emanate from the concert hall and from the audience. At the end of the performance – for such it really is – the pianist closes the keyboard’s cover, takes the customary bow and leaves the platform, often to considerable applause.

For readers with sufficient stamina, a YouTube video of a complete UK ‘orchestral’ performance ‘conducted’ by Lawrence Foster can be found HERE along with a post-performance commentary from BBC presenters and written comments from YouTube visitors.

Note: There’s a new, rather interesting and highly relevant article about John Cage today (28.11.2015) in MusicWeb International. We hope that some of our visitors may find it helpful to our discussion here. BK.

Using this ‘Post-Goethean’ framework, which space prevents us from expanding anything like as much as it deserves, we can begin to think about music as organised noise and silence – as opposed to the more common definition of ‘organised sound.‘ The silences within music – as any musician will confirm – are at least as important as the noises. Couple this with the overloaded ‘Goethean’ ear’s natural ‘propensity towards silence’, and it seems to us unsurprising that Hearing and Listening are activities that are increasingly neglected in favour of more and more visual imagery – and also to the more-than-aptly named ‘sound bite.’

We might all benefit from learning to listen more attentively it seems, especially perhaps to apparent silences themselves – during which, there may be a lot more going on than we generally assume – but also to the silences within music. There are certainly many more of those than we usually notice, and listening for them deliberately often makes music much more interesting.

Morphic Labelling

Improving the Perception of Sound

The more energy, the faster the bits flip. Earth, air, fire and water; in the end they are all made of energy but the different forms they take are determined by information. To do anything requires energy. To specify what is done requires information.

Seth Lloyd

‘The Computational Capacity Of The Universe’

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Thoughts as 'Things'

The idea that thoughts can be ‘things’ cropped up in an article by Sally Cunis, entitled Thoughts on Reality, and originally published in the Devon Dowsers magazine in 2002. Following on from the insight of Hamish Miller and others, the article considers the possibility of human beings ‘co-creating’ the worlds we inhabit in some detail. After reading it for the first time, BK had the feeling that the idea was just more ‘New Age flim-flam’ but, after subsequent experience with further labelling experiments, he slowly came to realise that this point of view might have to change!

Months of attempting to ‘explain’ how the labels might work, from a variety of interlocking theoretical perspectives, proved fairly fruitless when it came to fitting all the ideas together – something that Mullah Nasreddin would have called ‘scrabbling around in the dark.’

The worldview emerging from this way of thinking was certainly leading nowhere useful – so discovering where the ‘light was better’ felt imperative. Once again though, Goethe’s way of thinking through these difficulties was to provide a way out – or rather – a way in to resolving the problems. We simply needed to remember to think like Dowsers.

Witnesses for the Defence?

Our remaining ‘hard problem’ was that we wanted to be able to understand the labels on a personal basis (in the manner prescribed by Goethe) rather than merely explaining them in abstract terms. In particular, we needed to identify what both Billy Gawn and Seth Lloyd (in the quotation above) really meant by ‘information’, and then to find a means of fitting it into the restricting framework of a written message. A good map, for example, provides information about the terrain it covers, as does a printed score for a piece of music, or a technical drawing for making a table or a car. Similarly, mathematical or chemical formulae can define the components involved in particular situations, but they will also identify the relationships between them.

So we needed to specify both the form of the information we required in order to improve the perception of sounds, as well as its essential content. Without either of these components the necessary frameworks for our messages would continue to remain too difficult to identify clearly – even perhaps from within dowsing theory.

For dowsers who specialise in searching for lost objects, animals or people – or who use their skills to find water or mineral lodes – the use of a ‘witness’ is a fairly standard method of reinforcing the dowsing ‘signal’. A witness, in this sense, is something that relates to, is similar in composition to, or belongs to the object of the search. Typically, this would be a piece of hair or clothing, or an object of personal importance (such as a watch or a piece of jewellery) for individuals. In the case of animals it could be a chunk of fur and for water and minerals, a sample of the substance, either held in the hand of the dowser or placed in a small sample container attached to a dowsing device, might be regarded as appropriate. The purpose of the witness is believed to be to reinforce the visualisation of the dowser on the object of the search. A photograph of the dowsing target might also be considered to be a witness in this context.

