What if the music you listen to, the frequencies your body absorbs every day, and the sonic environment around you are doing far more to you -- biologically, neurologically, and emotionally -- than anyone in the mainstream music industry has been willing to say? Scott "Shagghie" Scheferman, cybersecurity strategist, live techno producer, and researcher deep in a confidential frequency-healing project, joins Sean Martin for a wide-ranging conversation that connects quantum consciousness, Cymatics, Solfeggio frequencies, the physics of live performance, and what it actually means to produce music that makes people feel good.
Scott Scheferman -- known throughout the cybersecurity and music communities as Shagghie -- brings a rare combination of backgrounds to this conversation: classically trained on trumpet, a live techno producer since the late nineties, a student of synthesis at its lowest circuit level, and now a full-time researcher working on what he calls the Joy Protocol -- a frequency-based framework designed to produce measurable physiological and neurological benefits through sound and light.
The conversation opens with Scott recounting his musical journey -- from blues trumpet in the Caribbean to losing his cherished instruments during a move to the United States, to a 25-year silence before his daughter convinced him to pick up the horn again. Then came the synthesizers. He describes performing live techno with six drum machines and synthesizer sequencers at a San Diego club, his parents in the crowd, sweating and dancing by 2:00 AM. For Scott, that was the moment of arrival -- not just as a performer, but as someone understood.
From there, the conversation moves into the physics. Scott and Sean explore how frequency operates across the entire spectrum -- from the 7.83 hertz resonant frequency of the Earth itself to the quantum oscillations that defy measurement. Scott makes the case that sound is not merely an aesthetic experience but a literal force, one that operates on the body, mind, and cellular structure in ways now being confirmed by a new wave of scientific research. The Solfeggio scale, long dismissed by mainstream music as esoteric, turns out to have been built around frequencies that have specific, studied, physiological effects on the human body.
The conversation doesn't shy from harder territory. Scott discusses directional sound weapons he witnessed firsthand at Booz Allen Hamilton, the documented Havana syndrome incidents, and how blue light frequencies are engineered into consumer electronics to trigger dopamine responses. These aren't conspiracy theories, he argues -- they are the same science, used from the opposite direction. The Joy Protocol is the inverse: taking those same mechanisms and applying them to produce healing, not harm. Even the 40-hertz frequency -- which Scott now seeks out on his wife's Power Plate machine at the gym -- produces a physical response he describes as immediately and unmistakably real.
The episode closes on the question every musician, listener, and creator should be sitting with: if certain frequencies heal and others harm, if the A-440 tuning standard may have been a deliberate departure from something more resonant, and if the spaces between notes matter as much as the notes themselves -- then what does it mean to produce music intentionally? Scott points toward the guitar as a last frontier that AI cannot replicate: the harmonic overtones that physically manifest in wood when an instrument is tuned to a resonant frequency cannot be induced after the fact. That reality, he suggests, is both a challenge and an invitation.
Sean Martin, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine, Studio C60, and Host of Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast & Music Evolves Podcast | Website: https://www.seanmartin.com/
Scott "Shagghie" Scheferman, Cybersecurity Strategist, Musician, and Researcher | Website: https://www.scottscheferman.com/ | On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottscheferman/
Scott Scheferman's Personal Website | https://www.scottscheferman.com/
Music Evolves: Sonic Frontiers Newsletter | https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7290890771828719616/
scott scheferman, shagghie, frequency healing, quantum consciousness, cymatics, solfeggio frequencies, sound as medicine, live techno, music production, joy protocol, sean martin, music, creativity, art, artist, musician, music evolves, music podcast, music and technology podcast
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Sound Is a Force: Frequency, Healing, and the Physics of Music | A Music Evolves Conversation with Scott "Shagghie" Scheferman, Cybersecurity Strategist, Musician, and Researcher
[00:00:49]Sean Martin: Hello everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Music Evolves. I'm Sean Martin, your host, where on this show I get to explore the world of music -- creating music, recording music, performing music, listening to music. It's all stuff that I love to do.
But more specifically, I'd like to connect technology to how we can leverage it to push the boundaries on all those things. Music clearly has an impact on individuals and societies and humanity at large. The more we understand how music plays a role in our lives and how technology can help -- in my opinion, better our lives.
