Peyton Groves was struggling to cope with the stress of medical school when she first moved to Oakland to attend the University of Pittsburgh.
“I grew up in California and I had a pretty hard transition coming to Pittsburgh,” Groves said. “I was kind of just looking for things to make me feel better.”
That’s when she came across a sound healing studio in Shadyside. She was intrigued. She was familiar with the idea of a “sound bath” but she didn’t expect the woman leading the session to be a world-renowned musician.
Monique Mead, a professional violinist who studied under Leonard Bernstein, has been offering sound baths at the Awareness and Wellness Center of Pittsburgh since 2022. The one-hour sessions offer a space to lie comfortably in a soft, blanketed bean bag while Mead guides a group meditation with violin, gong, crystal singing bowls and percussion.
Waves of soothing, overlapping sounds vibrate through the room, guiding those gathered into a deep state of relaxation. The undulating tones are designed to help the body to release tension and refocus the mind on the present moment.
“If we can cut out the distractions, if we can really deeply rest, then the body does what it naturally does, which is to repair tissue and find balance,” Mead said. “That rhythmic pulsing is something that naturally brings the body and mind to rest.”
Groves said Mead’s “soundscape of relaxation” not only helped calm her nerves but improved her focus on her studies.
“At the end [it was] pulling me out of some of the darkness that I’d been feeling,” she said. “[And] I wanted other people to experience this.”
Soon after that first session, Groves developed an interest in integrative medicine, which combines traditional medicine practices with complementary and alternative medicine practices like meditation, acupuncture and music therapy.
Now in her third year of medical school, Groves, as well as other Pitt med and public health students, are taking a sound healing course this semester designed by Mead.
The class originated at Carnegie Mellon University, where Mead is a professor and director of the music entrepreneurship program. In 2023, her CMU students formed the Scottie Sound Bath, which meets weekly to provide relaxation opportunities for students and faculty.
Mead plans to establish a similar wellness program on Pitt’s campus this year. Though her CMU students come with music backgrounds, Mead stressed that the practice doesn’t require that level of expertise.
“What I love about singing bowls is that 99% of people who play them are not musicians,” she said. “It's very accessible because they're just very easy to play.”
Beyond helping their professors and classmates relax, students like Groves want to explore how they can incorporate sound healing into clinical settings in the future.
“There's so much potential for it to be a healing thing for people that are in a lot of pain,” Groves said. “There would be so many benefits for people who are stuck in a hospital bed and can't move in the same ways that they would want to.”
Though clinical use of sound healing is not widespread in the United States, it’s not a new concept in American medicine. Some hospitals offer music therapy to help patients with anxiety before surgeries. Therapeutic drumming has been used by mental health practitioners to bring people together through meditative rhythm. (The technique has been used by survivors of the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting to manage grief and connect with each other.)
Mead said the idea of sound healing is based on the phenomenon of entrainment, which synchronizes a person’s heart rate to an external rhythm.
“If you go to a club and you hear this really big pulsing music, you're going to want to move to that,” Mead said. “At the same time, if a music therapist goes into an ICU unit with a baby with a racing heartbeat, they'll go in with a drum and they will match that heartbeat, and then they'll go slower and slower and the baby's heartbeat will follow that.”
Mindfulness meets scientific evidence
Sound healing and integrative techniques are centuries-old practices in Eastern medicine, but there is a paucity of research on the concept in the Western Hemisphere. A 2023 evaluation of brainwave entrainment research published in the National Library of Medicine concluded that existing findings were too inconsistent to produce a scientific theory about its effectiveness.
Jessica Burke, a professor at Pitt’s School of Public Health and vice chancellor for global affairs in health sciences, said Mead’s course at Pitt will provide a good opportunity to add to the research about the phenomenon of sound healing. She will lead a research element about sound healing that runs parallel to Mead’s class.
“We do know that it can have an impact on your feelings of anxiety… but how that works we don’t really understand,” Burke said. “There’s not a lot established.”