However, the processes involved are much less apparent – although physical proximity to the DNA, or to the atomic structure of the target may be one explanation. Any kind of explanation however, seems to require a degree of ‘etheric’ information transfer, as the witness could not, in itself, physically pass its information on to the quester.

Visualisation apart, information transfer is actually the only rational way of applying logic to the widespread use of witnesses by experienced dowsing practitioners. The line of reasoning would seem to be that the witness and the object should have similar, or even identical, information structures. Then the dowser could use the information structure of the witness to find its source in the ‘information field’ – and from there to locate an object, or an entity, of a similar or identical information structure somewhere in the dowser’s current space and time.

The Labels as Witnesses –

Emulations as Informational Descriptors

A Goethian thought experiment powered by caffeine-induced attentiveness, asking the question ‘What would the informational components of the labels look like?’ revealed the slightly unexpected answer – ‘Like emulations of the target objects.’

When the question was rephrased as ‘How could an observer experience the informational components in the labels?’ (a phenomenological format, completely in keeping with Goethe’s own investigative methods) then the answer remained much the same i.e. simply by imagining what needed to be emulated.

The point here is that absolutely anything can be ’emulated’, while a ‘simulation’ can not. Emulation can be a wholly imaginative process, whereas any kind of simulation seems to us to need some kind of physical similarity to the ‘target.’ The similarity might of course be fairly crude, but we suggest something of the sort will always be necessary for true ‘simulation’ to occur. More importantly however, we can emulate thoughts, feelings and experiences from any point in time, past, present or future, all of which may be relevant aspects of information about the quest undertaken or pursued.

From our point of view then, the crucial reason for choosing an emulatory formulation here is that there seem to be absolutely no limits of any kind as to what can be emulated. This discovery seems to us to unleash literally infinite numbers of possibilities, to be explored in the future.

Because anything we can imagine can be emulated effectively so long as we choose our information carefully, it seems that emulation can be a very powerful aid to all kinds of dowsing. We can emulate any object we choose from the everyday world for example, as in: A PERFECT DOMESTIC HIFI LOUDSPEAKER’ (a completely imaginary device, which by other reasoning should have no effect at all on the perceived sound from a cheap domestic music system – but which does seem to be demonstrably effective once we ‘create’ the idea).

At the other end of the scale of possibilities more personalised – and also far more abstract – ideas can also be explored, such as:

EMULATION OF SYNERGISTIC RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN A LISTENER’S PHYSIOLOGY AND ALL SURROUNDING ELECTRO-MAGNETIC FIELD ACTIVITY.

Importantly, it does not seem to be necessary to have any first hand personal experience of the object(s) or concept(s) to be emulated. A clear and specific idea about them seems to be sufficient.

We should note, too, that emulation messages appear to be able to transcend temporal boundaries such that the message

‘EMULATION OF THE ORIGINAL MUSICAL PERFORMANCES FINALLY RECORDED OR BROADCAST’

has also consistently proved to have positive effects – even when listening to ‘historical’ performances!

The Message is the Medium – passing Iiformation onward to intended recipients

In contrast to the difficulties involved in working out how to encode information into the labels, building in some means of ‘sending’ the information on to listeners turned out to be relatively simple. Rupert Sheldrake’s ‘Morphic Resonance’ was an obvious candidate, providing that a suitable instruction to ‘engage’ with it could be found.

A second ‘thought experiment’ brought up the fairly obvious idea that the encoded information in the message could, in fact, be mediated by Morphic Resonance between the label’s information and the listener.

This implied that the label should actually specify this idea, and a completed message would therefore include statements about the emulations it contained, PLUS the types of mediation (as there could actually be several kinds) used to send the emulations onward.

