Some projects kick off with a business plan. Others begin as a response to an odd little ad in the back of a magazine, or sparked by following a hunch. When you think about it, this is often how the interesting work begins—not with certainty, but with curiosity and enough craft and gumption to stay with the question.
This conversation with Rick Gold and Yuval Ron moves through the strange and increasingly practical territory where music, medicine, plants, and perception collide. We discuss Yuval’s early work with the pioneer of binaural beats and how psychoacoustics adds emotion to film scores. Beyond that there is an audio frontier that includes the exploration of how frequencies can shift attention, mood, and perhaps even help protect cognition.
Their current work takes medicinal herbs and records their bioelectrical activity, then turns those signals into music. Not synth magic, not a novelty trick, but a painstaking process of listening for pattern, repetition, and relationship—finding something humanly hearable inside something that is not human at all. Five years of work. A lot of editing. A lot of not giving up.
There’s something here about collaboration across species, we’ve been doing that with Chinese herbal medicine for a while now. But this new exploration using the language of music. That’s an innovative collaboration. Listen into this conversation and expand your ideas on both music and medicine.
You are not a drop in the ocean , you are an ocean in a drop.
Yuval Ron
Yuval Ron is an award-winning composer who has been involved in the world of music therapy since a commission in 1990 from researcher Robert Monroe of the Monroe Institute for hemi sync music composition using binaural beats. He has collaborated with neuroscientists Mark Waldman, and Dr. Andrew Newburg, psychotherapist Dr Sanjay Manchanda, pioneer healers Dr. Richard Gold and Gail Lynn, Sufis, Kabbalists and Ayurvedic healers and is the founding director of the record label Metta Mindfulness Music which produces quality intentional healing music for use in clinics and treatments centers worldwide. Yuval was invited to perform meditative music for the Dalai Lama, the Sufi Sheikh Sidi Muhammad, collaborated with the Sufi leaders Pir Zia Inayat Khan and Pir Shabdah Khan, with numerous master musicians including Omar Faruk Tekbilek, Estrella Morente and Deva Premal, and with the Zen Buddhist priest and master artist Hirokazu Kosaka.
Yuval has been invited to speak at numerous schools including: Yale, John Hopkins University, UCLA, Middlebury College, MIT, Berklee College of Music, University of Chicago, and has given keynote addresses at the Pacific conference of Oriental Medicine in San Diego, and at the Quantum Institute, in New Delhi, India. Yuval’s book Divine Attunement: Music as a Path to Wisdom won Gold Medal Award for Best book in Spirituality Category in the Indie Book Award 2015. He has composed scores for the Oscar winning film West Bank Story, PBS Nova documentaries such as Breaking the Maya Code, art house films such as Proteus, and scores for site-specific installations at the Getty Museum, Japan America Center, LAX, and more. He is the founder and executive director of the charity non-profit organization Inspired Sound Initiative, dedicated to providing free-of-charge educational performance arts programming to under-served communities and youth-at-risk worldwide.
Rick Gold, Ph.D, L.Ac
I graduated from Oberlin College in 1972 with a religious studies major and pre- med minor.
After a five year experience living alone in rural Kentucky, I awoke one winter morning in 1975 from a dream and all I wanted to do was study Acupuncture. Fortunately, by 1977, I learned about the New England School of Acupuncture and enrolled. After graduating from NESA, I moved to San Diego to study for a Ph.D. in Psychology.
In 1981, I was contacted by Joe Lazzaro who was starting a branch of CAC (California Acupuncture College). I joined the faculty of CAC and also completed my studies to sit for CALE. By 1986, CAC was floundering and along with Joe, Alex Tiberi and Ana de Vedia, we took the plunge and started PCOM (now PCHS). The rest is history.
Learn more about Yuval’s work at: www.yuvalronmusic.com, mettamindfulnessmusic.com, and inspiredsoundinitiative.org.
You can also visit Yuval on Instagram.
Visit Rick on FaceBook.
Learn more about The Secret Song of Plants and listen some sample tracks.
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