Top 20 Magickal Ways to Use Music – Part 1

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I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why music is important. I’ve also spent a lot of time using music in a ritual setting. And you know what? I’ve spent a lot of time talking to other people about how they do the same. I mean, at the time of writing this post, I’ve filmed 15 episodes of Music, Myth, and Magick, where I ask every guest: “How do you use sound or music in your personal practice?”

And yet… it has suddenly dawned on me that what I haven’t spent a lot of time doing is communicating all of that information so that it can be easily accessed and used by others. So let’s fix that.

I’m going to give you my top 20 magickal uses for music. Ten in this post and then ten in the next. Let’s do it!

Ritual Cues

The first thing we do in our coven before starting any circle is called the “tap and ring.” The butt-end of the wand is knocked against the altar three times and a bell is rung three times. We say that the knocking signals spirit and the ringing signals people — “get ready for ritual!”

Really, those noises are a conscious trigger. I don’t know if spirit really needs any sort of cues, but our brains certainly do.

You get the same effect when a bell is rung to signal the start or end of a meditation ceremony. If you have ever used a meditation app on your phone, like Insight Timer, you might have noticed that all of the meditations start and end with a chime. This is because, after some practice, sounds can trigger an almost instantaneous jump to the alpha state. It just needs to be the same type of sound each time. Try it and see!

Nathan M. Hall mentions using sound to alert spirit in Season 2, Episode 1.

Diagnostics

You can use sound as a diagnostic tool to trace out parts of the body that require healing or parts of a room that require cleansing.

Want to give it a try? It’s pretty easy. Just grab a bell and start ringing it over someone’s body. It’s very similar to the concept of a body scan performed during a Reiki session, where the practitioner might be naturally drawn toward one particular area suffering from dis-ease. In this case, however, it will be the sound of the bell that changes when it is positioned over a part of the body that requires healing.

Okay, the sound of the bell doesn’t physically change. Rather, it is your perception of the bell that changes. As such, it is a personal and intuitive experience. The ringing might suddenly become louder (or softer) or sound more hollow. And it’s probably something that will only be noticeable by you within the moment. Try not to get caught up in the logic of it all and just go with your best feeling.

When I smoke cleanse a room, I walk around with my burning herbs or incense and constantly whisper strange syllables to the walls. I’m not sure why I started doing things that way, but for almost as long as I can remember, that felt like a natural action. I’m quite certain that I look and sound extremely bizarre while doing it, but maybe that’s where part of the magick comes from. Sometimes, the whispers seem to reverberate off the walls differently. Sometimes they seem to have a sharper sound. If that’s the case, I know I haven’t spent long enough in that area. I’ll continue to cleanse until everything sounds regular.

Let me just reiterate that the sound of my whispers isn’t physically changing. I’m not insanely ranting to you about nonsense (at least I don’t think I am). It’s just my perception of the whispers, which is tied to my intuition, that provides me with feedback. Other people might feel changes in emotion or temperature when they walk through rooms that are unbalanced energetically… I just tend to hear it.

Check out Ivo Dominguez, Jr. talking about this in Season 1, Episode 1.

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Charging

You can charge ANYTHING with sound. The next time you’re tasking a crystal, making some incense, or even doing some simple candle magick, try this technique.

Place the object in front of you and make some noise. Ring a bell or singing bowl, sing to it, play an instrument, or beat a drum. Imagine that the sound waves are carrying an energetic current — because they are.

You might just be surprised at how much power you generate!

Group Mind

Are you trying to bring the attention of multiple people onto the same ritual focus point? Great. There’s music for that.

Have you ever felt the unified energy of a crowd at a concert? That’s the same principle we’re working with here.

Whenever there is a beat, rhythm, or note that people can attune to, it pretty much instantly snaps everyone into the same wavelength. How everyone reacts and feeds into that is completely their own preference — they can sing, chant, stomp, clap, play an instrument of their own, dance, or engage in some sort of other sacred movement… but they’ll all be vibrating under the same group mind.

Ask Spirit for an Impromptu Song or Chant

This one is like mixing channeling with a bit of improvisation and performance. It might take some experimentation and practice to get down, but it can be extremely powerful.

There’s not always a perfect chant for every ritual. Sometimes you just have to open yourself up to spirit and ask for words or sounds. It might be completely nonsensical and you might not even remember it once your magick is done. And that’s okay.

I actually use this technique quite frequently when trying to draw power from runes. In runic magick, we sometimes chant the name of the rune in different ways to focus the energy. It’s called “Galdr” and if you look it up in certain books, there are very specific formulas of sounds to use that are otherwise entirely meaningless and sound like gibberish, like “fu fa fi fe fo of ef if af uf.”

The thing is… I can never remember those formulas, so I just take the phoneme (speech sound, like “th”) associated with the rune and surround it with different vowel or consonant sounds depending on what feels right in the moment. It might sound something like “fuh fuh fuh fee foo feh” — again, totally nonsensical, but perhaps more driven by spirit or my higher self than simple memorization and recitation.

