Recent clinical research verifies what sound healing practitioners know: Meditating with sound improves mental and cognitive faculties and has measurable neurophysical effects. For example, work published in April by University of the South Pacific researcher Micah Amd demonstrates that binaural beat frequencies – tones of slightly different frequencies delivered to the left and right ears – improve focus and calm. In 2025, a team from India showed that rhythmic sound meditation resulted in neurophysical changes during the session and increased alertness afterward.

Other scholars continue to publish work on the effects of music and sound on brain plasticity, emotional resilience, and attentional task vigilance.

Two Pennsylvania-based music artists regularly bring their sound healing on the road. Moe Jerant, known in the Valley for her work with 1960s-style band The Large Flowerheads, leads drumming and soundscape meditation sessions in the Lehigh Valley and outside Philadelphia. Jim Donovan, a founding member of the band Rusted Root, held drum and chant workshops in the region in June and early July.

Maureen “Moe” Jerant’s journey in music performance and healing with music has taken her through djembe drumming, sound bowl- and gong-based healing, and Native drumming. Given a snare drum by childhood classmates, she honed the rudimentary skills she had learned from a neighbor’s youngest son and eventually bought a used drum set.

She started playing in bands, sometimes alongside another drummer. When she took a job at a music store in Allentown, she found the drum circle concept crystallized by Arthur Hull so compelling that she began leading drum circles in a room at the music store. “Arthur Hull developed a way to facilitate people drumming together,” she explains, noting that Hull took the concept from a fun meetup to a conducted session with longer staying power.

Every drum circle is different, Jerant asserts, even when the same people are involved: “It’s all music making in the moment.” As she has witnessed over decades, that music carries with it a tremendous amount of energy that can be a powerful healing force.

Protocols

for healing

As she was hearing and seeing positive feedback from the music store drum circle participants, Jerant began reading in the trade press about specific protocols for healing.

Neurologist Barry Bittman, MD, practicing medicine in South Carolina today, was instrumental in establishing a scientific basis for the role of music in health and healing. His work created the foundation for HealthRHYTHMS, a drumming protocol with the specific aim of healing. One of his studies, for example, demonstrated that group drumming increases Natural Killer (NK) cell activity, improving the body’s ability to fight everything from infections to cancer. Drum manufacturer Remo offers training to people who want to become HealthRHYTHMS facilitators, as well as facilitators of other music therapy programs.

Jerant took several HealthRHYTHMS training sessions and got to know Bittman. She describes his approach this way: “Dr. Bittman’s prime directive is ‘Begin with the end in mind.’ If you go to do a community circle, what do you want these people to leave with? He was focused on people having a deeper outcome than ‘Hey we had a great time.’” To this end, HealthRHYTHMS incorporates components like guided imagery.

In a prescient bit of advice, Bittman suggested that Jerant lead drum circles with the explicit goal of stress reduction. The response was so positive that she continued to lead drum circles in the community in different spaces for 20 years.

“When I did community drum circles, I didn’t ask anybody to focus on any specific tension [they were experiencing]; we just played,” she recalls. “The energy is big, raw, powerful, and … [it] leaves you, goes into the drum, and the drum channels it into Mother Earth, who will take that energy and purify it, regenerate it, send it up to Father Sky, so that there’s more energy to bless people and return back to people on the earth. That’s the community part of it.”

Like many community gatherings, drum circles were disrupted by government restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic, although Jerant led online groups for a time. Her next step was into “singing bowls” and related “sound bath” instruments. Unlike a drum circle, sound bathing involves participants lying or sitting in physically relaxed postures while the practitioner plays different tones on sound bowls, gongs, and other instruments.

She describes one sound bath school of thought as focused on precise frequency calibration, and another – the one that has greater resonance for her – as aiming to “make sure that when you put your sounds together that they’re pleasing and they match.”

