Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at The Edge. Today my guest is Jeff Strong. Jeff Strong is the founder and director of the [Strong Institute for] Rhythmic Entrainment Intervention, whose pioneering rhythm-based therapy is used in thousands of homes, schools, and institutions worldwide. His work has been presented in two documentaries, several books, numerous scientific journals, and at dozens of healthcare conferences. Jeff Strong has been a professional percussionist for more than 30 years and has played on countless recordings. He is the bestselling author of ten books including Drums for Dummies and Different Drummer, and with Sounds True has created several rhythmic entrainment recordings, including the Brain Shift Collection, The Better Sleep Program, and The Focus and Attention Program.
In this episode of Insights at The Edge, Jeff and I spoke about how rhythmic entrainment works, its tribal ceremonial roots, and how rhythmic entrainment recordings differ and are similar [to] binaural beat recordings. We also talked about Jeff’s work with autism, ADHD, anxiety, depression, and mood disorders, and other applications; and the research that supports the effectiveness of rhythmic entrainment. We listened to two excerpts from the Brain Shift Collection; we heard an excerpt from Neuro-Calm and also The Deep Meditative State. Here’s my conversation on drum healing with Jeff Strong:
Jeff, you’re a drummer, a clinical researcher, and a healer, and you work with a method called Rhythmic Entrainment Intervention. Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, Rhythmic Entrainment Intervention. I’d love to begin if you could tell our listeners, what is Rhythmic Entrainment Intervention and how does it work?
Jeff Strong: OK. Well, Rhythmic Entrainment Intervention is basically an approach I created out of traditional drum healing techniques where I used very specific rhythms to impact the brain and behavior. It really came out of three traditions that I studied in the early 80s, where you had drumming used either to alter consciousness, to affect behavior, or to synchronize a group. I started my clinical research by stripping all the cultural influence that used traditional techniques and really looking what was going on in the brain. I started playing for people, and really the name came out of a study that I did in the Saint Paul area of Minnesota in the early 90s. We had to come up with a name because it couldn’t just be “Jeff the drummer guy playing for people.”
We came up with the most archaic name possible at that time because we needed to get it through the school board, and unfortunately or fortunately, it’s held over the last 25 years. The idea here was basically using drumming to influence the brain and behavior.
TS: OK. Now tell me more about what specifically changes in brain function when specific rhythms are introduced? How does that work?
JS: Well, there’s really two aspects of what happens here. First is this concept of entrainment, which is what we thought initially was the core of what was going on here, which is why I got into the name. Entrainment is a synchronization of two or more rhythmic cycles. In this case, it’s the brainwaves to the drumming rhythm—the underlying pulse of the drumming, the tempo. We thought that was the most important component when we first started doing research. The idea here was that if I played a drumming rhythm at a specific tempo, over time, the brain will shift into that brainwave state that’s associated with that tempo.
As it turns out, musical rhythm, tempo-wise, is really, really perfectly matched for brainwave consciousness. In other words, musical rhythm in a musical tempo—say, anywhere from, what’s a classical tempo, 60 beats per minute up to maybe 180 beats per minute—that’s the range that most music exists in. That really relates very well to the different frequencies of brainwave states. Four beats per second relates to the 60 beats per minute tempo—and I can give you the math on that, it’s not terribly complicated—and then 180 beats per minute is up to about 12 beats per second. The idea here is that if I play a certain tempo for a certain amount of time, the brain will actually shift to synchronize to that pattern, and that can create calm. That was our initial idea here, that we could create a calm neurological state by playing rhythms at a specific tempo, and that could have impact on somebody’s behavior.
My early research was done mostly with people with developmental disabilities, with autism, ADHD, and we saw that just getting them into the state through this concept of entrainment reduced a lot of the basic symptoms we’re seeing, especially with people with sensory issues that [are] really common with both of these conditions. That’s one piece. We call that synchronization; the idea here that you’ve got the brain entraining to the tempo of the rhythm.
Then, as I was looking at some of the traditions that I learned back in the early 80s, one other aspect that I was looking at was this idea of impacting behavior through the specific rhythms, and this was something that was somewhat controversial. It’s a technique that I coined the term “rhythm healing” in the late 80s, which really was a broad concept of specific rhythms having a very particular response on the nervous system.
