# 24. Experimental Design for Resonance Claims

## How to test a beautiful idea

**Status:** Outline for future development  
**Primary fields:** Phase, Arc, Form, Lattice  
**Primary scale:** bounded study, participant, intervention, and evidence record

### Purpose

Give the Workbook a practical method for investigating claims about resonance, harmonization, fields, symbols, environments, and biological response.

### Central question

> What observation would support the claim, what observation would weaken it, and how can expectation or selection bias be prevented from deciding the result in advance?

## Proposed sections

1. **Turn language into variables** — define intervention, population, outcome, timing, and comparison.
2. **The smallest useful study** — pilot, feasibility, single-case, repeated-measures, and exploratory designs.
3. **Baseline and counterfactual** — what would have happened without the intervention?
4. **Controls and sham conditions** — comparison arrangements that preserve the relevant experience without the proposed mechanism.
5. **Blinding and expectancy** — participant, observer, analyst, and experimenter effects.
6. **Randomization and order effects** — why alternating conditions is not automatically enough.
7. **Measurement and missingness** — operational definitions, reliability, sensor limits, and incomplete records.
8. **Replication and null results** — what a non-result means and what it does not mean.
9. **Preregistration and transparent reporting** — declare outcomes before inspecting them where appropriate.
10. **Ethics and stopping rules** — consent, privacy, adverse events, and proportionate risk.

## Five-Foci sketch

- **Phase:** timing, sequence, exposure, follow-up, and replication.
- **Field:** participants, setting, instruments, incentives, and expectations.
- **Arc:** recruitment, intervention, outcome, stopping, and interpretation.
- **Form:** protocol, dataset, effect estimate, uncertainty, and report.
- **Lattice:** participant, researcher, instrument, analyst, funder, and public claim.

## Practice

Write a one-page protocol for a claim about a room, symbol, rhythm, or geometric form. Include one primary outcome, one comparison condition, one plausible alternative explanation, one stopping rule, and one result that would count against the hypothesis.

## Evidence boundary

A pilot study can generate a question; it rarely settles a mechanism. Statistical significance is not the same as practical importance, and a positive result does not erase measurement error, selective reporting, or conflicts of interest.

## Open questions

- What level of evidence should match a claim’s potential harm or commercial reach?
- How can subjective experience be respected without making it unfalsifiable?
- Which resonance claims are actually claims about attention, expectation, or social coordination?
- How should independent replication be funded and credited?

## Development sources

Experimental design, causal inference, placebo and expectancy research, measurement theory, open science, CONSORT, preregistration, and the existing evidence card.