EMULATION OF A SPECIFIED SPEAKER (for example) could be MEDIATED BY RUPERT SHELDRAKE’S MORPHIC RESONANCE

– or by any other mechanism that might cross the boundaries between more than one consciousness. CG Jung’s ‘Collective Unconscious’ might be another usable mechanism, or perhaps Lynne McTaggart’s ‘Bond.’ (See L. McTaggart – The Bond : The Power Of Connection.

More suggestions of how readers might construct their own labels are given in our ‘Do It Yourself‘ page. Before that, however, we need to discuss whether personal intent plays any part in the effectiveness of the labels.

Intention, Attention and Mindfulness

We are sometimes asked why the labels are necessary at all to produce the effects that they do. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier,’ some might say, ‘just to think the messages they contain, or perhaps just to express the intention that the desired results will materialise?’. BK has found a serious problem with the first suggestion, however, in that the messages are now so complicated and multi-faceted that they are actually really hard to remember – even for him, the person who wrote them in the first place!

It seems, too, that despite Lynne McTaggart’s other researches into the effectiveness of repeated and regular applications of intentionality to achieve particular ends (see The Intention Experiment – Using Thoughts To Change The World), positive evidence of an end result remains annoyingly elusive.

However, a piece of supportive evidence arrived from a very different quarter. Rasmus Gaupp-Berghausen gave an intriguing series of presentations about a related topic at the British Society of Dowsers Annual Conference, held at Keele University in September 2014. RG-B was a co-worker of the better-known Dr Masura Emoto, who achieved recognition (notoriety, in some quarters) by demonstrating that ice-crystals formed by freezing water from various sources had markedly different structures and formats. Furthermore, he went on to show that the ‘quality’ and ‘beauty’ of the ice crystals seemed capable of being affected by human thought or intention.

As a hard-nosed and well-qualified research chemist, RG-B’s own original intent was not to be an acolyte of Dr Emoto, but to prove his outlandish ideas wrong. Having failed to do so, he has spent many years researching why and how such phenomena might work. This has led him to discover that people who direct concentrated intent when the ice crystals are forming seem to have far less success in producing ‘beautiful’ results than those who formulate their idea, but then relax and just ‘open their hearts’. His catchphrase is that this is the process of ‘awakened attention’ rather than ‘focussed intention’. While this research is something of a ‘fox in the chicken run’ for some of those who promote intent (such as Lynne McTaggart herself), it does imply that relaxation could well be one of the keys to understanding the label phenomenon – and indeed to a wider appreciation of the process of dowsing itself.

A relatively recent, and potentially very useful, development in the study of attentiveness and relaxation has been the introduction of ‘Mindfulness Training’, which is designed – at least up to a point – to combat the stresses of modern living. Many of us seem to live our lives very quickly these days, bombarded by (so-called) ‘information’, and struggling to get our bearings in a confused, and confusing, world. Mindfulness practice provides people with a chance to slow down, and to experience periods of real stillness. With more ‘spare’ mental space at their disposal, the ability of a person to truly listen (and therefore both to perceive and to learn more) could be of a radically different quality.

Mindfulness certainly allows most people to create a sense of distance between themselves as thinkers and their thoughts. Its current popularity as a psychological therapy is largely based on the gentle manner in which it allows practitioners to notice their thoughts as they arise – and to recognise that their responses to thoughts and emotions are critical, in terms of lessening the severity of the impact that they have on us.

In some recent psychological studies, a good deal has been made of the role of “flow” or “fluidity”, as an optimal state in which a person is able to access a greater sense of personal happiness and creativity. Somewhat paradoxically, practising mindfulness appears to help this along through a greater acceptance of both unpredictability, and of the uncertainty that this can cause for us. With its historical roots in Buddhist philosophy, which accepts the challenging nature of life as being unavoidable, mindfulness practice seeks to provide us with skills for managing our internal struggles more effectively.