When we started our research, we were looking at, “OK well, if we can get the brain entrained through synchronization to this calm neurological state, can we change behaviors by some aspect of specificity in the rhythm?” We were looking at that for a very long time. The simplest way to describe that is thinking in terms of stimulation; the idea here is if you give the brain something that is unpredictable that the brain has to decipher, that becomes activating to the nervous system. It becomes a way of being activating the brain and so that was the second piece of what we were doing here is this idea of stimulation through novelty, through complex rhythms.
Spinning back around to entrainment, the oldest technique for what we’ve been training with drumming has to do with playing a very steady rhythm at four beats per second, and this would be part of the shamanic tradition where you play a very steady pulse. Just repetitive four beats per second pulsation will actually bring the brain into a low end of what’s called a theta state of consciousness. Theta is an inwardly directed state just above unconsciousness, and this is where you go into when you’re doing a shamanic journey, for instance, or if you’re a really adept meditator and you can really get deep into your meditation. This is where your brain is going. It will go in this theta. They’re a repetitive rhythm.
The stimulation is the opposite of that. It’s non-repetitive and faster. We actually settled—with Rhythmic Entrainment Intervention, on rhythm, we double that tempo at eight beats per second, because that’s the transition between the theta (this inwardly directed meditative state) and alpha, which is a relaxed, alert neurological state. We chose that as the optimal place to be because alpha is really about being calm neurologically, but also being receptive and outwardly directed. So sensory processing improves, and that can be a real benefit with the kind of people I was working with early on.
TS: Now just to clarify something. When you talked about rhythms affecting behavior, what kind of behaviors are you talking about?
JS: Well, it runs a gamut. One of the classic ones I talked about a lot because it’s one of the first most obvious things that I saw when working with children with autism, for instance, is one of the classic behaviors you see with autism is a repetitive motion. It’s called a self-stimulatory behavior; it’s a behavior that is repetitive, that is generally used as a way of being able to modulate sensory input. The classic one that I talked about a lot of times [is] kind of a hand-flapping motion. I found that if I played a particular rhythm, the hand-flapping would stop almost all the time, and we saw that consistently over the people I worked with early on.
That was the beginning of saying is there some real specificity to the rhythm and behavior. You had this [effect] of being able to stop that behavior as it’s happening with a particular rhythm, and then by extension, we started looking at what happens if you can affect behavior in the long term by giving that same type of stimulus or an evolution of that stimulus over time. It can be anywhere from self-stimulus type behavior, or an anxiety response, or a brain’s response to, say, a mundane task where the brain shuts down, say with somebody with ADHD. It can be a real overt behavior like this hand-flapping, or it can be a more subtle neurological response like the brain shutting down for instance. So kind of the gamut.
TS: Jeff in your book Different Drummer, this was something that really struck me. You described that you discovered over 600 different rhythms that produce different but specific changes and responses in people. I was really struck by that, 600 different rhythms. I don’t even know if I could imagine 600 different rhythms. I’m curious how did you figure that out, the 600 different rhythms?
JS: I just played for people. It was fun because this is what I love to do. Basically what happened is when I started out, I played for people and I documented everything. I recorded the sessions, I videoed, I wrote down what was going on in behaviors and I started looking at patterns. I had ideas about types of rhythms I wanted to play, so I had a starting point. My first teacher came from a tradition where when in ceremony, in order to have a successful ceremony, you needed to play particular rhythms in a particular order. This was the starting point of this idea. And then as well, he played for people one-on-one and shared with them the idea of what he was doing.
That was the seed, but really what happened is it became a process of improvisation and observation. So I’d play something and watch for a response. I played some more and watch for another response. Then after my session, I’d write down all the rhythms I played and then I’d make notes about what the response was. I had notebooks and notebooks filled with rhythmic patterns and responses, and data about the person I was playing for.
Then I started seeing the connections between, oh, if I played this rhythm or a slight variation on it, I almost always saw this response. This gleefulness for instance—even if it’s just the minor point of seeing that someone has just gotten to this peaceful place with just a slight smile, or a breath out, or whatever it was, I could say, “Oh, well this could be uplifting. What if I were to focus that in a little bit more?”
So it was this process of refinement, and I spent from about 1992 to 2004 doing this process. Over the course of 12 years playing with all of the people I played with, it was just documenting and starting to see patterns. That’s something I’m really good at, is making the connection between these patterns. And some people will listen to this rhythms and they can’t really hear the difference between one rhythm to another, because it’s still me playing at eight beats per second. It’s fast drumming, but it’s all in the base tones, the flap tones, and just the way that different orchestration of the rhythms that come about.
