About
Charleene
You probably found your way here because of sound. A song, a voice, a crystal bowl that reached somewhere perhaps where words couldn't. Curiosity drives some of life's greatest discoveries.
Thank you for being curious enough to be here. I appreciate that.
Here's what I want you to know first. From the outside, my life in music looks polished: Broadway, film, radio, classical training.
The part that shaped me most wasn't polished at all.
When my father was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, I poured everything I had into music I hoped might help him heal. After we lost him, the music left me too. I couldn't lift my violin. I couldn't sing a note. After four decades of training, nothing would come out.
Tragedy turned my music into silence.
What brought me back wasn't technique. It was a set of crystal singing bowls, an instrument with no rules, that asked nothing of me. I kept coming back to them. Slowly, over years, the bowls helped me rediscover my voice, often in ways that I'd never even considered.
That's when I finally learned what all those practice rooms never taught me. Sound doesn't need you to be perfect. It needs you to be present.
Here's what I believe. Everyone is a composer: of your thoughts, your words, your feelings, your choices. Sound is how we bring the music already inside us to the surface. And no one can hear it for you. Not me, not an expert, not a frequency.
So, I won't tell you what to hear. I won't even tell you there's a single frequency to heal your heart or pacify your achy stubbed toe. I refuse to regurgitate Instagram spirituality wrapped in hertz frequencies that unravel perfect, blissful love into your life.
To do so would be disingenuous to the unique individual that you are. Because the truth is, sound impacts each and every one of us differently. (And I've got the data to prove it.)
But do take note...
While I am engaged in exploring and replicating the latest scientific discoveries related to sound, I am at heart an artist.
An artist always asks questions; she creates based on her innermost waters of wisdom and instinct. Intuition drives creation. Creation drives science. Science drives understanding. In my world, all are of equal importance.
Sometimes you walk by faith, not by sight. And I'm good with that. It's how the most beautiful melodies are birthed.
On our journey together, I'll give you ways of listening you can use every single day. Press play, then notice how you feel afterward. Sound is a progression, not a pill.
I've spent over forty years learning to listen more deeply, so you can too.
Biography
Charleene Closshey believes everyone is a composer: of their thoughts, their feelings, their choices, their lives. A composer, performer and frequency researcher, she uses sound to help people hear the music already within them, and she refuses to tell them what they should hear. She has spent four decades in music, first as a professional violinist, Broadway actor and Billboard-charting recording artist, and now as a researcher studying how sound moves through the human body.
Today, Charleene composes and performs on a chromatic set of quartz crystal singing bowls, bringing the full twelve-note scale of classical music to an instrument with no established classical technique. Her album ALIGNED: A Planetary Mantra & Gong Shower won the 2022 Hollywood Music in Media Award for Best Ambient/New Age and carries endorsements from GRAMMY winners and scientists alike.
She is faculty on The Shift Network and also shares her ever-deepening understanding of the power of intentional sound with Insight Timer and YouTube audiences.
Charleene is the creator of the Archetypes of Sound™, a framework uniting classical musicology and Jungian psychology that is the subject of the book she is now writing.
You are the final authority on how to use the power of sound, music, and vibration to shape your nervous system and begin to reframe your life.
I’m here to help.
As a PhD candidate in natural medicine, Charleene studies how music affects the body, with particular attention to the gap between what listeners feel and what instruments measure. In her pilot study of crystal bowl music, every participant felt calmer in every session, and every participant's heart rate fell while listening. Yet the listeners who felt calmest were not the ones whose bodies changed most. Rather than smooth that divergence away, she's building aspects of her work around it: how to help people connect to sound in ways that bring deeper somatic and physical benefits.
An only child, Charleene was taught at an early age to ask intelligent questions and seek deeper levels of understanding: find the answer(s) to your questions.
Understandably, her research into music, sound, and frequency stemmed from personal grief and tragedy. When her father was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, Charleene passionately set out to write music that might help him. It was through this exploration that an unseen perspective of sound began to emerge. After his death, her world went silent — she could neither play the violin nor sing, two of her father's favorite things.
Instead, Charleene sat down in front of (then) 8 crystal singing bowls: an instrument with no prerequisites, no strict pedagogy, and no uninspired or out-of-tune notes. Over many months, these bowls seemed to soothe the grief and reconnect her to life, offering permission to make music. Again.
Before the bowls, there was the stage. Charleene acted and played violin onstage in the Broadway company and national tour of the Tony Award–winning musical Once, sang opera in Rome, and wrote, starred in and produced Feather: A Musical Portrait, which premiered Off-Broadway. She has played violin with Josh Groban and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and twice dueled Charlie Daniels on "The Devil Went Down to Georgia." Her single "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" reached No. 24 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary chart in 2018, and her "Ave Maria" was performed live on Fox & Friends. On screen, she starred in and scored An Evergreen Christmas opposite Academy Award nominee Robert Loggia and Grammy winner Naomi Judd, who called her voice "as crystal clear as a cool mountain spring."
“Her voice is as crystal clear as a cool mountain spring.”
She was on stage at eighteen months, carried into the crowd scenes of Easter productions at a Florida church that seated ten thousand. She began piano at two and violin at twelve, graduated valedictorian of the Harrison Center for the Visual and Performing Arts, and studied at The Juilliard School, New York University, Berklee and Circle in the Square.
Charleene is a TEDx speaker, a voting member of the Recording Academy and a board-certified health coach. She lives in Plant City, Florida, with her husband, filmmaker Jeremy Culver, and a houseful of rescue cats. There she plays a chromatic set of up to 26 crystal singing bowls. She even sings and plays violin, again.
A note from me to you…
Letters on listening, and on life.
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