I work better when I have music going, and I feel better when I play certain types of music. My guest today, Shagghie, we've actually talked about that a bit on previous episodes of this show and other shows. I'm thrilled to have you back on. It's good to see you, my friend.
[00:02:03]Scott Scheferman: Me too. It always feels like coming home when I'm on the show talking to you.
[00:02:08]Sean Martin: People may not realize, but we talk in general as well, and that's kind of the trigger for this conversation. Some of the work you've been up to and the research you've been doing -- it's really cool. Totally connected to what I'm doing on this show. So let's wrap about that.
Before we get into it, maybe a few words about some of the things you're doing musically. I know you record, you play, perform -- all kinds of artistic things, and in the broader sense, music being part of it. Maybe a few words about some of the things you're up to, and then we'll get into the topic.
[00:02:52]Scott Scheferman: Yeah, music is just life for many of us. A lot of our conversations in years past have been in the cyber community, and there are just so many people -- let me just make sure my laptop's plugged in here. It wasn't actually plugged in. Sorry about that.
[00:03:17]Sean Martin: It's always power. That's going to be the demise of society.
[00:03:17]Scott Scheferman: Well, you need electricity -- that's one of the stronger forces we'll talk about. Music is life. Always has been. Classically trained on trumpet, went into jazz and marching band, then got into the blues really heavy. By others' accounts I was pretty good at one point in my youth, right around my upper teens. Then I moved from the Caribbean to the United States. The guy packing up my two horns -- one was a Flugelhorn, Chuck Mangione model, a very special model, and the other was a gorgeous box silver horn with the sweetest tone. He was asking me questions about them, super enthusiastic, talking about his sons who were learning to play trumpet. I got to the United States and everything arrived except for both instruments.
[00:04:12]Sean Martin: That's--
[00:04:12]Scott Scheferman: Right. And this was at the peak of my blues era. You would think I'd just buy another horn and start playing blues again. But I got so hurt, so painfully hurt, that I promised I would never play the horn again. No rational reason why I did that, but I did. It wasn't for about 25 years before I picked up another horn -- actually when my daughter started playing. She said, "Daddy, you have to play the horn." And I said, all right, I'll play the horn.
Music is life. Music is this constant rhythm that takes you through your life. You can remember your life through the sonic lens of music, wherever you were and what you were doing. The real question we'll talk about today is why that's the case -- from a spiritual perspective, a scientific perspective, a physiological perspective, even a quantum, galaxy perspective. Studying all the quantum forces at play is what got me into this current conversation.
My music background is also techno. I'm a live techno producer. I've played live shows with all the instruments -- I was doing that back when only a few guys and gals were doing that, way back in the late nineties, early two thousands. Now it's quite common where people bring their boxes and play. Half the time it still doesn't sound as good as a DJ set for the people dancing. But if you're into the artistic, in-the-moment creative side, it's much like going to see your favorite jazz horn player where they're improvising, vibing off of you, and you're vibing off of the fact that it's unscripted. It's not prerecorded, it's live. There's a certain fascination we have with live music -- that anticipation, that space between the notes when you're not quite sure how they're going to hit you. That's why I've always been a live player.
[00:06:37]Sean Martin: The cool thing with the techno and the synths is -- I dabble in it and record some stuff -- but the idea of performing just blows my mind. The powerful thing about it is you can push the limits and end up in a place you never expected.
[00:07:05]Scott Scheferman: Yeah. Nobody expected.
[00:07:06]Sean Martin: -- your point, that may or may not be what the listener is expecting at the time. A good performer will have the ability to work that.
[00:07:18]Scott Scheferman: My pinnacle moment in my life is actually on a birthday. I played a live show with like six drum machines and synthesizer sequencers at a pretty big club in San Diego. My parents showed up and they didn't really know this musical side of me -- they kind of left off at the old horn stuff. They knew I did techno, but that's a statement, not a reality. By 2:00 AM they were sweating and dancing and screaming. My own parents. And I was like, I've arrived. One of those bucket list moments where no matter what else happens, I feel understood. My parents know me.