TS: Now, I also read that you arranged these 600 different rhythms into 10 symptom categories, and I wonder if you can share at least some of those symptom categories to give us a sense of how you arranged all of these different rhythms.
JS: Yes. There’s calm, so anxiety reduction. There’s attention impulsivity. There’s a language in communication. There’s socialization. There’s sleep, there’s energy, there’s mood. I don’t remember the rest of them, but we were just looking at the broad categories of what that meant. So if we’re looking at mood, we’re looking at the different aspects of mood and trying to then connect them to what might be an observation that one would make, when they were looking at trying to determine whether or not somebody has a mood issue, for instance. As we were looking at these symptom categories, I was also referencing the DSM-IV, which is the Diagnostic and Satistical Manual for the American Psychiatric Association, which is what’s used to diagnose these different conditions that I was working with. These symptom categories [are] related to diagnostic criteria that you’ll find in the DSM-IV.
TS: Now Jeff, for people who have maybe heard of binaural beat music and how working with binaural beats can shift brain states, can you talk about how the work you’re doing with rhythmic entrainment is either similar or different from binaural beat recordings?
JS: Sure. It’s similar and different. Binaural beats come out of the idea that you can have a pulsation that the brain is going to entrain to and it comes out of that age-old shamanic technique. I mean, if you trace all the stuff back, it goes back tens of thousands of years to the traditional shaman beating and drumming in a repetitive four-beat pulsation.
Now, binaural beats come from a phenomenon in the brain where—and this is related to our ability to locate sound in space; so if we hear someone speaking or we hear a bird or a dog barking, we’re able to tell what direction that’s coming from ,and we’re able to do that because of the time differential between when that sound hits the left ear and the right ear. So that differential, we’re able to pick up these milliseconds of difference and we’re able to use that as ability to locate where something is in space sound-wise.
That ability to differentiate to that degree, timing, allows us then to differentiate slightly different tones because frequency is timing. Each different tone that you hear—like on a keyboard for instance, the note A has a different wavelength than the note B. The B being slightly higher will be a slightly shorter wavelength. Your brain—if you were to give one frequency in one ear and the other frequency in the other ear, the brain is actually able to perceive the difference in those wavelengths the same way it can perceive the difference in time that that sound comes from one ear to the other. If you play with those frequencies, you can actually create a pulsation in the brain which the brain will entrain to, and that’s what a binaural beat is all about.
It’s the same idea, then, as a pulsation of a drumming pattern. Think of it this way: if you’ve got a binaural beat for instance of—and I don’t want to confuse people with math, but it’s terribly simple. Say what happens with binaural beats is the difference between two frequencies is what turns into a pulsation. If you have a frequency in one year of 400 hertz and you have a frequency in another year of 404 hertz, the brain will actually perceive that four-beat difference as a pulse. It will sound like a drumming pulse. It has the same effect as the drum.
However, where binaural beats and where drumming—and not just REI drumming, but drumming in general—can differ is that with the binaural beat, you have a very steady pulse because you’re playing a frequency in one ear and another frequency in another ear and that pulsation is not going to change. It’s simply a difference in wavelength of frequency that is perceived as pulsation. It’s not actually a sound, and so it’s going to be this beat that you hear. Drumming rhythm is going to have the drum beat, but also the frequencies of the drum skin itself—the tone and the pitch of the drum, and the overtones of the drum. Then you add into that the variability in the drummer, which is I think the key component in why drumming can be different.
Once you create that variability, you’ve just opened the door to a whole bunch of other stuff. I talked about this in a course I offer which is Drum Healing, where I show people what happens when you go through the different speeds of drumming, and same thing for speeds of binaural beats. If you’re going to entrain someone to a low-theta frequency, that four-beat per second pulsation that the shamans used, you can play a very repetitive rhythm. And because it’s an inwardly directed state—in other words, you’re less aware of your outer world and you’re more aware of your inner world—your brain is going to perceive that pulsation and it’s going to feel the beat, and it’s going to entrain to it just fine.