As our researches progress, we are inclined to think that the relaxed attentiveness, apparently promoted by mindfulness, is somewhere very close to the core techniques and attitudes of dowsing practice. We also suspect – although, as yet, we cannot ‘prove’ – that ‘Morphic Labelling’ may work, at least in part, by helping this process along.

We are grateful to SD – a professional therapist and Mindfulness trainer – for his helpful summaries of the topic.

Panpsychism – the Ultimate (Un)certainty

If the physicists are right,

the only thing we can be certain of is uncertainty.
Buckminster Fuller – Architect

The Management apologises for any inconvenience.
God’s Final Message To The Universe
in Douglas Adams’ ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.’

Throughout our discussion so far, we have deliberately kept away from exploring pan-psychism as an ‘explanation’ for how human consciousness arises, or as a ‘mechanism’ for describing how dowsing as a whole might ‘work’. The pan-psychist idea initially seemed to us not to be ‘testable’ in any controlled way that we could imagine but, more importantly, we could never quite match the idea with any kind of direct experience that either of us could identify personally.

Even so, the belief that everything in the universe is in some way conscious has had remarkable staying power, for more than 2000 years. Today, we can find a surprisingly large number of professional scientists and philosophers who continue to take the idea more than half seriously.

So, while initially we chose to stay with the general idea of materialistic ’emergentism’ – the idea that consciousness somehow emerges from the physical substance of the brain – as a ‘best fit’ theory, we also noted that back in 1986 the Nobel Prize winning physicist David Bohm had written:

“That which we experience as mind … will, in a natural way, ultimately reach the level of the wave function and of the ‘dance’ of the particles. There is no unbridgeable gap or barrier between any of these levels. … … in some sense, a rudimentary consciousness is present even at the level of particle physics” (See Bohm’s book ‘Wholeness and the Implicate Order’ 2002)

More recently the British philosopher Professor Galen Strawson – a panpsychist himself –has written that:

‘The issue of emergence of mind is important because it is the mutually exclusive counterpart to Panpsychism: either you are a Panpsychist, or you are an Emergentist. Either mind was present in things from the very beginning, or it appeared (emerged) at some point in the history of evolution. If, however, emergence is inexplicable (our italics) or is less viable, then one is left with the panpsychist alternative. This line of reasoning … is the (panpsychist) ‘argument from Non-Emergence.’

So Strawson directly challenges those who implicitly endorse emergence, as we have done with our discussion of Douglas Hofstadter’s ideas about it. He asks, “Does this conception of emergence make sense?”, and answers, “I think that it is very, very hard to understand what it is supposed to involve. I think that it is incoherent, in fact, and that this general way of talking of emergence has acquired an air of plausibility for some … simply because it has been appealed too many times in the face of a seeming mystery.”

Strawson goes on to give a number of examples of would-be emergence, showing that each is not seriously intelligible. His slogan – “emergence can’t be brute,” implies that while higher-order mind can conceivably emerge from lower-order mind, it cannot possibly emerge from no-mind. “Brute emergence,” he says, ” is by definition a miracle every time it occurs, which is rationally inconceivable.”

Strawson believes that panpsychism offers a kind of resolution to the problem of emergence, and is supported by several other arguments as well. The viability of panpsychism is no longer really in question, he says, but what does remain an issue is the specific form it might take, and the implications arising from this question.

By definition therefore panpsychism suggests a radically different worldview, one that is fundamentally at odds with the dominant mechanistic conception of the universe. But by challenging this worldview at its root, panpsychism may offer new and potentially very interesting solutions to some very old problems.

Because there are relatively few panpsychists in the world, almost everyone else is, by definition, an emergentist. But, as Strawson (2006) re-emphasises, emergentism is not a forgone conclusion. In fact, it is highly dubious. His article “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism” presses this point, and offers the most detailed and complete version of the Non-Emergence argument to date.

In a nutshell, if people are not panpsychists, then they necessarily believe that only some creatures can be thought to possess mind. So, logically the vast remainder of nature must be in some real sense non-mental which in fact must include the greater part of our everyday reality. Strawson maintains that this pure speculation: “there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever” he says in his paper, “for a non-mental component of reality.”

