A new and seemingly implausible sound therapy is being used to heal traumatic events that may contribute to psychological and physical illness. Cate Montana reports.
Positive psychological wellbeing is associated with better health, and recent studies show that it even impacts mortality rates, lowering the risk of death.1 But how do we get there?
Eliminating obvious stress factors—a hectic home life, a high-pressure job, money worries, difficult relationships, divorce, self-esteem issues, constant exposure to electromagnetic fields and all the other things that contribute to our harried modern lifestyles—isn’t always possible. And even if stress is managed, that doesn’t guarantee positive psychological wellbeing.
To get to this positive state, we have to get down to the root of why we don’t manage unavoidable stresses well in the first place. And that means uncovering unhealthy, submerged emotional patterns that sabotage even our best efforts at stress management and self-improvement.
Why some people are more deeply affected by stressors than others depends on their life experiences as well as their genetics.2 Stress can be more dangerous for people with a predisposition and family history of conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and depression. And a child who has lived through a traumatic experience, for example developing abandonment issues around a parent after a divorce, is far more likely to be stressed and emotionally traumatized by her own divorce proceedings later in life than another woman who had no such earlier experience.
To compound matters, researchers in the area of epigenetics have now discovered that events in someone’s lifetime can change the way their DNA is expressed, and many of the effects of traumatic stress they experience can be passed down to subsequent generations, even if those future family members are not exposed to any traumatic stressors.3 This means an individual may have been raised in a perfectly happy home with both parents present and still be affected by or even inherit the trauma of a grandparent or great-grandparent who was abandoned as a child.
Until recently, uncovering unhealthy hidden emotional patterns—learned and/or inherited—and more positively reframing a person’s perception about themselves, others and life has been the purview of psychiatrists and psychologists. And yet patients may spend decades in talk therapy and never uncover the root causes of an issue, let alone clear it and evolve beyond that issue.
Now, thanks to advancing technologies in voice pattern recognition and the development of perception reframing software, a new therapy claims to address certain hidden patterns and aid in creating emotional wellness by mapping the subtle frequencies in a person’s voice and then feeding back missing frequencies through a neurofeedback process, creating positive, permanent shifts in a person’s wellbeing in a matter of hours.
Speech production involves much of the body: the lungs, the nasal and oral cavities, pharynx, diaphragm, abdomen, back, ribs, brain and nerves. According to Dr Vaughn Cook, an Oriental medical doctor and developer of the EVOX perception reframing device and software, anything that’s going on in the body will be reflected in the voice.
“There is a lot of information carried in the voice,” says Cook, who is also founder and chairman of ZYTO, a technology company in Lindon, Utah, that markets the EVOX system. “The words are almost insignificant. It’s just the tip of the iceberg.” He points out that when someone calls on the phone and says “Hi, this is …” we immediately know the caller’s gender, their approximate age, their ethnicity, the part of the world they were born in, what kind of mood they’re in and probably a general idea of how healthy they are.
We decode this vocal information all the time without even thinking about it. At times we even know that the words someone is saying aren’t true. The words just don’t feel right. We detect a dissonance between the words that are being spoken and the energy behind the words, like when a parent says, “Everything is fine,” and we know full well that everything is not fine.
Little clinical work has been done on what is called the “prosodic signature” (vocal intonation, stress and rhythm) of the human voice. But one study shows that listeners can reliably determine whether another person is lying simply by how the other person’s voice sounds.4
“With EVOX we don’t care what the words are,” says Cook. “We ignore the words. All we’re interested in are the energy patterns in the voice. And voice energy is just frequency. So we listen across about a four-octave range—the 12 tones of the Western chromatic music scale, C up through B. Then we take the energy, aggregate it into one octave and display it in what we call a perception index. Through clinical trial and error, we have learned that it’s desirable to have a symmetrical voice. In other words, it’s desirable to have frequencies in all of the ranges.”
However, according to Cook, frequencies that should be in the voice are often missing. Some frequencies are overstressed or exaggerated, while others are subdued. And the configuration of frequencies that are missing, stressed or diminished varies from topic to topic, depending on the hidden emotional content behind the words.