As you speed up and you come out of this deeper level of awareness, you get to the upper levels of theta state of consciousness and into alpha—which is, like I said, an outwardly directed but neurologically calm state—you’re now in a place where your intellectual brain starts to get involved. If you play a repetitive pulsation, the brain will actually shut down because it has figured it out, because our brains are deciphering mechanisms. They want to, and always do, categorize stimulus that comes in, be able to relate it to something in the past, and be able to make sense of it. Once we make sense of it, we decide what we want to do with it. If it’s not important to us, it just stays in the background.
As we speed up the pulsation, whether it’s a binaural beat or a drumming rhythm, the brain needs something more complex to deal with the faster we go because if it becomes too repetitive, the brain will shut it out. This is one of the issues that the binaural beats have had over the years, is that if you play a steady pulsation at eight beats per second, which is at the cusp of the theta state of consciousness and it’s outwardly directed alpha, the brain actually won’t entrain to it for very long. You’ll have what’s become tolerance or habitation, and it may work the first couple of times you hear it, then it will stop because it’s just not changing and your brain is categorized into something that’s unimportant and then shuts it out.
Drumming, if you vary the rhythms and you create a musicality to it, like any drummer who’s playing well at that tempo—because they’re not just going to play a steady beat, they’re going to groove with it. Once you start grooving, now the listener’s brain is saying, “What’s coming next?” and it stays engaged and that’s how it can entrain to these faster rhythms.
TS: OK. I want our listeners to actually get their ears on what you’re talking about and so in just a moment, we’re going to play an excerpt from a CD called Neuro-Calm, and we’ll play a bit of a track called “Gonga Calm.” I just want to ask you a question. This may sound very elementary to you; I just don’t think a drumming music as being calming. I noticed it seems counterintuitive to me. I think of drumming music as, let’s bang the drum and we’re going to have a military march or go play a football game or something. Here, you’re using the sound of the drum to help calm me. Help me understand that.
JS: On top of that, I’m using a really fast, complex drumming to do that. Yes. It’s funny—years ago, I got a call from a publisher of music therapy books and he heard about my work. He said, “You know, I’m curious of what tempo music you’re using to calm people down.” I said, “It’s eight beats per second.” He said, “Gah, you can’t! That’s not going to be calming.” [But] it is because what we’re doing is we’re bringing the brain through entrainment, to a calm neurological state. This isn’t a relaxation; this is neurological calm. In order to do that, the rhythm, like I said, has to be complex enough to keep the brain engaged so that it will actually entrain to it, but the brain will actually come into a state of an eight-beat per second pulsation which is a neurologically calm state.
The trick with it is to make sure that you play the music in a way that it becomes background stimulus. You want to disengage the intellectual process of listening to the music and that’s where we ask people to play this [as] background music—we want them to not be able to notice it after a few minutes. We also add another instrument to the drumming in some instances, in order to moderate and modulate the drumming so that there’s something else for the intellectual mind to chew on. We call them the “ambient instrument” because it’s harmonically complex but melodically simple.
There’s a reason for that, but the whole idea here is that to make it so that you don’t actually listen to the patterns the drumming is playing, but you just let it be in the background enough that the brain will entrain to it without you deciphering and intellectualizing what it is.
TS: All right. Well, let’s listen to an excerpt of “Gonga Calm,” and listeners, go about what you’re doing. Just let it play in the background and here we go, let’s listen.
[“Gonga Calm” plays.]
Well, I think that gives people a taste of the kind of musical rhythmic compositions you create. How long do I need to listen to something like a piece of music like that to feel real calming effects? I mean do I need to put it on in the background for hours and hours and then over months and months, or right away? What have you found?
JS: Well, it really depends. Entrainment as a mechanism takes anywhere from 12 to 17 minutes first time you encounter it. If you’ve never encountered any kind of entrainment music, so say you’ve never been to a drum circle or you’ve never listened to a binaural beat or listened to single drumming that last a long time, it could take 12 to 17 minutes the first time. The cool thing about the brain is it becomes adept to doing it and so the more you listen, the quicker it happens. The first time, give it a good 10, 15 minutes. The second time, it’s going to probably take half that. Before you know it, it will take just a couple of seconds; when the music comes on, your brain will what to do, basically. It learns how to do this. It wants to entrain.