I even did a show downtown Houston at an art gallery. I brought a modular Eurorack system with literally many dozens -- maybe even a hundred -- interconnecting wires on logic circuits and audio circuits and modifiers, all the modulation you do in that context. I created a live techno acid, 303 acid-type vibe set. I think I hit the 70 to 80 percent of what's possible mark. In your mind you always think, I know I could have done better. You're making a thousand mistakes per second because it's all real time. You have infinite possibilities, infinite soundscape. That's why I shifted from hacking the planet and cybersecurity to becoming a synth person -- a subtractive, additive synth, FM synth person.
I literally studied synthesis in its rawest form at the modular level, even designed those circuits for that whole industry for a while. And that is part of what I'm drawing from when I look at this idea -- that vibrations, or what we loosely call frequency -- happen across the whole spectrum. Not just sound. It's also light. It's above light. And even infrasound, which is below the frequencies we can hear, but they're all vibrations nonetheless. An infinite number of frequencies on that analog, linear scale.
[00:10:00]Sean Martin: We can mark where we can do something with those markers.
[00:10:00]Scott Scheferman: Yeah, in a decimal system, right. We can refer to that frequency with some confidence. But it's this realization that from the lowest frequencies -- the oscillation of how galaxies spin, so low that it would take infinity lifetimes to experience two beats -- all the way up to frequencies so high you can't even fathom how fast they are at the quantum level. Oscillations that still defy our ability to measure the intervals. They're so high, and also so random and hard to observe without affecting them. The quantum problem.
[00:10:42]Sean Martin: Dogs hear things that humans can't, right? But that's pitch -- is that also frequency? Is that why certain animals hear different things?
[00:10:54]Scott Scheferman: Yeah. Animals amazingly operate -- some of them, we can with high confidence infer that they have a quantum portion of their brain. Even the falcon. They've measured the ability of a falcon to descend off of a hot air balloon from their trainer and retrieve an object that's been thrown down with great force, hundreds of yards in front of them. They're the fastest animal in the world. The way they can defy gravity, go faster than what their body contours should allow as they're tucked in. Their brain couldn't possibly be operating in a classical transistor-synapse model.
Humanity has always thought of the brain as a computer -- the larger the brain, the more intelligent. But that's absolutely not true. There's a quantum level that allows our brains to operate regardless of the mass of the gray matter. There are people who have lost 95 percent of their gray matter through accidents and are still high-IQ, fully functional individuals.
So there's always been something going on, and we're finally unlocking and codifying what quantum consciousness is -- that thing that keeps us connected, that allows us to know when something on the other side of the world just happened. That gut feeling. It's all quantum driven. And quantum operates off of vibrational frequencies as well. States of your brain's consciousness -- alpha, theta, beta -- those are lower than audio frequencies. One to three hertz versus the 20 hertz where you can hear. Something below that literally affects your state of mind. That state guides everything -- your dreams, your body's physiological ability to heal. Your whole mind, your whole body. It's all about frequency.
[00:13:34]Sean Martin: We were talking the other day and your daughter said, listen to a good song and I feel good for the day. And I feel the same. It's the melody, the beat, the lyrics -- whatever someone taps into to get that feeling. But it's more than that, right? There's a frequency perhaps. I remember there was something on Instagram where a guy was saying that popular songs end up recorded at a different pitch or frequency -- they readjust them to actually hit properly.
[00:14:35]Scott Scheferman: They retune the whole--
[00:14:36]Sean Martin: Retune. Yeah.
[00:14:39]Scott Scheferman: What is music but frequencies and intervals -- rhythmic intervals between words. A lot of people don't realize that vocals are one of the hardest things to get right when you're producing music. What I found is that the best vocalists are not the ones that are pitch perfect. They're the ones with the best timing. They play like a jazz instrument between the spaces of the rhythm structured underneath them. That's why Sade works -- the drum and bass structure creates a canvas where you get to bob and weave and play in between the spaces. If you listen to Sade through that lens, it's amazing what you'll hear. Same thing with Miles Davis on the horn. It's not the notes he's playing, it's the notes he's not playing. The spacing between the notes, the timing against the drum and the bass -- that's what makes music feel alive. It's what makes you lean in. It's the whisper, not the shout.
