This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A sacred sound entry records a specific chant, cantillation style, call, blast or vocal practice that a religious tradition sets apart from ordinary speech and ordinary music, treating it as carrying a particular power or standing in worship rather than as decoration added to it. A shofar blast, a muezzin's call to prayer, a cantor's Torah cantillation and a monk's overtone chant are recorded here as distinct, specific practices, each with its own history and its own rules, rather than folded into one general category called religious music.
An entry records where and when a sound is used, whether in daily prayer, a single annual rite or a moment restricted to initiates, and what a tradition itself says the sound accomplishes, calling a community to worship, transmitting a sacred text with exactness, or opening a state a tradition considers otherwise unreachable through speech. Many of these practices carry a formal notation or a strict oral transmission method, and an entry records which of the two a given tradition actually relies on.
Where a sacred sound's traditional practice has become contested, opened to outside performance and recording in ways some practitioners welcome and others resist, the entry records that contest as a documented fact about the practice's present standing rather than settling it either way.