The more you listen, the quicker it is and we’ve had people actually tell us that. I had a woman years ago who is part of a study. She had an anxiety disorder, and she listened to a recording every day for months. She had a phobia about going on planes and she just couldn’t do it. The big, exciting part for her was couple of months into the study, she had to take a trip on a plane and she decided she could do this. Well, she ended up dropping her cassette tape—it was cassette tapes back then, this is the early 90s—he dropped her cassette tape in the mud at the airport and couldn’t play her recording on the plane. She said she closed her eyes and just imagine the recording, and she said she’d heard it so many times that she could get into the calm state just from imagining hearing it because her brain was used to it. The more you do it, the quicker it becomes.
TS: You’ve mentioned in the course of this conversation that you used these healing rhythms with people with autism, and you’ve also mentioned, now, people who have challenges with anxiety. I’m curious what other applications there are, and where this type of Rhythmic Entrainment Intervention is most effective because we know it works in these areas, but we’re not so sure, let’s say, in these areas.
JS: Well, there’s four conditions that we worked with most often, and they’re developmental disabilities, anxiety disorders, sleep disorders, mood disorders. Then if you expand that out, sensory processing disorders. That’s the five biggies we work with.
We like to really just look at things from the perspective of calm and focus as being the core components of what we do. Getting the brain into a calm, neurological state opens tremendous doors for all kinds of things. Once you teach the brain how to get into this relaxed—go into the alpha state of consciousness—anxiety reduces, sleep improves, sensory processing improves. That’s just pretty universal. Then [there’s] the other aspect of focus, stimulation, of being able to activate the brain from novelty through the specificity of the rhythm. Anywhere we have a need to be more focused or to be more calm, that’s what we look at.
Now, we see some ancillary things with some areas like mood disorders. They’re complicated. Then you have some other conditions that we’ve worked with off and on over the years—schizophrenia, disassociated personality disorder. These are areas that are more hit and miss for us. Seizure disorder is an area that we’re not really—we see what I’m calling at this point, even after 25 years, “random effects” in reducing seizures. Not really sure when it happens or not.
So we’re kind of broadening out. We’re not looking at degenerative neurological diseases. We’re not looking at Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s at this point. It’s been too complicated for us to look at, so that would be another area that I wouldn’t expect much from. Even though we could improve cognition for the moment, we can improve memory to a point, but I haven’t looked enough to see anything if we can slow Alzheimer’s or improve Parkinson’s. The jury is way out on that.
TS: Now Jeff, tell me some about the research that supports what you’re doing.
JS: It started off behavioral, and so we’re looking at [it] observationally. We’re looking at what’s happening over a long term and short term as well, but we’re really more interested in the long term. When we first started out, we choose conditions that you wouldn’t expect someone to have a psychological response necessarily to—or, let me rephrase that. You wouldn’t expect them to have a placebo response to. When you’re playing for somebody with autism who has no concept of what this music is supposed to do for them, you can pretty much be assured that they’re not going to calm because you’re expecting them to be calmed, [or] because they’re expecting to be calmed from it.
So we started off behaviorally and our early research was really looking, like I said, [at] the developmental disabilities, autism and ADHD, both in children and adults, and then we went into depression. We went into chronic pain, which is another area that the jury is still out. So we were looking at observations and then we shifted a little bit over the years. I mean that probably constituted about 15 years of our research, and then the last 10 years or so, we’ve been playing with EEG as well. Now EEG is limited because you’re really just capturing surface activity; You’re not looking super deep into the brain—and that’s the next step someday. But first was observational.
Then also at a period of time, we added in some quantitative testing to what are considered continuous performance tests which are used for people with ADHD, and these are really normalized test that you can pretty much gather pretty good data on. You could say “Aha, their numbers are showing up, we’re seeing improved focus.” Really for the most part, behavioral research is what created the foundation of what we’ve done.
TS: I think what I’m really driving at, Jeff, is, from these research studies, how effective is rhythmic entrainment? Meaning, “75 percent of the people who receive rhythmic entrainment over X period of time change in this way.” What does it actually show?
JS: It varies, depending on what we’re looking at, obviously. From the broadest perspective of somebody who does one of our programs, it’s exceedingly rare that we don’t see changes. Ninety-some percent of the time, we see significant changes, and the caveat there is—anxiety is the number one thing. I can calm somebody down almost universally; it’s really, really rare that we can’t see calm and we can’t see calm within a couple of minutes. And it’s really observable, and almost everybody will feel it as well for themselves. They’ll feel it because it’s a shift in their brain.