Even when I was doing public speaking -- and you've been with me on my journey long enough to know I started with great fear of it -- what unlocked it was a Vietnamese speaker who taught me to focus on five areas of the voice: lowering the voice, increasing cadence, pitch inflections. He teaches all five things. Being an audiologist of sorts, it resonated with me. And I unlocked my whole public speaking career. I was no longer afraid -- in fact, I was eagerly waiting to get on stage.
Voice is extremely powerful because it brings in all the elements of sound design. Our vocal cords are remarkable in how they articulate rhythm, pause, whisper. There's so much going on with the voice that our brain is tuned to. And that's one of the reasons why music hits us so hard -- our brains are tuned to understand sound at the level of what I call force. Sound is literally a force.
[00:19:09]Sean Martin: I want to talk about sound. Marco and I -- we talk about this. Analyzing a Beatles song: why did John throw that note in there? It makes no sense in the context of the other notes, but it works.
[00:19:46]Scott Scheferman: Jimi Hendrix.
[00:19:46]Sean Martin: Yeah, Jimi Hendrix, same. I was just at a performance with Trey Anastasio from Phish -- him and his guitar and a keyboardist. They were doing a dueling thing. The notes didn't work together, they were completely at odds. But they worked. And Trey said about the keyboardist, he's the best skunk-slinger I know. Just making it raw and nasty. The nastier and more competing it got with the guitar, it worked. It gave me a feeling of energy and a bit of discomfort, and at the end you're like, that was amazing.
[00:20:58]Scott Scheferman: There's this idea of happy accidents in music creation. My jazz instructor taught me long ago -- if you're playing a solo and you play the wrong note, don't stop. Hold it. Use whatever inflection you need to make that note feel on purpose. No matter how wrong it is -- whether ill-timed or the wrong pitch -- just hold it. Because things that don't make sense are what we kind of crave. What we really crave is the artist having enough confidence to define the moment.
In techno, in raves in the nineties, when the beat hit right and the DJ dropped the perfect drop, we would literally sit down on the ground and stop dancing to show respect. That phrase, "that track floored me" -- it literally means sit your ass down because you're submitting. Submission as a listener is really important. You can go in headstrong and try to analyze, taking it apart, trying to understand it. But instead of just submitting to the music--
[00:22:53]Sean Martin: Exactly. So let's talk about the physical aspect. We all know we feel music and it gives us a response. There's a reason behind it. Tell me some of the research you've been doing and how that connects to the physical aspect of who we are.
[00:23:25]Scott Scheferman: What's amazing about the era we live in right now is that AI has progressed scientific discovery at a rate that was unimaginable five years ago. In the last three or four years, there's been a massive amount of very significant, hard-hitting research that should inform us going forward. It's almost like we need to delete all the books we've studied in the past and start anew -- that's how fresh quantum physics is. That's how fresh the research just on sound and healing is. It's affirming what we've always intuitively felt. But now it's being affirmed scientifically in a way that's irrefutable.
And we're just on the cusp of where we're about to go in this specific field. I don't even know how to define this field other than -- it's all of frequency. The visual spectrum sits above the audio spectrum. There's infra-audio below the audio, and ultra-high frequencies above visual. When you look at the body of work on how certain frequencies affect the body and mind -- let's start physiologically.
A techno kick drum is usually tuned between about 30 hertz and 110 hertz. That's the thump hitting you in the chest. Your body's resonant frequency is around 100 hertz. Some 100-hertz frequencies hit you so hard they literally heal your body. That's why people are bass addicts -- there's a whole genre called bass music. Now we know scientifically that 40 hertz is a universal healing frequency. We've known that going all the way back to ancient hermetics.
The Solfeggio scale -- a long-lost scale you don't hear in pop music because it's not tuned to A equals 440 -- each one of those frequencies has been scientifically studied to produce discrete physiological benefits to the human body at a cellular level. This is ancient science now being vindicated. There are churches that were acoustically tuned to amplify those Solfeggio frequencies. I personally looked at a lot of that stuff as esoteric and fufu. I've done a complete 180 to -- holy shit, this is going to unlock what we need in humanity today more than ever.
40 hertz is healing. Just above it -- 50 and 60 hertz -- that's what your power grid runs on. And those frequencies happen to be incredibly damaging to your body. Being exposed to them brings about depression and a bunch of other studied physiological and mental harms. So when I produce music, I'm literally writing a protocol through the entire frequency spectrum -- a protocol I'm doing full-time for a company I can't say too much about.
