The Healing Power of Sound with Darlene Koldenhoven

Summary

Grammy-winning vocalist Darlene Koldenhoven, soprano soloist on Yanni's Live at the Acropolis, joins psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove to explore the healing power of sound, from Alfred Tomatis's listening therapy to quartz crystal singing bowls. She describes the claim that hearing tests can reveal the year of a person's childhood trauma and that acoustically filtered Mozart can retrain the ear. The conversation ends with her paranormal experiences, including a childhood flash of untaught musical knowledge and a 2007 performance where glowing orbs appeared to rush into her mid-aria.

Key takeaways

• 1Koldenhoven's new book is 'Put Your Dress Down and Sing', named after an incident at age three when she lifted her dress over her head during an Easter church performance.
• 2In 1954, Dr. Alfred Tomatis told the medical community that humans hear through bone conduction as well as airwaves. Her sister, born in 1959 with bilateral aural atresia, was among the first infants fitted with bone conduction hearing aids.
• 3Dr. Richard Buckingham of Chicago surgically built an ear canal and middle ear for her sister, who regained 85% hearing. Koldenhoven says the first patient to have the surgery died and the second was left impaired.
• 4Mishlove recalls rooming in 1976 with physicist Fred Alan Wolf, who was studying the sonic imprints of spoken Hebrew Kabbalah letters, and later visiting Tomatis's office.
• 5Koldenhoven claims that where a client misjudges pitch direction on a Tomatis listening test reveals the year of life in which a trauma occurred. She also claims depressed people lose hearing above about 1,000 Hz and autistic people are overstimulated by high frequencies.
• 6She says Tomatis therapy uses acoustically processed Mozart over 80 to 100 hours, and that listening at 8,000 Hz led her to compose 'First Light' in 13/4 time.
• 7She links low frequencies to the base chakra and high frequencies to the higher chakras and the aura, and says her high soprano singing takes her into 'a different dimension.'
• 8At Sheryl Lee Ralph's 'Divas Simply Singing' AIDS benefit around 2007, while singing 'Casta Diva' from the opera Norma, she says vibrating orbs with gold nuclei appeared and rushed into her, re-energizing her performance. She later saw them at Lowell Observatory and in her yard.
• 9As a seven-year-old who had never touched the piano, she correctly corrected her mother's wrong note (E above middle C), which she and Mishlove speculate could reflect a past life.
• 10Mishlove describes Peruvian pre-Columbian whistling pots that, played together, produce a perceived low tone the brain creates between the notes.

Glossary terms

Source

Transcript excerpt

because I have a five octave vocal range and when I go way up and sing those really high frequencies, I've done that on several recording sessions as a studio singer back in LA and there was one producer who always used to say he always would make me write these really high notes for me to sing cuz I kind of was the only one in town that could do that, right? But he go he says it's really a trip watching you sing those notes because he says your whole face changes and it's like you whole go into this whole different dimension and I never thought about it but since he brought it up I thought yeah I do I do go into a different dimension dimension because I'm going into a different center frequencies you know all lower frequencies as Tomatus pointed out go to will correlate it with a base chakra >> okay And and as you go up to higher frequencies, they are coordinate with the chakras, you know, the Indian chakras. And the higher chakras are for the higher frequencies because they have to do with not only your head but in your aura and beyond into the land of spirituality. So yes, to me singing certain things u is very spiritual. >> Keep watching to learn more. The new Thinking Aloud magazine issue 10 on UFOs and UAP is now ready for free download and you can also order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingaloud.org. New thinking Aloud is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body, and spirit. the topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parasychology and the paranormal.…

Excerpt from New Thinking Allowed, Sep 25, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.