When we’ve looked at it from just really drilling down to the data, and we started a project probably I think it’s been four years now; no, it’s actually been six years now. We started in 2001, where we’re using a continuous performance test. The types of tests that are used to evaluate treatments for ADHD. We started seeing some—really from looking at the data, what we’re seeing is an average of a 43 percent reduction in symptomology. The number of people, the percentage of people who saw changes were about 93 percent. This is along the focus end for ADHD. Seven percent of people really didn’t see much. The average is almost 93 percent saw a 43 percent reduction in their symptomology. Those are pretty good numbers. I don’t know how to compare it to, say, medication, but—
TS: Given that, given those kinds of results, I wonder, do you feel frustrated that rhythmic entrainment is not more widely adopted? And why isn’t it?
JS: Because it’s drumming. [Laughs.] This is a thing we’ve talked around a lot about here, is—am I bothered that it’s not more that widely adopted? Yes, I guess. I mean, I’d like more people to be doing it. I think a lot of it is because number one, we don’t recognize sound therapies as really having much impact in the world. It’s not on the radar. We’re used to taking a pill or doing something more invasive. For a lot of people, the idea of music or sound is so esoteric that they just don’t really consider it, and I think that’s part of it. One of our battles has always been just getting people to accept the idea that you can have calm or focus, for instance, from drumming.
And drumming is another one. I mean, it’s a tough one—you have a lot of psychological triggers out there from people who find it being very tribal and primal, and they’re not terribly comfortable with that. Those are bits and pieces, and we’ve tried to get around that, with adding the ambient tracks for instance. We only started adding the ambient tracks with adults that were what we consider more neurotypical, who were listening because they’re wanting to intellectualize the listening. The people with autism don’t care if there’s an ambient instrument or not; they’re fine with the drumming because their brain is just responding as it does.
The other challenge, truly, has been that coming from ground zero with this research, with this idea of Rhythmic Entrainment Intervention, we had to make a really difficult choice early on of, were we going to do research that helps us understand and optimize an approach, or were we going to do a research that simply tries to validate it in the outer research world? This was in 1994, actually, that this came about. My first study came out as behavioral research. I was then really pressured to do double-blind placebo control research, where we’re starting to now drill down into just saying, “We’re going to cover this base with our research to be able to get the regular community to accept it.” Or, are we going to really look at making the best possible approach here?
We made the choice that looking at the double-blind placebo control studies, we decided that we were going to focus on understanding what we were doing first. Because when you did the double-blind placebo control, you had to have an active component that was consistent, so we had to come up with what we call a generalized recording. I had to distill all the ideas I had into a tape for people with autism, or ADHD. We found that the results of that weren’t nearly as effective as when I went into somebody’s living room and played for them. We decided that—and there was a lot of factors that came into decision, but we decided that I like the personalized end of it, the custom-made end of it.
So we stayed on that track, which meant developing these 600 rhythms that’s associated with behaviors rather than just looking at the broader implication of calm. That has, unfortunately, made it much more difficult for us to say, “Hey look, here’s proof” because now we’re looking all these variabilities because everybody’s recording is unique, and that creates its own issues.
TS: That make sense. Now one of the things I want to make sure we talk about, Jeff, is what you referred to as the traditional roots of the type of healing with drumming that you’re using. I know that back in the 1980s—you write about this in your book Different Drummer—you met a gentleman named Lloyd and that Lloyd was very instrumental—a street musician named Lloyd. Tell me a little bit about your friendship with him and how it impacted you.
JS: Well, yes, huge. Lloyd—he was from the island of Trinidad and he was living in Los Angeles. I met him, actually, at a park that was around the corner from my apartment building in Hollywood. I would walk by this park going to school. I went to the Musicians Institute where I was studying, actually, to be a percussionist. I was studying with some of the top people in the field at primarily Studio World in LA at that time. This was early 80s. I ran across this guy just playing congas, and I just was captivated by what he was doing.
It was interesting in that he was playing stuff not dissimilar to what I was learning at the Musicians Institute. The difference was that at the Musician institute, we translated everything to the drum set because that’s what you do in popular music. You took these traditional hand-drumming rhythms and you put them on the drum set, and you were able to play a mambo or a sambo or a meringue or whatever, that were traditional in Cuba or Africa, Brazil. You put it on the drum set rather than playing it on the full hand drums. What he was doing on the hand drum was so captivating to me because there [were] variations he was doing that I wasn’t learning at school. I bugged him to teach me, and part of his deal was he wasn’t going to teach me how to play the drums unless I honored and understood where they came from.