There are sets of frequencies in the audio range that are absolutely healing, and others that are harmful. When you're watching a horror film and they bring in that bass -- guess what frequencies they're using? Hollywood's bigger studios have known a lot of this science for a long time.
There's also a whole body of conspiracy theory that talks about the CIA, MK Ultra, using light and sound frequencies to control populations. But by the same mechanisms -- through the same science -- you can use the inverse of what has historically been used to harm. The stuff that happens in Havana, those low-frequency attacks that made people sick -- we're using the inverse of those frequencies to create a protocol for media that only brings about what we call joy. It's called the Joy Protocol.
In music, you can create sounds -- instead of just retuning to align songs before and after for harmonic congruence -- you can retune to the geometry of music and the universe. I think it's 528 hertz -- right in the middle of the audio range, 20 hertz to 20,000, we can hear it perfectly, and it's super healing. And if you go up a number of perfect octaves from that frequency, you reach a light frequency that is one of the most healing for your body at a cellular level.
[00:30:54]Sean Martin: As long as you stay within the octaves.
[00:30:57]Scott Scheferman: There is an absolute set of geometry that governs all the way down to the lower frequencies. The resonant frequency of the whole Earth -- the planet that humanity has been born from and evolved through -- that's 7.83 hertz. It's below what you can hear. But it's definitely something you feel. It's a low frequency, low frequencies travel far. Our atmosphere and our Earth creates 7.83 hertz. That ends up being a fundamental for a whole set of healing frequencies above it. Two of those happen to be in the Solfeggio scale.
So our body has been looking for these geometries to ground us. These geometries are the true clock. Not just the frequency -- the geometry. Just like Phi. That curvature we observe at the macro level all the way down to the smallest quantum particle levels. Phi is basically how we observe congruent structures of universal intelligence. It's the answer at every single level from macro to micro. And that same geometry is reflected in octaves and harmonic intervals that we love in music.
[00:32:57]Sean Martin: My brain is already fried.
[00:33:00]Scott Scheferman: That wanted me to go down 10,000 other avenues.
[00:33:03]Sean Martin: I have 10,000 in my head too, probably different from yours. Let me say a couple things here. First -- not sound, but light and power. I have this thing a company's building that uses hundreds of LEDs. They had a quality control issue that forced them to refactor. The level of power to the circuit of LEDs wasn't set quite right, which let them burn or light but not consistently, not for the expected long period of time. They found that dropping the power level gave them the consistency they wanted and also the longevity. Your thoughts on that connected to music, frequency, all that.
[00:34:14]Scott Scheferman: It's literally the perfect analog to what I'll share. Music is frequencies, but also intervals and dynamics -- loud and soft. If you look at all the studies, there's one thing in common: it's not the frequency as much as how long it's applied and how intensely it's applied. Whether it's a light source or a sound frequency -- intensity matters, intervals matter, dynamic or power level matters. And in every single one of those studies, those are the three common denominators.
Like 630 to 660 nanometers of light -- that's your reddish light. That's a super healing frequency. There are actually five red-area frequencies that individually do different things at a cellular level. When cells are exposed to all five together, there are harmonic synergies where the sum is much greater than five. It's some exponential higher. Go figure -- back to music. That's what a chord is. It's all about the relationships. Geometry that heals. It's not the frequency, it's the frequency in relation to everything else going on in that cell. All of those geometric relationships -- even at the quantum level.
Why do we feel the human brain could possibly be doing quantum computing? You can't hold quantum state at room temperature -- you need to freeze it to hold a quantum state long enough to compute. That's what humanity would have thought just a few years ago. But now, with the study of quantum consciousness, we realize there is a lattice structure in protein microtubules that is constructed so geometrically perfectly it can hold a quantum state regardless of temperature.
There's even a scientist looking at a certain asteroid -- I forget the name -- that we sent a space vehicle out to study. Part of that asteroid has this crystal lattice structure. And the scientist went way out on a limb in the context of quantum consciousness to suggest that asteroids might have consciousness. Why not? If all you need is a certain lattice structure that geometrically produces quantum state -- the rock's reality might not be like ours, where we have five senses. Maybe the rock is stuck in a quantum state without any other senses beyond the cold air of space. But it doesn't mean it doesn't hold a quantum state sufficient to have a weird form of intelligence.
[00:38:44]Sean Martin: Super interesting. I'm going to bring it to the other extreme -- sound bowls, sound rooms. I have a good friend who is basically a musical health therapist.
[00:39:09]Scott Scheferman: Some of them don't know the science. I have a yoga instructor who knows exactly how to work the bowls and what to do but hasn't studied it at an academic level. I take those yoga classes with those bowls and in Shavasana I do go places.
A lot of those frequencies align to the ancient monks. You know what a mandala is -- a geometric shape, sometimes like a lotus flower or triangles. The ancient monk mandalas, I through my study reverse-engineered to what Cymatics frequencies those mandalas actually represent. Why is that geometric shape important in the first place? The answer is sound.
If you don't know what Cymatics is -- you've seen it, you just might not know the name. Take sand on a drum surface, play certain frequencies, and it will form geometric shapes. Same thing with water or any liquid. And through the geometric shape, you can reverse-engineer and infer what frequency or set of frequencies created that mandala. And some of those frequencies are the same as in yoga.
[00:41:01]Sean Martin: So interesting. I know there are sound rooms -- big sound healing spaces. And I guess, to your point, sound and frequencies have an impact. You mentioned some conspiracy territory -- I don't necessarily want to go down conspiracy theory, but there's being passive and letting the sound and frequencies and vibrations do whatever they'll do to us. And then there's being an aggressor -- using that to control people, in the media, getting people to want to buy stuff. What do you think about the intent behind some of this?
[00:42:16]Scott Scheferman: On the conspiracy side -- I don't go down those rabbit holes too much. I know enough to know they exist. There are large online populations very much convinced that this is not only real but hitting people today. The stuff that happens in Havana with low-frequency sound that made everybody sick and they continue to be sick. When I was working at Booz Allen Hamilton way back in 2000, they gave us a demo of this new technology -- two panel speakers brought into a room. This was a weapons application, not to kill people but to disrupt them. At the lowest level of amplitude, just barely audible, the woman operating them was able to literally make us all sway our heads and do crazy things, bouncing these panels off the walls, crossing them over right to where our ears were -- which made us nauseous almost to the point of salivating before she backed off. We had signed waivers. It was profoundly eye-opening that early in my life to understand how powerful sound is.
That technology is used for crowd disruption. It also creates a linear laser of sound -- if you're just a few inches away from that beam, you can't even hear it. So it could pass right by you and hit its target. If you have a building you're approaching as a platoon, you might project the sound of tanks rolling in from one direction so all enemies look that way while you approach from the other side.
There's also the brown note, and there've been studies on whether it actually causes you to defecate. I went to an Iron Maiden concert in the eighties and I almost defecated -- don't know if it was the brown note or just the 60,000 watts of sound that broke the Guinness World Record after that concert. I'd never heard a wall of sound like that. It changed my life. And honestly, that concert led me on this journey.
[00:46:04]Scott Scheferman: Control is the whole other aspect of this thing. Certain blue frequencies that hit certain dopamine receptors at certain intervals make you addicted to that source. Blue light is not a natural light in nature -- it very rarely occurs. When you see that frequency, your body is genetically tuned to pay absolute attention. It creates dopamine. Electronics manufacturers realized this during the Bluetooth era, when everything was Bluetooth enabled. Part of that branding campaign was to make every LED blue. I had a Volkswagen in the mid-2000s where the whole dash was blue -- I could barely look at the road because the dash was so beautiful.
[00:47:09]Sean Martin: I have a blue strip behind me there. There's actually a story about the blue LED -- it took ages for them to figure out the technology to create the blue one. All the other colors were easy enough.
[00:47:26]Scott Scheferman: Go figure, just like nature. There's a reason why blue doesn't occur very often. It's a very powerful frequency. There's very little healing research around blue light. Blue isn't just one frequency -- it's a whole suite of them. Some hit the dopamine receptor very strongly. Others can be healing at the right interval to help mood. That's what a lot of depressed people need -- more dopamine. So they put the blue light on. That's what we do.
