Building a Sound Bath Tool for Meditation
Table of Contents:
Introduction
This is a work in progress
Like most of my tools, I started to build this one as a way to better understand a new topic. In this case, I wanted to learn more about what sound baths: what they are and what makes a good one.
What is a sound bath?
A sound bath is a popular form of meditation that relies on being bathed in waves of sound, as though you were in a sonic ocean. Like most forms of meditation, it has existed for centuries across many cultures being used for relaxation and healing.
To quote Tamara Goldsby, PhD, “a sound bath is an easy, noninvasive, low-tech, and relatively inexpensive technique to induce the relaxation response.”[1] This focus on the relaxation response makes it easy to understand in the mindfulness context, where sound is the mental device that activates the parasympathetic nervous system and prompts us to “rest and digest.”
The sounds themselves can come from a wide range of instruments like gongs, singing bowls, bells or chimes, and many more. Many of these allow for gradual builds, evolving harmonies, and varied textures over the course of each sound bath session. As a student, I also focused on the inexpensive aspect. Many sound baths are held in yoga studios or similar and, like any class, can be expensive if money is tight or if attending on a regular basis.
This all led me to wonder if I could build something that's free to use and easy to access.
What are the elements of a good sound bath?
From my beginner’s perspective, I found a few elements to focus on that might be partially adapted to an online tool, namely improvisation, harmony, and an evolving sound.
Outside of AI, which I've been avoiding for this project, improvisation is one thing that I couldn't think of easily mimicking except through randomness. Even then, making a thing too random can lead to really distracting results which is not what anyone wants when meditating. Given that, my goal was to play an instrument (i.e. a synthesizer) with variations that feel improvised and see how far I got. Going in, I knew that it wouldn't be the same as a concert where the musician adapts to other people and their energy, which is good because I do love me a concert.
Next up was harmony, which we can define as "pleasing sounds," since it's hard to relax when there's a lot of dissonance. This was the easiest part to wrap my head around, starting with the Western Octave and memories of introductory piano lessons from childhood to find a decent combination of notes. My concern was once again that anything too interesting, like randomness, would distract from the meditation, while too much repetition would quickly become annoying with the same result. In the end, I decided that Brian Eno's quote that ambient music "must be as ignorable as it is interesting" was a good approach, suspecting this is also why most sound baths rely less on multi-part harmony and more on texture.
That brought me to creating a dynamic, evolving sound. A good bit of this could rely on layered harmonies or bringing instruments in and out, using loops that were just long enough (or subtle enough) to escape notice for a while. Still, textures felt like a better fit: I still had to avoid dissonance, but something like noise is easier to gradually change over time than a melody. To be honest, this is the element where I spent the least amount of time and hope to revisit.
An online sound bath tool
From a technical perspective, I decided to build the tool using WebAudio for the sounds themselves and SVG to visualize the instruments.
This tool uses initial randomness to mimic improvisation, a limited set of notes that are always in harmony, plus subtle effects and noise for an evolving sound during meditation.
Conclusion
It’s safe to say the tool is a different experience than a real sound bath but it is free and always available! It also still a work in progress and I have some ideas planned for the coming months, like tuning it to 432 Hz to see whether it has a noticeable effect. If you tried it, let me know what you think!