Whatever is being talked about—or even thought about while speaking gibberish—the voice pattern accurately reflects the emotions, experiences, beliefs and attitudes behind the subject, believes Cook. In other words, he says, whether what’s being talked about is trauma from a car accident or grief over losing a loved one, the software reveals a person’s perception of the situation based on their buried programming—programming that is unique because it purportedly is based in that person’s life experiences, genetics and epigenetic influences from what Cook refers to as the “family of origin.”
“When you talk about any topic, your voice energy actually changes, because all of the information that you have in your body about that topic will be reflected in your voice,” he says. “If you talk about your low back pain, your low back pain is going to come through. If you talk about your father, your experiences and memories with your father are going to come through.”
The problem, as any psychologist knows, is that we get stuck in our perceptions about things. A dog bite at age five can transform into a fixed perception in the adult that “All dogs are dangerous.” An absent father due to a divorce may trigger the perception that “all men will leave me.”
Each of us is filled to the brim with such rigid hidden perceptions: school is hard. I don’t do well at math. Boys are bullies. Women aren’t trustworthy. There’s no getting ahead in life. I don’t deserve good fortune. The more fixed unconscious perceptions we have, the more restricted our reality and options become.
“Your perception sabotages your efforts,” says Cook. “We make dumb choices because the dumb choices are our best option as far as we can see. What perception reframing does is to give your body information that is lacking—because it doesn’t show up in the voice.
“The computer generates information that is missing and feeds back the energetic frequencies your body shows a biological coherence for based on the voice analysis. This unique information is then introduced unconsciously via a software output that the body picks up and incorporates.”
As missing information is incorporated, the voice pattern eventually changes. When the software detects a significant change in the voice pattern, it indicates that a shift has occurred and the perception of the topic has been reframed, claims Cook. “Once it does that, you’ve expanded your available options because you can understand more and make more intelligent decisions.”
The conscious mind—our waking state of consciousness—is only the tiny tip of the iceberg. When it comes to both voluntary and involuntary movements and nervous system functions, including our supposedly conscious choices, neuroscience has proven that 95 percent of those functions and choices are driven unconsciously.
As neuroscience researcher and professor at San Francisco State University Ezequiel Morsella writes, “[T]here now exists substantial evidence that the unconscious is not identifiably less flexible, complex, controlling, deliberative, or action-oriented than is its [conscious] counterpart.” Comparing human behavior to the “complex and intelligent design” shown by plants and animals, he adds, “Unconscious processes are smart and adaptive throughout the living world… In nature, the ‘unconscious mind’ is the rule, not the exception.”1
Marketing experts know that buying choices are not made by the five percent slice of our mental pie called the conscious mind. That’s why advertising deliberately appeals to human emotions. Marketers are trying to trigger deep-seated emotional associations that in turn generate buying impulses in the unwary customer.
EVOX practitioners use a perception index map based on the energy of the voice, revealing both present and missing frequencies compared to ideal balanced perception (see ideal map) in each of the following 12 perception zones.
Have you ever walked through a parking lot and waved at a friend only to be ignored? And felt hurt and angry about it? And then you find out, after days of seething, that their dog died, and they were upset and preoccupied in the parking lot that day and didn’t even see you? The new information changes everything. You understand what really happened. You no longer feel upset and angry because your perception of the situation has been reframed.
This is precisely what practitioners using the EVOX system claim to do with clients who come to them with problems—stress, depression, anxiety, obsessive thinking, compulsions and sometimes even physical symptoms—but by changing those emotions through missing frequencies in the voice.
Kevin Talmadge, a nutrition adviser and EVOX practitioner in Sarasota, Florida, had an 83-year-old client named “Sarah” who came to him in a wheelchair.
“She looked about as beaten-down and defeated as you could ever imagine a person being,” Talmadge says. “She had had a shingles outbreak three years previously, and even though the shingles lesions had gone into remission she still had excruciating pain. She couldn’t be touched over most of her body. She couldn’t sleep comfortably, and she was ready to give up.”
He conducted an EVOX session just on the physical discomfort she was experiencing, identifying many of the markers to look for in a client’s voice recordings that show progress is being made. After about an hour he ended the session.
“I was brand new and just two weeks into my practice,” he says. “When she asked me, ‘What do we do now?’ I had no idea really. So I just sent her home and asked her to keep track of her pain levels during the week.
“She called me a week later and told me the pain was gone and that she’d been able to sleep and hug her husband. At that point she was crying, and I was crying. I couldn’t believe how meaningful it was to be able to assist somebody in that way.”