[00:48:03]Sean Martin: So let's -- I want you to tell the story about the gym and the machine you used.
[00:48:14]Sean Martin: I want folks to hear that story. And then we'll spend the next couple minutes bringing it back to traditional raw music and our lives with that. But tell the story about the machine, the vibration, and the frequency there.
[00:48:33]Scott Scheferman: Yeah. I've been doing this study and understanding how healing 40 hertz is. I put a subwoofer underneath my couch. I'll literally put on a sine wave -- there are websites where you can make a website play a frequency. I just go to that website, put in 40 hertz, turn up the sub full volume, and sit on my couch. 15 minutes of that is like a full body massage. You walk around like He-Man Hulk after that. It feels amazing.
I'm at the gym and my wife is a certified Power Plate instructor. That machine has different intensities and different frequencies -- you can turn the dial between one and eight. I was watching it and the display shows the frequency. I've always been at eight, maxing it out. But I recently put it at six. Six happens to be 40 hertz. It's moving in four different planes, X, Y, Z, all axes -- shaking you all different ways to improve blood flow. It's so powerful that it's also kinetic enough to bring you physiological healing at the cellular level.
Now I go five minutes at 40 hertz and I feel absolutely incredible. I thought: is it psychosomatic, is it just what I want to believe? But no. If I go off of 40 hertz and back up to eight just to get more of a resistance workout, I literally don't feel good when I get off. At 40 hertz, I feel amazing every time. These are not coincidences.
[00:50:22]Sean Martin: Let's go with that as the theme to wrap. The whole show is about creating music, performing music, listening to music -- people have a role in all of them, and we're impacted by those things. As a creator, how does this change how you think and what you do? As somebody who's listening, if you want to feel good, are there things to look for? And if you're going to a performance, are there things you can do as a performer to make the crowd respond better?
[00:51:16]Scott Scheferman: I'll answer it in two parts. At a general music theory level, absolutely. One of the hardest things in the world is to produce a song that makes you feel good. It's very easy to produce a song that makes you feel sad or angry -- the darker side of our emotional spectrum. Now with AI it's very easy, but traditionally it's been hard.
The best songwriter I know -- I forget his name, I think it's Ryan -- is the main singer from OneRepublic. For a long period of time, he had written about 80 percent of the top 20 Billboard tracks at any given time in pop music. I talked to him about it over dinner at the Ocean Air after one of his concerts. He said: I have a strong formula for what I know works every single time. I can't tell you why it works, but I know it works. Every artist that comes to me, I give them back a song with that formula no matter what they tell me they want to write.
This was a human songwriter who knew what worked. More importantly, half of it is removing what doesn't work. But now with AI, it's very formulaic -- frequencies, harmonics, intervals, beats. Even the drum kit you use. The 808 is the most popular drum sound you'll ever hear in any pop or rap song -- that kick drum, that high hat, that crispy snare. That drum machine has been sampled and resampled a billion times. But certain kits, certain versions of that kick drum, hit way better and harder than every other 10,000 sampled 808 kits. It's even down to the kits that are formulaic in the music industry today.
Sound is frequency and volume, but it's also texture. Texture is where the nuance of what makes you enjoy a sound lives. Some people's voices I'm really attracted to because I'm all audio -- not visual at all, I'm audio -- and others I almost can't get past. Texture is everything in sound.
[00:54:21]Sean Martin: I'm picturing a multi-dimensional thing. You said it's harder to get to good. I'm wondering if the range is infinite, and good sits within just a very narrow sphere -- where does good sit within the broader spectrum?
[00:54:53]Scott Scheferman: I don't know the answer to that question. I imagine good is a much smaller sphere than what sounds bad. I applied a lot of what I learned at the audio frequency level of this research to music production recently. I created a set of tracks that guide you to different states of consciousness. Very heavily tuned -- all the harmful frequencies are removed. The melodic structure uses only Solfeggio frequencies. And even some of the rhythmic structures are based on Fibonacci cycles, which the human body enjoys. They don't sound structured to most people, but when you're singing and your phrasing is a Fibonacci, it's very powerful. Some of the best singers do that intuitively, but you can mathematically count a Fibonacci in their phrasing.
