The physics of resonance: A cross-disciplinary study of sound, music, and meditation in yoga and health
DR. Dona DAS Sengupta
International Journal of Yogic, Human Movement and Sports Sciences 2026 DOI: 10.22271/yogic.2026.v11.i1b.1976 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Meditation |
| Key points | Proposes that yogic and contemplative sound practices are physically techniques for forced oscillation and entrainment of biological resonant systems, and that matching sound frequencies to the body's natural resonant frequencies may explain healing effects. |
Abstract
Sound is, above all, a wave of pressure variation in time that follows the same laws as a plucked string, a swinging pendulum, or a struck bell. In this paper, the study of sound, music, and meditation is posed as a problem not just in psychology and/or comparative religion, but in applied physics. It explores the physics of oscillation, resonance, damping, and wave interference, and the measurable physiological and neurological impact of effects of certain sounds such as Tibetan singing bowls, Vedic chant, dhikr, and Bhakti kirtan. The paper, which includes an interdisciplinary literature review ranging from acoustics to neuroscience to religious studies, asserts that yogic and contemplative sound practices are, physically speaking, techniques to create a forced oscillation and entrainment of biological systems themselves resonant oscillators - the cardiovascular baroreflex loop, the neural networks of the cortex, and the autonomic nervous system. The paper follows this argument from the wave equation and the physics of standing waves, and then to the documented acoustics of singing bowls (Terwagne & Bush, 2011) [19], before going on to the resonance-frequency breathing literature in cardiovascular physiology (Lehrer & Vaschillo, 2003; Steffen et al., 2017) [11, 12, 18], and finally to the neuroimaging studies of Om chanting (Kalyani et al., 2011) [11]. The synthesis proposes that the ancient wisdom that “correct sound, correctly produced, heals” is, in a literal sense, a prescription for matching the driving frequencies to the natural resonant frequencies of the oscillatory systems in the body, which has implications for yoga teaching and health education.
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on meditation, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mindfulness: A proposed operational definition. | 2004 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Mechanisms of mindfulness | 2005 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action From a Conceptual and Neural Perspective | 2011 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression | 2006 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-transcendence (S-ART): a framework for understanding the neurobiological mechanisms of mindfulness | 2012 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |