Every piano you have ever heard is slightly out of tune, on purpose.
Alexandre Tannous has spent his life studying what choices like that have cost us, and what sound can give back.
Alexandre grew up in Beirut, where civil war broke out when he was nine and lasted fourteen years. The war reached him through sound, and years later sound became his way back. He began meditating at fourteen, earned four degrees in music, walked away from a doctorate at Columbia, and went on to study how people use sound in more than forty countries. Today he leads sound meditations around the world.
We talk about how equal temperament traded resonance for convenience, how the music around us shapes our moods without our noticing, why he refuses to call his work "sound healing," and how sound helped him recover memories of a childhood that trauma had erased. We also explore relabeling the past as a rite of passage, why so many high achievers carry unresolved trauma, and why he believes that when we lost tonality, we lost God.
"The only way to survive and heal is to relabel the past." - Alexandre Tannous
Read the companion essay, "Tempered," on PersonalKosmology.com
Learn more about Alexandre: SoundMeditation.com
CHAPTERS00:00 Cold open
01:14 Introducing Alexandre Tannous
03:12 Growing up in Beirut's civil war
06:58 Learning to meditate at 14
15:40 Equal temperament and the harmonic series
28:59 Relabeling the past as a rite of passage
32:37 Episteme and gnosis
34:02 Why he rejects the term "sound healing"
35:18 Sound and recovered memories
37:54 Psychedelics, shamans, and the role of music
49:37 Entrainment: films, jingles, and functional music
54:54 Overtone singing
1:03:44 Alcohol and self-medication
1:04:45 Friendly fire: trauma in the body
1:06:34 Money, safety, and the dark day
1:08:20 High achievers and unresolved trauma
1:14:40 Music that keeps us stuck
1:16:44 Improvising versus extemporizing
1:27:52 We lost tonality, we lost God
1:31:05 Why humans alter consciousness
