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How Does Sound Healing Work?

Sep 9, 2025
5 min read

A man meditating with sound

Sound healing is both an ancient practice and a modern therapeutic approach. Science is still exploring how different kinds of sound affect us, while practitioners have long worked with sound as a way to support rest, reflection and connection.

So what might be happening in a sound healing session? How does it work?


My understanding draws on research, my experience with clients, and my training with the British Academy of Sound Therapy (BAST) and teachers including Simone Salvatici, Anne Malone, Dean Carter and Mark Swan. I also work with an energetic understanding of the person. In a session, I’m interested in what changes in someone’s body, attention and sense of energy as the sounds unfold.

How Sound Interacts With The Vagus Nerve

The vagus nerve is deeply involved in how the body responds to stress and rest. It helps regulate heart rate and digestion, and its branches connect with the throat and voice. Another branch, sometimes called Arnold’s nerve, supplies sensation to part of the outer ear. These connections are part of why I’m interested in what happens when we make, hear and physically feel sound.

When you hum, chant or sing, you feel your own voice vibrating through your throat and body. Vocal sound often lengthens the exhale, changing the pattern of your breathing. Research with singers has measured corresponding changes in heart-rate variability, which reflects the interaction between breathing, the heart and vagal activity. That inner vibration can feel like a massage—a description of the sensation many people recognise when they sustain a tone.

Receiving sound can be physical too. In a sound massage, a Himalayan bowl placed on the body creates vibrations you can feel directly. A softly played gong or drum may be felt in the chest as well as heard. Together with listening, stillness and changing breath, these sensations can help someone move towards a calmer state. Studies of singing bowl massage have measured changes in heart rate and brain activity during and after a session.

The vagus nerve is one part of this picture. Sound also reaches the brain through hearing, where its rhythm, pitch and texture can influence attention and brainwave activity. That leads into entrainment and the altered states we can experience during a sound healing session.

Entrainment, Brainwaves & Altered States

Entrainment describes how rhythms can begin to synchronise when they interact. We experience it when we move to music or sing with others and find ourselves sharing a pace. Our brains respond to rhythm too: repeated sounds can influence their electrical activity.

Brainwave activity changes throughout the day. We might move from the focused, analytical activity often associated with beta into alpha, associated with relaxed awareness, or theta, which can arise during drowsiness, meditation and deeply absorbed states. We don’t remain in one brainwave state all day. Sound offers a way to help create a shift.

This is a core part of how I was trained to work with sound. Through rhythm, repetition, frequency and the way instruments are played, a sound bath can draw someone away from the pace of everyday thinking and into a more absorbed state. The steady pulse of a drum may become the rhythm their attention follows; the unfolding harmonics of a gong or the sustained tone of a bowl may change their sense of time and space. Some people describe this as entering a trance or altered state of awareness.

Researchers have measured changes in brain activity during singing bowl sound massage. A study of rhythmic drumming also found that people whose brains tracked a theta-range beat more strongly tended to report a stronger altered experience. This interests me because it connects something measurable with something clients sometimes describe after a session: feeling as though they have travelled somewhere inward, even while lying still in the room.


Frequency, Vibration & Energy

My sound therapy training has taught me to work with people as energetic beings as well as physical ones. The heart and brain produce measurable electrical activity, and the heart generates a magnetic field that can be detected beyond the body with sensitive equipment. HeartMath’s work on coherence looks at the pattern of our heart rhythms and how those rhythms can become more ordered alongside breathing and emotional state.

That scientific picture sits beside what I observe in my own practice. I’ve taken energy readings before and after sessions and seen changes both in a client’s overall reading and at the points I work with as chakras.


As I study anatomy and physiology with Brighton Holistics, I’m struck by how chakra locations often correspond to areas of significant nerve activity: the solar plexus chakra, for example, sits in the region of the solar, or coeliac, nerve plexus. I explore changes in a reading alongside what the client felt during the session—perhaps warmth, movement, rest, release or a clearer sense of themselves.

For me, sound healing creates an opportunity for the body to rest and draw on its own capacity to recover. Voice, vibration and breath can all be part of that experience.


In Summary

Sound healing works with frequency, vibration, rhythm, breath and resonance. Sound can influence our attention, heart rhythms and brain activity, sometimes drawing us into the absorbed states associated with meditation or trance. We may experience its effects physically, emotionally or energetically—and the sounds that speak to us can change from one day to the next.


If you’d like to explore therapeutic sound in your own time, Sonic Lumins® features instruments and voice from our sessions, each paired with sounds we’ve recorded in nature. Listen to the samples and see which ones draw you in.


Books and Practitioner Influences

Further Reading/ References





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