A musician friend asked: "Terry, you know when there is a bunch of people chanting really harmoniously, sometimes a high pitched voice, that doesn't sound human, also joins in?"

"Yes. I've heard that. It usually happens when there are a few hundred people in the main hall, but I have heard it in smaller rooms with fewer people. It only happens when everyone is in rhythm with each other. I used to think that it was a wise guy doing a falsetto, but now I think that it is sound bouncing off sound or an extreme harmony producing a new voice. Like when two people bond they create a third entity that is the relationship between them."

He said: "I don't know what it is, but I heard it last night when I was in the studio with my band while we were working on my new song. The sound also appears on the tape. It sounds like an instrument that no one has ever heard before."

I told him about a bodhisattva that traveled through many star systems to hear the Lotus Sutra. As he passed through each star system he caused all the musical instruments of every world to sound at once in harmony.*

He asked: "What is the name of that bodhisattva?"

"Bodhisattva Wonderful Sound."

He said "Thanks, Terry. I was wondering what we should call that piece.  You just helped me name a song."

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*"With that, Bodhisattva Wonderful Sound vanished from his own land and, accompanied by eight-four thousand bodhisattvas, appeared here [in this saha world]. The lands that he passed through on his way quaked and trembled in six different ways, and in all of them seven jeweled lotus flowers rained down and instruments of hundreds and thousands of the musicians sounded of themselves without having been struck." (Lotus Sutra [translated by Burton Watson], p. 24)