Sympathetic Resonance

Go into an otherwise silent room full of guitars and pluck the A string on one of them. You will soon hear all the other guitars sounding back at you! Their respective A strings will have picked up and responded to the sound wave you created. They just couldn’t help themselves. We call this effect sympathetic resonance. (You probably learned this trick in high school physics class using one tuning fork to excite another.)

This works with people, too. Most of us instinctively want to be in tune with those around us. Put me in a roomful of Nova Scotians and it’s not long before I’m talking about “car inshorance” and “torrist attractions” with the best of them. It’s not affected or patronizing, it’s just long-forgotten speech patterns rejuvenated by the sounds around me. You can be “shore” of that!

The notion of sympathetic resonance is an important one for communicators. If we strike a single, clear note, our audiences will naturally want to get on our wavelength. This is why focused speakers excite the crowd effectively, while those who ramble or overload fail.

Speakers as diverse as Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill and yes, even Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump, captivate their audience because they focus on a single, clear message. They understand that their audiences want to “eat it up” and they deliver a single theme straight to the heart and soul of the listeners.

(You think that the Donald offends this rule by his whiney babbling? Not at all– he may seem to prattle nonsense, but there is a single, consistent undertone note running through it all, a cunning appeal to our worst animal instincts. We’re not talking about “pretty”, we’re talking about “effective”. He may sound foolish, but he is no fool.)

Speakers such as these understand something more: the sympathetic resonance of your direct audience will then ring out to further audiences. If the world were quiet enough and guitar stores were close enough, your plucking an A string in a local store would set off sympathetic resonance in that store, which would start the next store humming, and then the next, and so on across the continent. People are like that, too.

But while there is perhaps no more powerful device in communication than the magic of sympathetic resonance, it only works if you strike a note to which your audience is capable of resonating.

What do I mean by that? Simply this: you can play the note “F” all you like and a classically-tuned guitar will not respond. Why? Because it has no “F” string. In other words, there’s nothing in its makeup capable of resonating.

In the same fashion, it’s critical that you know whether or not your audience is capable of resonating to your message. That means that you need to know your audience. And that is what separates the pros from the amateurs when it comes to communicating.

Here’s a link to a demo of sympathetic resonance in the lab. They could maybe use some lessons on communication, though! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=aCocQa2Bcuc)