Quantum Mind

The physicist David Bohm (another Nobel Prizewinner) viewed quantum theory and relativity as contradicting one another. This contradiction implied that there must be a more fundamental level in the physical universe at work somehow. Bohm claimed that both quantum theory and relativity pointed towards this deeper theory – which he ultimately formulated in terms of a ‘quantum field theory.’ This more fundamental level was proposed in order to represent an undivided wholeness and an ‘implicate’ order, from which the ‘explicate’ order of the universe as we experience it, arises Bohm’s implicate order applies both to matter and to consciousness – and could even explain the relationship between them. Mind and matter are seen as projections into our explicate order from the underlying reality of the implicate order. Bohm claims that when we look at matter in space, we can see nothing in either concept that helps us to understand consciousness.

Importantly for our context, in trying to describe the nature of consciousness, Bohm discussed the experience of listening to music. He believed the feeling of movement and change that make up our experience of music, derive from both the immediate past and the present – both being held in the brain together. The musical notes from the past are seen as transformations rather than memories so that notes that were implicate in the immediate past are seen as becoming explicate in the present. Bohm viewed this as consciousness ’emerging’ from the all-pervasive implicate order, rather than from physical brain structures.

Bohm also saw the movement, change or flow, and coherence of experiences such as listening to music, as a further manifestation of the implicate order. Quoting the Swiss Psychologist Jean Piaget, Bohm stated that studies show that young children have to learn about time and space. This is not because these things are part of the explicate order, but because the children have a “hard-wired” understanding of movement, which is part of the implicate order. He compared this “hard-wiring” to Noam Chomsky‘s theory that grammar is “hard-wired” into young human brains.

A major weakness in Bohm’s hypothesis is said to be verification. In his writings, Bohm never proposed any specific means by which his propositions could be tested or falsified – falsification generally being the acknowledged test of whether ideas and theories can be held to be scientific. Nor did he propose any kind of neural mechanism through which his “implicate order” could emerge in some way relevant to consciousness. However, we are tempted to wonder whether something like Hofstadter’s ‘Strange Looping’ might be such a mechanism – and perhaps might also provide some kind of answer to Strawson’s arguments for panpsychism.

A Quantum Basis For PanPsychism?

Over the past 15 years or so the British theoretical physicist, Sir Roger Penrose, and the American anaesthesiologist, Stuart Hameroff, have collaborated to produce the theory known as Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) – which is actually about how (or perhaps even whether) quantum interactions can be processed in the brain. The authors initially developed their ideas separately, and only later collaborated to produce Orch-OR in the early 1990s. Their ideas were reviewed and updated by them in late 2013.

Originally, Penrose lacked a detailed proposal for how quantum processing could possibly be implemented in the brain until Hameroff read his work, and suggested a means by which this might be possible.

The discovery of quantum vibrations in microtubules – tiny sub-components of cells, involved in both nucleic and cell division and in intracellular transport – by Anirban Bandyopadhyay of the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan, in March 2013, – apparently confirms the hypothesis of the Orch-OR theory.

Subsequently, a paper entitled ‘A quantum physical argument for panpsychism’ by Shan Gao of the University of Australia appeared in the scientific literature:

‘It has been widely thought that consciousness has no causal efficacy in the physical world. However, this may be not the case. In this paper, we show that a conscious being can distinguish definite perceptions, and their quantum superpositions, while a physical measuring system without consciousness cannot distinguish such quantum states.’

The possible existence of a distinct quantum physical property of consciousness may have interesting implications for the science of consciousness as a whole. In particular, it suggests that consciousness is not emergent, but is a fundamental feature of the universe. This may – so the argument runs – provide an actual quantum basis for panpsychism.

And So??

