BARBARA OSTERTAG

Music and yoga are a part of my life. I grew up in a family of musicians. My father and his musician colleagues were already practising yoga in the early Sixties and as a child I imagined that everyone was living with music and yoga. What a wonderful thought. After taking my High School Graduation I studied music. Playing music with the wind section and the strings fine tuned my ability to listen and my senses. I have been practising yoga since I was sixteen. I am especially thankful to my teacher R. Sriram for teaching me recitation and to my Sanskrit teacher Vivek Nath.

My meeting with Hans Cousto and his tuning forks revealed the world of planet sounds to me. A further key moment was a concert with a gong. Its sound made me feel happy and worked its spell on me. I believed I was listening to the universe. It seemed to contain all of the music - the themes and rhythms, which I knew from sonatas and songs. The sound of gongs and singing bowls takes us to the threshold at which sound manifests itself as music or when music dissipates into sound once more. It is the point at which the finite and infinity touch, the point at which time „ comes into being“ and then recedes again into the origin of being.

A further happy coincidence while recording was getting to know Michael Gerlach from Amazonas Studios in Munich. He was immediately thrilled to help me capture the special magic of the gongs and singing bowls using microphones. While searching for a suitable place to record, my yoga and meditation room proved just right. All my planet gongs are there, resonating with the singing bowls when these are played and generating this inimitable magical sound.

The project „Pure-Planet-Sound“ was born.

In this project planetary tuned instruments are played exclusively and are deployed consciously as if part of an orchestra. In order for the original character of the live recordings to be preserved, with the music being played continuously and without interruption, the reduction of background noise is largely dispensed with in the master recording.

Together with friends, colleagues and pupils we have a great number of planet singing bowls. As a result we have the opportunity to record singing bowls with the same main frequency, as on our CD „The Earth“. Here you can hear that a multitude of sounds is contained within the whole. Together the bowls form the keynote, while at the same time each bowl has an individual sound, depending on its composition and the way it is played.

The sounds from harmonic instruments such as singing bowls and gongs have always been used to help people find themselves and to experience space, silence and peacefulness. Many people have already learned that their body relaxes, their breath deepens and their spirit is calmed by listening to the harmonic spectrum.

With our project we want to make this experience available to interested people.

Our CD 

Earth 136,10 Hz is the first CD. We plan to record a whole series.

Sun and moon and in time further recordings with planet sounds are planned. Each CD has its own colour, so the the CDs can not just be selected by frequency but also by colour.