After a few weeks, however, her pain started to come back. It wasn’t as bad as it had been, but Talmadge had her come in to do sessions working on the unconscious perceptions she’d developed and inherited from her family of origin—parents, grandparents and other family members. After two or three months they started to work on some early life experiences.
“It’s very well established that adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, are related to physical and emotional outcomes like diabetes, obesity and depression, etc.,” Talmadge says. “Compound ACEs in their effects are much like post-traumatic stress disorder in that multiple events have multiple effects, and they stack.”
When Talmadge helped Sarah think all the way back to when she was 11 years old, she suddenly remembered that she’d been sexually abused by a family member. After Talmadge addressed that buried trauma through EVOX, Sarah became totally pain-free again and stayed pain-free for the rest of her life.
“With physical stuff it’s tricky,” says Talmadge. “I tell people that if they’re getting proper medical treatment and getting all the help they normally would want and the situation’s not changing, maybe there’s something that’s inhibiting their normal human ability to heal and it could be a pattern of trauma.”
For instance, at 30 years of age, “Janet,” another patient of his, was in a wheelchair and had been struggling with Lyme disease symptoms and disabilities for years. Despite treatment, her limbs were paralyzed on and off, she experienced paresthesia (a burning or prickling sensation, usually of the hands and feet), blinding headaches and an inability to focus. She couldn’t hold a job and was living with her parents.
Her symptoms didn’t clear just working on the physical level, so Talmadge explored information about her family of origin. It turned out her family was from the Baltic region, where warfare had been waged for generations. So Talmadge ran the software, having her focus on intergenerational PTSD.
“People don’t even have to talk about trauma because it can occur so early in life that they have no memory of it,” he says. “It can occur when they’re in the womb or before they were born. So of course they have zero memory. But just talking about the time frame is enough to anchor the voice to that ancestor and time. The information is there, epigenetically, and will manifest in a voice map where we can address it.”
In Janet’s case, after clearing information about her family of origin, Talmadge carried out several sessions on her symptoms, after which they quickly cleared up and she was able to start living a normal life. “When you change your mind, you change your life,” says Talmadge. “As a species we’re carrying around all this trauma, and now we can do something about that. That’s what the big picture is for me.”
As potentially promising as the EVOX system appears to be, there is a long way to go proving the technology. Forensic science has long understood that vocal tone is a powerful indicator of emotion. Voice stress analysis devices (VSA), which measure “microtremors” in the voice as an indicator of stress, are used widely in police stations and prisons in the US as “lie detection” devices. And yet the few studies that have been done on the much more basic VSA technology show that VSA devices, while they can accurately detect the presence of stress, cannot reliably determine whether that stress is due to lying or not.5
While EVOX obviously has its enthusiastic proponents among therapists, clearly more advanced research into the frequencies of the voice and their relationship to healing trauma is needed. Watch this space.
All practitioners have a different approach using the EVOX technology. Leonie Baxter, a naturopathic health practitioner in Cornwall, UK, says she tries to coach clients on getting very exact with the topic at hand, getting into the scope of it, the feel, the smell, the taste, everything that is pertinent.
“When did they first experience it? Is there anything they can relate it to? The more I can get them into their thoughts and feelings, the more I’m going to capture those frequencies. It’s kind of like biography to biology, as it were.”
Sometimes she asks them to write whatever it is down. Then, when they’re ready and give her the nod, she starts recording a 10-second statement. “Eight seconds of audio is all it really takes,” she says. “And it doesn’t matter what they say. As long as they’re focused on their topic, EVOX captures the voice energy and creates a voice map called a perception index.”
The perception index displays the person’s perception around their topic (see page 55). After each recording, missing frequencies in the voice are outputted through a hand cradle—a transceiver signal emitting/receiving device—or through a low-level laser back to the client’s body.
While the information is being output, the client relaxes while listening to unstructured ambient music. The feedback portions of the session average between 30 seconds to two minutes in length. Then the next voice recording is made. The changed frequencies in the voice are assessed and displayed in another perception index, and the latest missing frequencies are fed back to the client’s body.
Sessions typically last around an hour and include multiple recording/feedback cycles until the perception index reveals that a clear shift in subconscious perception has been made.