A simple addition to the ‘Mediation’ elements in the formulae of the Morphic Message labels (e.g. ‘Mediated by helpful Panpsychic Energies”) turns out to have an immediate, substantial and highly positive effect on the perceived sound from any equipment – including loudspeakers – to which the label is attached. In fact, this is so effective that we have no hesitation at all in providing a sample that readers can download and copy. Please see the ‘Do It Yourself‘ page on this site, where full instructions on using and applying the labels can also be found.

Even so, we would properly be accused of astonishing self-deception if we were to claim that this demonstration proves either that the morphic messaging system has been satisfactorily explained so far, or that panpsychism is the correct theoretical basis for making sense of how dowsing ‘works’!

When we stand back ourselves, and consider the processes involved in making and using a ‘morphic label’, they seem so unlikely that we cannot help but think of them as the absolutely Ultimate (Un)certainty.

The only real fact is that despite all our elaborate theorising, we actually have no real idea as to how: -

§ Writing complicated messages on a computer,

§ Then making the messages into three-layered images on the same computer,

§ Then collapsing the images into a single layer, so that only the top layer is visible,

§ After which, printing the finished images onto ordinary plain paper,

§ Which is stuck onto miscellaneous hifi components with commercial ‘blu-tack’-

§ Can possibly convey any information at all, let alone pass it on to affect what people hear when a loudspeaker is vibrating with a musical signal.

But that is exactly what seems to happen regularly and obviously. The effects can be heard by anyone nearby, even those who have no idea at all what the messages on the labels might actually mean.

The best answer we can suggest so far comes from the physicist Dean Radin’s elegant little book, ‘Entangled Minds – Extrasensory Experiences In A Quantum Reality.’ Radin suspects (and indeed quotes Mullah Nasreddin to back up his argument) that what we often call psychic phenomena may be perfectly natural abilities. These are abilities that everyone has as a child, but which we then choose to ignore, or are simply encouraged to dismiss by scientists dedicated – like Nasreddin’s deliberate and allegorically perverse choice – to looking in entirely the wrong places, because ‘that’s where the light seems to be.’

This has been our (first) attempt to look fairly carefully into some selected shadows. There are obviously many more to be explored.

PWB Electronics – HiFi and Human Perception

To grasp the idea that seemingly unconnected and inappropriate low-tech homespun ‘devices’ might have any effect at all on the performance of audio loudspeakers and other electronic equipment, we need to appreciate a little of the background of the people who thought the notion up: Peter and May Belt, operating as PWB Electronics in Leeds, Yorkshire, UK.

In 2005, Mrs. Belt described her husband’s journey: ‘Peter Belt’s background is over 45 years in the audio industry, the first 30 years as a conventional engineer, designing and manufacturing moving coil loudspeakers, electrostatic loudspeakers, orthodynamic loudspeakers, moving coil headphones, plus electrostatic and orthodynamic headphones.

‘During this time Peter was constantly researching how he could improve hifi performance. From time to time, he would become aware of occasions when the sounds produced changed for no apparent reason: all he knew was that the sound had changed, without any conventional explanation as to why this should be.

‘In a further period of research, Peter began to see that many different factors could be affecting the sounds he was hearing; things that would not, by any stretch of the imagination, alter either actual audio signals or acoustic air pressure waves. This is when he began to realise that it must be the human listeners who were reacting to the listening environment somehow. The last 15 years have been spent in this unconventional area, struggling to find ways to counteract the notional adverse conditions.’

Although Peter Belt is a highly qualified electronics engineer, who had manufactured well-rated conventional loudspeakers and headphones since the late 1950s, and a variant on the electrostatic speaker in the 1970s and 1980s, he’s neither orthodox nor part of the hi-fi establishment. In the late 1980s, he caused a stir in the audio equipment press (Hi Fi News, Hi Fi Answers, Hi Fi Review and Audiophile for instance) by demonstrating, beyond reasonable doubt, that small and usually overlooked ambient electromagnetic fields in most rooms could seriously detract from the perceived performance of the most expensive audio equipment.

Worse than this, he developed relatively cheap ways of combating these problems, sometimes with the curious and highly unpopular result that cheaper kit sounded magnitudes better than higher-end stuff – which, of course, made him less than welcome with manufacturers and their customers alike.