The research will build upon what Burke started at CMU’s Scottie Sound Bath, where she surveyed Mead’s students and asked open-ended questions about their experiences. In the responses, she found significant improvements in most questions about state of mood when comparing answers before and after a sound bath session.
“They talked about feeling relaxed and grounded,” Burke said. “And it offered them a sense of relief and clarity and an awareness about their body.”
While 79% of respondents reported feeling anxious before the sound bath, only 20% reported the feeling after. Burke found similar drops in feelings of stress, inability to relax, tiredness and trouble focusing.
Burke’s surveys were not a perfect cross-section of society: most participants were female college students at an average age of 26. And 83% of respondents had never experienced a sound bath before. Still, Burke argued the surveys provide foundation her future research can build upon.
At Pitt, she plans to explore other areas of assessment such as how long the effects of a sound bath endure, and whether heart rate or test scores can be improved. Burke said her research is aimed at providing hard science to support what she and others have observed about sound healing. She first experimented with sound healing when she was living in Nepal, where the practice is common.
“I have felt firsthand the power of the practice,” Burke said.
Legitimizing the use of sound healing with hard data is something that excited Groves, who noted that mainstream medicine can be dismissive of complementary alternative medicine practices.
“Alternative medicine has a negative connotation because [it’s like] you’re choosing one over the other,” Groves said. “But a lot of people don’t [choose] and they just do both. And I think it’s our job as doctors to know how to do that.”
Burke said she hopes her research will encourage more universities to offer sound healing practices as a wellness program for students because of its low cost and proven effectiveness.
“This is a class that is going to provide skills for practitioners, skills for researchers in health sciences who are interested in improving mental health and well-being,” Burke said.
Proven in practice
Though the class at Pitt may provide more academic insight into how meditation and sound healing can impact health, some mental health practitioners are already deploying the tool.
At the Awareness and Wellness Center where Mead practices, more than a dozen psychotherapists refer their patients to her studio. She also offers sessions for the therapists themselves, who often experience high levels of stress.
Mead joked that most people would expect to find her in a yoga studio instead of a therapy group practice but noted that anecdotally, she has seen meditation have positive impacts on patients’ progress in therapy.
“They have an immediate somatic experience of being calm,” she said. “And when people are more open and calm then the work that they can do with a therapist is accelerated.”
Mead also trains novice sound healers at her studio where her students range from musicians exploring a career path to counselors, therapists and even preschool teachers. One of her students, Sheri Robinson, is a licensed professional counselor based in Wilkins Township. She began training with Mead soon after her first experience with sound bathing.
“I’d never experienced anything like that,” she said. And the wheels began turning in her mind to bring the technique to her clients. “People who suffer with anxiety and different somatic issues that hold them back from healing need to know what this is like and how helpful it can be.”
Though she’s still learning, Robinson has already incorporated singing bowls into her practice.
“I have recorded sound meditations for my clients, specifically to their needs to help them kind of reground themselves when needed and kind of de-escalate emotions when things become overwhelming and overstimulating,” Robinson said.
Robinson will be one of 20 singing bowl practitioners gathering Sunday for a massive sound healing performance at Heinz Chapel. Mead will lead the session on violin alongside her daughter on harp.
Advertised as the largest sound bath in Pittsburgh, attendants will lie on the pews of the chapel and, Mead said, be “looking up at the stained-glass windows and feeling through the wooden benches the vibrations of these singing bowls all around them.”
The “Mega Surround Sound Bath” is the first of several scheduled at the historic chapel this year. Mead said the performance will symbolize the launch of Pitt’s own sound bath initiative.
“Having a coordinated synched effort of sound is really one of the greatest flow experiences that you can possibly have,” she said. “It [will be] a nice way for people who are just getting into it to have this ‘Wow!’ experience with all these practitioners.”
As the Pitt med students learn the practice this semester, more sound bath performances will be scheduled on campus. Groves said she’s eager to see how she can use sound healing to help students and faculty.
“Not a lot of students have the tools that you need to really take care of yourself, whether that's because of personal things, structural things, or societal things,” she said. “I think that's why this is so exciting because it's such a passive way to relax.”