“It’s a beautifully simple process,” Baxter says. “The thing I like about EVOX is that if somebody doesn’t want to get deep down and dirty into stuff—which not everybody does—they can actually talk about anything as long as they’re focused on their topic. It’s all about frequency, not words, and just letting the software work out its algorithms until it shows there’s been a shift in perception.
“Frankly, if I lost this technology tomorrow, I don’t feel like I could be a whole practitioner. Yes, I could do my functional medicine questionnaire and my medical history and I could do blood tests, but I certainly couldn’t reframe people’s emotions in 60 to 90 minutes. It’s really the future.”
Typical topics
Practitioners claim the EVOX system can be used to reframe perceptions on all manner of issues including:
David Watts, 54, from Plymouth in the UK, had long-term issues with his parents. “My father was violent,” he says. “Unkind is probably the nicest way I can put it. I think he believed in tough love. I had a chip on my shoulder as a result, and I didn’t have a very high opinion of myself. I also felt a lot of guilt around how I’d never got on with either parent and how we’d drifted apart.”
He heard about Leonie Baxter from a friend at work and decided to see if she could help him with these negative feelings. “Everything was very straightforward,” he says. “We sat down, and she explained the technology and showed me the EVOX computer and the hand cradle. Then we did a session, and the computer mapped my voice.”
After about an hour, the computer indicated that there had been a significant perceptual shift around the topic of his parents. “I’m not a religious man,” he says, “But I felt refreshed, and I felt slightly lightened in my body, if that makes sense. Since then I haven’t really thought about issues with my parents. And that’s been over a year ago. I’m not jumping out of bed every morning saying, ‘I feel better’!” But I haven’t torn myself apart about the issue. And the sense of guilt, anguish and regret is just gone.”
Lisa Talmadge. Vermont native Lisa, 60, is Kevin Talmadge’s sister. She worked as a nurse her entire career, and says she was barely able to contain her disinterest and disbelief as she listened to her brother’s excited stories about his work with EVOX over the years. “If I can’t see it and can’t measure it, I don’t believe in it,” she laughs. “There was no bigger skeptic than me.”
Then, in early 2020, she experienced a sudden and traumatic breakup with her long-time girlfriend. “She called and asked me to meet her at a specific location, a place called Joe’s Pond, and she just laid it out. After that happened I went into a deep depression. For months I was a complete mess. I kept replaying the conversation, thinking ‘If I’d only said something different. If I’d only said this, if only I’d done that, things might be different.’
“I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I was literally wailing in bed replaying the scene over and over, night after night. I was so stuck and obsessed.”
Eventually she talked to her brother about her problem. He suggested she work with him long-distance using the EVOX technology and she flatly refused. “Coming from a traditional medical background where you take a pill or you have the surgery or you work through something with talk therapy, I didn’t have any confidence that it was going to work. But I just couldn’t shift my crying and not eating and not sleeping.”
Finally Lisa relented. Kevin shipped her a hand cradle to use, and they did a few long-distance sessions. First they worked on clearing family-of-origin issues. “I realized right away it was affecting how I felt about my mother in a positive way,” she says. “I was queer in the 1960s, so basically my relationship with my mother was traumatic. After a session, I was more settled and calm, and that was a big change. Then we got to the girlfriend part.”
The EVOX sessions helped, but she continued to obsess. At that point Kevin suggested they do a session with her focused on the location where she was ditched—Joe’s Pond.
“I was like ‘Really? Seriously?’ But after that it was like a miracle. I still can’t even believe I’m saying this out loud, but after we did that session I slept through the night and I didn’t wake up thinking about it. And I have not gone through that pain and obsession ever again. It was over immediately, and it changed my life. I was shocked!”
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References |
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1 |
J Aging Res, 2018; 2018: 2126368 |
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2 |
Neuroscience, 2014; 0: 157–70 |
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3 |
Prog Mol Biol Transl Sci, 2018; 158: 273–98 |
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4 |
Nat Commun, 2021; 12: 861 |
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5 |
National Institute of Justice, March 16, 2008. “Voice Stress Analysis: Only 15 Percent of Lies About Drug Use Detected in Field Test.” nij.ojp.gov |
Buried thoughts
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References |
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1 |
Perspect Psychol Sci, 2008; 3: 73–9 |
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