The God Notes is the story of a scientific revolution in its infancy, and as I mentioned in my recent vlog, it was born from a throwaway line.
I’d been watching a documentary called Did Darwin Kill God, in 2009, featuring presenter Conor Cunningham, a philosopher and theologian at the University of Nottingham, interviewing Simon Conway Morris of the University of Cambridge, one of the world’s preeminent paleobiologists and a committed Christian. Renowned for his research demonstrating how divergent life forms with entirely independent evolutionary paths produce markedly similar results, Morris was making the case for some sort of intelligent and universal design beneath the process of evolution.
For instance, take music. “Animals,” Morris said, “have music remarkably similar to ours. Some birds have drumming, for example, plus harmony, melody, and invention. There are even cultures of music.” In the oceans, he said, whales even swap songs.
“Now, supposing there is a universal music out there,” he added. “The reason why the music sounds the same is because it is something which arguably is even preexisting.”
I greeted that statement as if I’d just received an electric shock.
This distinguished scientist, who’d made his name studying convergent evolutionary paths of long-extinct species, had just suggested something outlandish: Music was not only universal between species, but it was just there, and it always had been—not anything that had evolved over time, but a feature innate in anything that was alive.
Throughout the next fifteen years his statement—suppose there is a universal music out there—continued to haunt me, a conundrum begging to be solved. Was there in fact something universal about music—not just in humans but in all living things?
What had Conway Morris meant by “preexisting”? How far back did it go and where did it come from? Had it just sprung, fully formed, out of nowhere? And why music, and not what would seem to be the more logical mechanism for communication: language?
And then one persistent question of my own: Why does music, a completely abstract construction, alone among the arts, have such a profound effect on us?
Over the years, even while writing two other books, I kept my hand in, clipping relevant articles, maintaining files marked “Universal Music,” mulling over the research, trying to work out what it all meant.
Whether or not music was universal among humans was not, to my mind, the real question. The bigger issue, raised by Conway Morris, was that all living beings created similar music. Why would these sounds be so familiar, so innate? Once I finally began researching in earnest, I discovered something even more astonishing.
Sound wasn’t just an adjunct to our being; sound was our being. Sound and musical patterning were in good part responsible for our existence and indeed that of the rest of the universe.
As I would go on to discover, listening to sound was far more than a relaxing, “feel-good” activity. Certain sounds in specific circumstances appeared to have powerfully transformational effects on the brain and body.
What’s more, civilizations living thousands of years ago had not only recognized this but understood how to create structures capable of instantly transporting human beings into a mystical state, creating a deeply transformational experience akin to a “God” consciousness, and with it a deep sense of the divine. All this, too, was forgotten knowledge, swept away by the propagation of Newtonian physics and Darwinian biology, and never fully resurrected.
I began calling these particular sounds “God Notes,” not because they have a connotation affixed to any particular religion but in a metaphorical sense, because they can stir up in anyone, even the most ardent atheist, a taste of divine transcendence.
It wasn’t just due to some sort of relaxation effect. Certain sounds in our world—including a number below our capacity to hear—have profound effects on human biology, altering consciousness and transporting us into a mystical state, with pronounced positive physical effects. Our skin tingles, our emotions soar, we vibrate in time to the music. Within seconds, we arrive at a mystical state of wonderment or may even heal a long-standing condition.
But if there are good notes, there are also “bad” notes, whether natural sounds from seismic rumblings or manmade ones, from such machinery as wind turbines, which can have negative physical effects, causing nausea, fatigue, a sense of malaise, pain, sleep disturbances, and a general sense of dread, even if they are below our capacity to hear.
We constantly resonate with our world—for better or worse.
The more I looked, the more astonished I became. Science was finally catching up with what Pythagoras and the other ancients had espoused: The harmonious structure in nature and the fundamentals of musical harmonics are essentially the same. All of life is, in fact, quite literally, a symphony, in which each component part innately understands just the perfect notes to play.
This was nothing less than a new science, hiding in plain sight, blasting a crater-size hole through much of existing theory, particularly neo-Darwinian evolution.
The God Notes is an attempt to synthesize this copious evidence into a coherent whole—the first book to reclaim the primacy of sound in making every aspect of our world.
I have framed this book as a detective story, detailing the painstaking discoveries, often by outsiders—many of them engineers or physicists, rather than biologists—who were willing to examine this subject with fresh eyes, each contributing one more explosive discovery, all adding up to a drastic revision of our universal story.
In a sense, I became the chief detective investigating this as I pored through countless books and research papers and interviewed dozens of scientists and sound practitioners. Putting the entire story together required many months of painstakingly synthesizing all the separate findings, decoding the work of these scientists into plain English from what is often advanced mathematics, and highlighting their explosive meanings.
Besides their papers, I also had to tease information out of these experts. These are men and women who spend their time peering into microscopes or examining graphs on computer screens, the better to come up with one more cautious baby step of scientific discovery.
These discoveries may finally answer why music, alone of the arts, has such a profound physical impact on us. That shiver down the spine that we experience when hearing certain music may be an unconscious recognition of this natural order, tacit understanding that there is no division between nature’s most fundamental pattern and ourselves.
Music affects us so deeply because it is, essentially, a portal to our truest essence. We are just on the brink of remembering what we’ve forgotten, and in our hubris, temporarily lost. May all those true explorers of sound and music keep reminding us and, in so doing, show us the path back home.