So he schooled me on traditions, and it blew my mind because I came from a very conservative Midwestern environment where a lot of discussion he had about ceremony in drumming and traditional tribal context—which is, ceremonial drumming is related to the spiritualty and the religion of the people—it was contrary to what I was brought up believing, and so there was a lot of these issues that I had with it.
He managed to work me through that, and what really got me, though, was when he took me to a family’s house where he played with a child who ultimately, if I were to diagnose him today, I would say he had autism. He played one-on-one with that child and I watched the dance between this child’s behavior and his drumming, and he talked about what he was doing. [He] talked about it in the terms that were used in traditional tribal cultures, about spirits and behaviors and driving spirits out and spirit possession and these things that come up in that context. But it blew my mind and that he was using drumming in a very different way than popular music, where you’re just trying to get people to enjoy and dance.
What got me more than that, though, is the fact that he was totally OK with me going into a regular music career, even though we were sharing this really deep spiritual stuff. I think he could tell that I wasn’t ready; he could tell that I wanted to play in popular music, but he was planning this seed that took a decade to germinate for me and that became a core of what I started doing with REI.
The reason that the drumming that I did became Rhythmic Entrainment Intervention, this esoteric mouthful of a technique, [was] because I wanted to take away the tribal parts of it because it’s scared me so much. I just wanted to look at it from a mechanical what’s going on in the brain. Yes, he was really important in planning seeds for me.
TS: Do you think it might be fair to say that in a contemporary context, you’re creating a continuation, if you will, of this deep tribal sense of how the drum can be a healing instrument, but that you are framing it in a Western context and using contemporary language of brain science—but you’re really continuing a tribal ritual finding, if you will?
JS: Yes, I do. I hesitate to say that in public.
TS: That’s why I said it.
JS: Which, you could see the undertone of it in my book. That book was 20 years in the writing because I was so afraid to put it out there. So yes, I do, and as a matter of fact, last year I started a course on Drum Healing where I’m trying to wrap these two together. I’m trying to bring in the brain science with the traditions and bring them into a context that anybody in today’s world can learn the essence of how to do this—learn the rhythms and where they come from, and honor it that way my teacher Lloyd taught me how to honor it. Because if you can’t look back and reference the past and have respect for that, then you really don’t have a foundation to be able to bring forward to do credible work in the future.
I’ve been really careful with that. I’ve been very private about it because I learned early on when I was presenting research that I had to tone down the talk, but I still to this day when I talk to professionals, when I’m doing professional conferences—and I still do quite a few—I still start by referencing traditions. I talk about the three traditions that create the foundation of what I do, and probably talk more than I should about it because I want people to understand that there is a basis for this that goes back a really long time. We’re talking about tens of thousands of years of history and experience honing these techniques. We need to honor that.
TS: I want to end our conversation, Jeff, with giving our listeners one more taste of your music. This is also from the Brain Shift Collection, and it’s from a CD called The Deep Meditative State. I thought what we could do is actually—are you ready for this?—play it for 12 minutes, since you said it, because Sounds True’s function in the world for decades now has been to help introduce people, to the best of our ability, to meditative states. Let’s give them a full 12 minutes and see what happens to our listeners. What do you think?
JS: Excellent. This is a great place to end as well because this is the beginning—the origins of drumming to influence consciousness. This track is based upon traditional shamanic techniques. As a matter of fact, the core rhythm in here is a journey drum. For anybody who’s studied core shamanism, you’ll recognize it. I add a bunch of other stuff too, just for fun, but we’re going to take you to the same place that the Shamans would have gone to tens of thousands of years ago.
TS: Just to say before we listen, I’m speaking with Jeff Strong. With Sounds True, he’s created the Brain Shift Collection: Ambient Rhythmic Entrainment—it’s eight sessions of music; as well as a program for Better Sleep and a Focus and Attention Program. Now Jeff, we’re going to listen to a track called “One Tribe,” 12 minutes of a 30-minute track. It’s from the Brain Shift Collection, a CD called The Deep Meditative State. Thank you so much for all of your good work and good heart. Thank you.
JS: Well, thank you, Tami.