Jerant regularly leads sound bathing sessions at Holy Trinity Memorial Lutheran Church in Catasauqua, Moonstone and Sage in Malvern, and other venues. “I just want to give you an opportunity to get away from it all and experience some peace,” she says. She uses the invitation “You deserve a moment of peace,” she explains, “because you do!”

Jerant has also returned to drumming, using Native drums that are held in the hands, rather than between the knees, and are gentler on the elbow that she fractured in 2025. Information on her upcoming sessions is available at lvdrumcircle.com/events.

From rock

to research

Jim Donovan has played with Jerant at events in the Lehigh Valley, and is a full-time assistant professor at St. Francis University in Loretto, Pa. His June 12 workshop at the Yoga Loft in Bethlehem offers “a direct way to reset” from “life [feeling] loud or overloaded.”

Donovan’s interest in drums was sparked by hearing – and feeling – a live performance of the theme from the TV show S.W.A.T. at Disney World when he was eight years old. “I can still remember feeling the drums and bass guitar vibrating in my chest,” he recalls. “Something clicked for me in that moment.” His grandmother then bought him a toy drum; owning a real, complete drum set had to wait until he was 18 years old and working a part-time job at Burger King. During high school, he made do with “air drumming,” using a pair of drumsticks.

He studied music at the University of Pittsburgh, although his parents thought he was majoring in computer science. After forming the band Rusted Root with fellow Pitt musicians, selling millions of albums and playing live (including opening for Jimmy Page and Robert Plant in 1995), Donovan joined the fine arts faculty at St. Francis.

“After I took the position at St. Francis,” he explains, “I quickly realized that being in a university environment meant I needed to understand the research behind what I was teaching, not just rely on

my personal experience as a musician … One of the things that fascinated me was learning how many different regions of the brain become active when we play music.”

The brain-body-music connection is a crucial component of Donovan’s research, as well as his workshops. “When you hear a sound, track a rhythm, move your limbs to create the note, adjust your

timing, listen to the people around you, and repeat those actions over and over again,” he notes, “the brain is constantly building and strengthening neural connections.”

The engagement of multiple senses is another part of what makes music such a health-building activity. As Donovan explicates, “You’re hearing sound, feeling vibration, coordinating movement, using attention, memory, timing, and emotion all at once. Experiences like that are incredibly stimulating for the brain … [and] when people engage in new and challenging activities, the brain has the ability to continue adapting and growing throughout life.”

Focusing on perfection can be counterproductive, he says. “Many of the benefits of music aren’t dependent on performing everything perfectly. As a professional musician, of course precision matters to me. But the body responds positively to the act of creating music itself.”

This recognition affects the way Donovan teaches: “I try to create what I call a fail-proof environment. I encourage people not to obsess over perfection at first. Instead, I ask them to focus on participation and consistency, and to allow themselves to make mistakes without shame. Ironically, that willingness to make mistakes is often where the most growth happens. It’s not that we ignore what needs improvement. It’s that we don’t waste energy beating ourselves up when something doesn’t happen perfectly the first, second, or third time.”

This brain-strengthening capacity of music is available even to those who aren’t professional performers or full-time music students. Singing along to the radio, singing and dancing at a rock concert – all of these activities involve meaningful engagement.

“If I were to rank the effectiveness of different musical activities,” Donovan muses, “passive listening is certainly helpful. But listening to music and singing along with it is even better. Listening, singing, and dancing is another step up. And probably the most beneficial of all is singing, playing an instrument, and actively performing, whether that’s alone or with other people. Generally speaking, each additional level of participation engages more of the brain and body.”

The most important thing is that everyone can get involved. “What I hope people discover through my teaching,” Donovan shares, “is that music is far more accessible than they think it is … What I’ve found is that with the right approach, [people who have been told they have no rhythm] are usually capable of much more than they imagined. And in the process of making music together, they often experience not only personal growth, but also a deeper sense of connection with the people around them.”

Information on Donovan’s training programs, including upcoming local sessions, is available at jimdonovantrainings.com/jim-donovan-live-event-schedule.