Check out Christopher Penczak talking about this concept in Season 1, Episode 9.

Musical Scrying

This one is a bit like Bibliomancy, where you grab a random book and quickly flip to a page to get a message.

With musical scrying (or maybe you can also call it “playlist scrying”) you’re essentially asking your guides or spirits around you to give you a message through song titles or lyrics. Queue up a giant playlist, put it on shuffle, hit skip a bunch of times, seek to a random position in the song, and pay attention to what you hear.

I guess you could also take your favorite Led Zeppelin record and play it backwards.

Will this be a direct answer? Probably not, but like many methods of divination, it’ll require some intuition to understand the response.

Vibration of Divine Names

This is one of my favorites. You can vibrate (or intone) divine names or words of power.

You’ll see this type of technique described in many texts on ceremonial magick, even in common rituals like the LBRP.

All you really need to do is find your own personal resonance frequency — that is, the pitch at with your voice causes your body to actually rumble or vibrate. It’s different for everyone because there are like 10,000 different things that attribute to our voices (including vocal cord size, throat length, and the exact structure of the pharynx and nasal passages), but it’s usually somewhere in your lower register.

Want to give it a try? The next time you’re by yourself for a few minutes, try intoning the word “Ra” or “Ram” while focusing on your solar plexus chakra. This is a seed sound and qualifies as a word of power. You should use one full breath for every recitation of the word and it should sound booming.

Intonation is also sometimes called “The Great Voice” or “The Magickal Voice.” It should not be confused with The Voice, which is both a TV show and a technique used by the Bene Gesserit in Dune.

Jack Chanek mentioned intonation in Season 2, Episode 3.

Offerings

Any type of performance can be given as an offering to deity, provided it is done expressly with that intention. It can be as simple as the recitation of a quick chant or as complicated as writing your own song (like this one).

Although it may feel more appropriate if the intended deity is some sort of patron of the arts, this does not need to be the case. Spirit often connects with us through emotion and creating any sort of joyful noise is a great way to connect back and say thank you. We’re also not limited, of course, to only offering things to a deity. Songs can be given in gratitude to ancestors, guides, elementals, or really any other sort of spirit that you decide to work with.

While you sing, try to feel a deep emotion of gratitude. Let it pour through you and out of you as if this were the very moment that you woke up and realized you had suddenly received all the things you ever wanted. Allow things to flow freely and don’t be worried if, for some reason, you go off script or lose the lyrics. You may just have some interesting results!

Drumming or Chanting to Raise Energy

Listen, I’ve heard a lot of people say they can’t play drums during a ritual because they don’t have rhythm. Let me be clear about something: having rhythm is a totally separate thing. As long as you have a hand that can physically smack the drum head, you possess the ability to raise energy.

The same goes for chanting. People tell me they can’t do it because they don’t have a pretty voice. It doesn’t matter!

You don’t have to play in rhythm. You don’t have to sing in tune. All you have to do is make noise… and it’s even better if you can make noise as a group. Playing cohesively is cool and all for a public performance, but if the goal is to raise energy for a magickal working, you can be as cacophonous as you want.

Check out Deborah Lipp talking about some drumming in Season 1, Episode 8.

Meditation or Trance Guides

What does the soundtrack to your meditation sound like? Maybe you have a specific playlist that is geared toward the type of journey you’d like to have, but if you don’t, there are plenty of songs that are designed just for this. They might lull you into a relaxed state at the beginning, gradually build in intensity to pull you deeper, and then use other noises to help bring you back at the end.

As I mentioned in the earlier in this article, sounds can be triggers for meditative or trance states. But you can also listen to recordings of spoken word that will take you through a guided meditation or pathworking.

This type of thing is different for everyone and might vary significantly based on the occasion. For one type of ritual, you might want to hear the sounds of singing bowls… and for another, you might want heavy metal!

What you choose is completely up to you, but the best way to work it out is (as always) to experiment.

Check out Coby Michael discussing some playlist choices in Season 1, Episode 5.

Conclusion

I’ve presented these first ten in no particular order. Really, it was just the first ten things that came to my mind. To be quite honest, I probably could have written an entire article about each of them.

What I’ve said here really just scratches the surface. I hope you’ll use this as a way to spark some experiments, then report back with what worked for you!

In the meantime, feel free to drop me a note or message. What’s your favorite magickal use for sound or music? I’d love to hear all about it.

Ah, here we are at last. The fine print. You know what? There’s an Amazon link somewhere in this post. I almost didn’t include one, but I couldn’t help myself from being a nerd and talking about the Bene Gesserit in Dune. Yeah, so like, if you use that link to buy the book, Amazon will pay me a small commission. That’s it. That’s all you needed to know.