So I produced a song using both classical music production tools and frequencies. I can tune instrumentation to certain frequencies that are not on the A-440 scale. That scale -- C-D-E-F-G -- has been around since the forties and was mass-institutionalized. Part of the conspiracy theory is that Hitler was one of the ones who institutionalized A equals 440. Prior to that it was at another frequency just below or above it. When you tune a guitar to that other frequency and strum it, it's like the whole instrument just comes alive. It sounds like a new person. Fundamentally different.
So when I do music production, I'm actually frequency-specifically tuning to that other scale. And here's the thing -- if you're doing this acoustically, you can't fake it with AI later. You have to do it with the actual instrument because the instrument has an analog infinity-resolution scale. You need the harmonics to actually physically manifest in the wood to create the harmonic effect of a properly tuned guitar. You can't later use AI to induce that. It's one of the only remaining hard limitations AI is not going to be able to overcome -- hitting the wood differently -- unless we have robots doing it better than we can. Elon?
[00:57:44]Sean Martin: Scott, I don't think I gave you a chance to answer the second part, but we can keep chatting another time.
[00:57:55]Scott Scheferman: Yeah.
[00:57:56]Sean Martin: An hour is a good time to let people chew on this. I'm starting to think I'm going to try different tunings on my guitar now and see what happens.
[00:58:06]Scott Scheferman: I'll let you read the white paper if you want. I trust you like a brother -- it's not going outside to anyone else. But it's up to you.
[00:58:16]Sean Martin: Alright. Yeah, I'm happy to take a look at that and see what you've been up to. That'd be super cool. This is mind-blowing, but it shouldn't be.
[00:58:35]Scott Scheferman: Exactly. That's full circle. My first experience as well -- it's like, how are we not living our lives frequency-optimized? There are all sorts of gadgets and binaural beats you can buy, but you don't actually do the thing most of the time.
[00:58:51]Sean Martin: Yeah.
[00:58:52]Scott Scheferman: Like you were saying earlier.
[00:58:53]Sean Martin: Yeah. The other thing sticking in my head -- when I think of waves and sound, it's a line. And the thing I was trying to figure out is, is it more of a sphere? And funny, we just said full circle--
[00:59:10]Scott Scheferman: Yeah.
[00:59:11]Sean Martin: And I'm looking at the logo of the show -- it's a circle. Just like a record's a circle. Maybe we're infinitely inside something. Not just along something.
[00:59:28]Scott Scheferman: Yes.
[00:59:29]Sean Martin: I'm probably not doing a great job being philosophical, but that's what's in my head, and I'm sharing it.
[00:59:31]Scott Scheferman: Circles are very special geometrically. That's how the aliens talk and communicated in the Invasion series, if you've watched that. It has Cymatics and alien communication.
[00:59:50]Sean Martin: Yeah, the waves are actually concentric. Yeah.
[00:59:56]Scott Scheferman: Yes, yes.
[00:59:57]Sean Martin: Too much fun, man. Not everybody gets the joy of doing that kind of research that you do. I'm glad you get to, and hopefully you are enjoying it, and hopefully the results are what you want.
[01:00:25]Scott Scheferman: That's all I want -- to be able to do the right thing at scale so that my daughter grows up in a world that is acoustically healing and beneficial. That doesn't grow up in a world where she's mind-controlled and she's getting cancer and her RNA is breaking down because of vibrational frequencies she could have otherwise avoided, where she's using media of all types. That's the Joy Protocol.
[01:00:52]Sean Martin: Right on, brother. I love chatting with you. We could keep going. Some people will probably still tune in and continue listening, but we'll have another chat for sure. I'm going to point people to our previous episode where you described taking the synths on the road and gave a brief tour of your setup. Some of the cables, all the Eurorack stuff--
[01:01:28]Scott Scheferman: Eurocrack is what we call it. Eurocrack. Have to buy more modules every day.
[01:01:33]Sean Martin: People can look that one up if you want a visual of what Scott was talking about there.
Alright, Shagghie, thanks again for having this conversation with me. Sharing what you've been up to -- and hopefully, people listening found it interesting. I certainly did. Lots to chew on there. As you do that, keep listening if you're up for it. Keep creating and hopefully we'll keep enjoying music. Thanks everybody.
[01:02:06]Scott Scheferman: Thank you.