Now while it is fairly obvious that big fields coming from power cables, ranks of computing equipment, large amplifiers and so on might well affect working sound equipment nearby, this wasn’t what concerned Peter Belt. Instead, he believed that very small fields from components such as the spinning platter of an LP turntable (or, worse still, a spinning CD itself) affected the way we hear the sounds from our beloved audio systems.

According to Belt, there were also, unnoticed and unhelpful fields (not measurable, unfortunately), which were unwittingly built into the designs of most electronic equipment. But, because these failed the falsification test for scientific hypotheses (if you can’t disprove a proposition, it’s not science as we know it) audio experts wrote off his proposed fixes as ‘self-deception’ and ‘auto-suggestion for the gullible’.

For a while, however, some audio writers were thoroughly persuaded. Paul Benson for instance, writing in the July 1989 edition of Hi Fi Review, said that a Belt-treated loudspeaker actually improved the sound of the working speakers when brought into the listening room – in diametrical contrast to the more usual deterioration that happened when any other passive speaker was introduced. ‘Peter and May Belt,’ he wrote, ‘have ways of treating all electromagnetic pollution. Ways that are incredible – literally incredible. But they work … The beauty of it is that the products and free applications clear up the electromagnetic smog in the room (which) allows us to hear what equipment is capable of doing.’

The really odd thing about this ‘smog clearing’ though, was that according to Benson it made the listening room and the listeners feel better. ‘The improved listening environment’, he added, ‘is far more important than expensive equipment upgrades’.

Small wonder then, to discover that Peter and May Belt were dropped relatively quickly by the orthodox audio press. After a flurry of interest, and glowing reports from such ‘hifi’ worthies as Jimmy Hughes, Paul Benson and Keith Howard, most commercial coverage dried up from 1993 onwards – and next to nothing was printed about their subsequent developments until 1999.

Then, when the industry magazines Soundstage, Audio Online andAudio Musings began to review PWB products, a new wave of interest developed. It is an interest that is still continuing today. The Belts are still in business, with the help of their son Graham, and their products are more numerous than ever.

Some Early PWB Devices

The theory behind the early devices was that ‘electronic smog’ (in the form of unnoticed, but adverse, electromagnetic fields) affected human perceptions of the performance of hi-fi equipment. Clear this up, the reasoning said, and better sound reproduction would result from quite inexpensive components. Since even the physical spinning of a CD could generate electronic ‘pollution’ apparently, then fixing small pieces of permanently charged metal foil to the discs was one of the things that could put matters. So far so good.

In a similar fashion, two other ‘permanently charged’ PWB products, ‘Cream Electret’ and ‘Spiratube,’ both seemed to produce beneficial effects when applied to audio equipment and to cabling – and these effects were substantially enhanced by subsequently freezing both the audio leads and the foil-treated CDs. There was no great conceptual difficulty with these propositions, because the simple treatments might be doing something materially useful – and common sense implied that a more complete physical explanation for what was actually happening would be found eventually.

What did remain a puzzle though, was that according to Peter Belt, one of the charged foil strips used to treat CDs had to be placed in a very specific location – over the ‘Compact Disc’ logo that initially appeared on all commercial discs – and, unless this was done exactly, the perceived benefits to the sound did not occur.

Why ever not? Logic suggests that if the printing on the discs was generating spurious electromagnetism, then either all of the print should be covered with the charged foil, or else the specific placement of the foil strips should make no great difference. Yet, the placement of the foil really did affect the result, which meant that something additional to the ‘smog’ theory must be at work on CDs to produce the problems in the first place, and then the benefits to the listener after the ‘treatments’ had been applied.

Peter and May Belt’s ideas about what was actually happening seemed so outlandish at the time that a little more description of their experiments is necessary, before we can discuss any potential explanations. One of the more staggering PWB products was called Morphic Green Cream.

