Editorial policy

What this Journal is

A record of an inquiry. I follow claims about sound, frequency and tradition back to whoever made them first, and I say what I found — including when what I found was nothing. Every claim carries a label (what the labels mean).

On health and wellbeing

People have used sound in healing contexts for as long as there are records of people. Some of that is being studied now; most of it isn't; some of it never will be. I write about it, because pretending a large part of the subject doesn't exist would make this a worse Journal, not a more honest one.

What I do:

• I report what people claim, and I name who claims it;
• I say what evidence exists, with the numbers — how many participants, what design, published where;
• I mark a claim ⑤ ORPHAN when I cannot find its source, however famous it is.

What I do not do:

• I do not assert, in my own voice, that any sound, frequency or practice treats, cures, prevents or alleviates any medical condition;
• I do not offer any of this as a reason to buy the instruments. The product pages describe physics and nothing else;
• I do not give medical advice.

Nothing on this site is medical advice, and nothing here is offered as a substitute for professional medical care. If you have a health condition, the person to talk to is your doctor. If something here interests you, the right way to find out is to try it yourself and pay attention — which is exactly what I'd do.

On the instruments

AcusMagic instruments are audio software. They make sound, and they compute and draw the physics of that sound. They are not therapeutic devices, they are not diagnostic devices, and AcusMagic makes no claim of any health effect for them.

Where the physics claims are exact, and where they are lenses

On the sand plate, modal frequencies and spatial scale are physically exact — no zoom, no fitting — and cross-checked against published Chladni-plate measurements. Sand renders true at any size — the mode shapes are analytic, so more pixels mean more detail from the same physics. On the liquid plate, spatial frequency is log-compressed above roughly 40 cycles, because real Faraday cells at audio rates are millimetric and a 1:1 render would be unreadable. The liquid field is 512 points by nature: its patterns have a characteristic wavelength and there is nothing above it to recover, so it's rendered at full size rather than simulated at full size. Non-circular plates use an averaged effective radius, since their true eigenvalues are not Bessel. Every one of these lenses is also declared inside the plugin, in the tooltips, where you can see it while you work.

Corrections

I correct in public and credit the person who caught it. Write to me.