What is the Nature of Sound Healing? An Interview with Silvia Nakkach, Part 1 - How sound and music can help to heal psychic wounds

This is the first of a two-part interview with Silvia Nakkach, an innovative, award winning composer, multi-instrumentalist, voice culturist and author. Her specialties include music to aid in the healing process. Founding director of the Vox Mundi Project, an organization dedicated to the research, education, preservation and performance of sacred vocal arts, Ms. Nakkach teaches her students the art of sound healing. In this interview, she tells SevenPonds a little about her practice.

Antal: Thanks for joining us, Silvia.

Silvia: It’s my pleasure, Antal.

Antal: Tell us a bit about your work in musical healing. How did you find your calling in this line of work? How did you get started?

Silvia: I’m a musician and composer and professor of music and sound healing, which we mostly go through with music. We also do simple sound, tonalities, but we’ll get to that. Mostly I am a composer and professor of music and conscience, and I am a musical healing psychologist. I’ve been a musician and in this line for more than 40 years. I started off a bit more technical, and then moved into a work where I could be more sensitive to others’ suffering. I’ve always been very sensitive to others’ suffering, and this led me to working with the terminally ill. One of my passions is to work with people in the last passages of their life, and the only thing they can do is hear music. I had experience with my own family, playing music at their bedside, and I got into hearing, listening, being with the ill. I work with nurses, doctors, musical therapists, sound healers, and a lot of my family died, so I used my own experience with them for other families who had someone dying. And I was a clinical psychologist, and I started connecting that with my work, my bedside playing, so everything I do now is to help people. That is my mission, my vision, and my service in the world. And I can accompany people through the end, and it’s necessary, for someone to do that, to be there. People who are near death are very sensitive to sound. They want to be connected to the divine, and music can go directly into that sacredness, without the mediation of thought, of the brain.

Antal: What kind of music do you play? What is healing music?

Silvia: Any kind of music can heal, depending on what you play, depending on who you play it for. We use music that has not much melody. There is a whole system I created — we go with music that is more melodic, with ambient harmonies, ringing harmonies, but still progression and a sense of journey. The culture of music is important, so we play jazz, classical, country, rock and roll, but music with less rhythm. We avoid too much rhythm. When we play East Asian or South Korean we will play in the major pentatonic scales.

Antal: Is this improvisation?

Silvia: Sometimes we are improvising, sometimes we are playing songs. Sometimes we are playing nothing at all, sometimes the silence is what the patient wants. The most important thing is to be there. The protocol is being, not doing, not creating sound that is not necessary. And culture will play an incredible role. We play a lot with Asian people in the Bay Area, and you have to respect that, if that’s what they want to hear. You have to ask first what kind of music they would like to hear.

Antal: Tell us about your playing and your teaching technique. What is your style? How do you develop your own playing?

Silvia: What is my style? At my level it’s hard to say. I play ancient and contemporary sound and music healing modalities. This is what I teach my students. And they learn from the shamans, spirits, doctors, clinicians, scientists. We play music, and they also learn how to play the harp. They have to be able to play anything, whatever a patient’s needs are. We teach them forms to play music, to calm the mind, to make it sensitive to positive intervention, and my title is to play music for any time, not just for dying. Music is always healing. We create a human resonance. Music healing is not a brand, it’s not a product, so we teach students to find the empathic resonance. That will help people to communicate in a healing manner. I actually don’t really like the term musical healing. It’s not music healing, it’s human resonance. Music healing is a New Age idea, and I’m not New Age.

• Read another perspective on the use of music in a therapeutic setting.