In the PWB online news group’s postings, there were references to this cream, claiming extraordinary results from it, despite its relatively high cost. It could be applied to almost anything in minuscule quantities. Applying it to only one terminal of one speaker, BK was staggered to hear the sound stage take a gigantic leap away from both loudspeakers – and to crystallise into a genuinely 3D reality. Applying cream to the other speaker (also to one terminal only) completed the transformation, and the result was completely enthralling. After this, for review purposes, Mrs Belt generously provided a complete pot of this remarkable stuff, resulting in even more dramatic improvements to the apparent sound quality.

Although Morphic Green Cream was originally meant for manufacturers, it proved to be so effective that some PWB news group respondents talked seriously about down-grading their equipment, and of substituting cheaper treated components for higher-priced gear. At the time BK had no absolutely idea how this cream ‘worked’ – and he still doesn’t – in much the the same way that he doesn’t quite know what makes his old house feel so comfortable to visitors.

BK once asked Mrs. Belt if she thought that there was an upper limit to the benefits of PWB treatments, adding that common sense would say that there should be. ‘I don’t know,’ she said candidly, ‘but then, common sense also says that many of our products can’t possibly work!’

Happily however, PWB Electronics continues to thrive to this day and is still producing new devices on a regular basis. Some current favourites with PWB customers are ‘PWB Universal Rainbow Magnablocks’ – small pieces of specially prepared foil, which can be applied equally successfully to the listening environment or to items of audio equipment, and the ‘Digiplus’ treated phono plug, which should be inserted into the empty phono sockets of amplifiers, CD and DVD players. The very latest products – a range of specially treated plastic dust caps – should also be used on the empty sockets of electronic devices including the HDMI ports on TV sets and the USB ports on computers.

The Birth Of A Theory – A Dowsing Perspective

Visitors to the PWB website will find that over the last thirty years or so Mrs. Belt has written extensively about how the company’s products might work. Gradually, but systematically, she has shown that they have no effect at all on electronic equipment itself. Instead, what seems to be changing are the listeners’ perceptions of what is happening – sufficiently consistently for the effects to be much greater than chance events.

Sadly, however, until very recently Mrs. Belt’s ideas were mostly roundly rejected as ‘unscientific’, or even as deliberately fraudulent, by significant numbers of website/newsgroup commentators who simply ‘knew better’ – and, as often as not, without even trying out any PWB’s devices for themselves, of course.

On the other hand, some reviewers have been more encouraging. In 2012, Dr. Bill Gaw of EnjoytheMusic.com and Art Dudley of Stereophile Magazine both wrote very positive articles about one of PWB’s most longstanding products ‘Cream Electret’ – with Art’s article including a long and very detailed interview with Mrs. Belt.

BK has always remained assiduously careful never to probe for information that Mrs. Belt had not made public (the Belt family is running a commercial enterprise based on their own intellectual property after all). As a consequence, Mrs Belt has kindly allowed him to undertake personal experimentation into some of her ideas. One of these has been the exploration of how positive messages written on home-made labels, e.g. GOOD SOUND>O.K. could improve the perceived performance of audio equipment to which the label could be attached – with Blu Tak or something similar. Further experiments along these lines can be found on our Do It Yourself page.

BK is also grateful to Mrs Belt for introducing him to the work of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, whose work on a biological principle he calls ‘Morphic Resonance’ has proved to be an enormously useful springboard to further thinking about how and why the simple labelling process, described above, might begin to become half-way understandable. Before we delve into that though – and because this is a discussion about dowsing – we need to consider NT’s work with the Northern Irish dowser Billy Gawn.

IMPORTANT ADDENDUM. For an almost complete account of all the early PWB developments plus lots of free experiments to try out – please visit The Advanced Audiophile web site. BK had thought that this site had disappeared from the Internet, but he was delighted to find it again recently, through a link to one of his own articles. The Advanced Audiophile has not been updated for a while now, but it still remains the most comprehensive source available for PWB Electronics memorabilia and commentary. It also includes the original articles by Paul Benson and others mentioned above.