An Introduction to Sonic Minds

Every day we feel an invisible impact from sound.

From escaping the chaos of Tokyo with a walk in the park or along the river, and tuning into the birdsong, wind, and water flow; to the steady but always slightly unpredictable waves gently lapping on the sand after a refreshing swim in the sea; even in somewhat mundane domestic interactions with the washing machine, or in lying in bed meditating to the reassuring hum of a busy road – we started to think why is that something that would bring us peace?

That thought connected back to the work we’ve been doing for years in sound, music and cities. We’ve often asked: how might a city sound better? Not just quieter — better. More tuned to human nervous systems rather than engines and air-conditioning. Many cities have improved visually and environmentally, but their acoustic layer still feels largely accidental rather than intentionally tuned for the best experience.

To begin looking at this we undertook work as the collaborative project OTOCARE [University of Tokyo] focused on how natural sounds alongside composed synthetic ones can improve the conditions for hospital workers, and worked on projects intrinsically connected to health, such as with Ab Rogers Design [ARD] providing sounds for Maggie's cancer centres in the UK.

We started obsessing over specific questions around what is actually happening when this sound ‘helps’ us– is it a distraction, a regulation, or as we suspect something more like some kind of pattern or memory? 

At the same time, the idea of “sound for wellbeing” has exploded. Open your phone and you’ll find sleep apps, focus playlists, sound baths, algorithmic calm, and endless ads for new sound devices promising to improve your life. Some of it is thoughtful and well-grounded. But much of what’s emerging feels driven by buzzwords and marketing hype, wrapped around sleek devices and generic frequency waveforms.

In 2023 MSCTY Founder Nick Luscombe established Sonic Lab at Okinawa institute of Science and Technology [OIST], with the aim of taking the time to rigorously investigate the relationships between sound, health and wellbeing–and to then enable this to be applied to our work and outputs more broadly. The Lab has looked into how natural sound and urban sound can affect the flow and behaviour of people as they move through locations, and upcoming peer-reviewed papers will show the ongoing results of these studies. We’ve also worked with local sounds, instruments, and musicians to create sonic experiences based on the familiar elements of place - again echoing back to those ideas of memories and sound connecting on some deep level to enrich our lives. 

Since 2019, we’ve collaborated with Scratch First, creators of the annual Wonderfruit gathering. Though widely known as a music festival, Wonderfruit operates on a much broader spectrum. It is a convergence point for architecture, design, sound, ecological thinking, wellness, hospitality, and radical experimentation that in many ways is closer in spirit to a World Expo than a traditional festival.

During the Covid years when travel was difficult and we collectively, and necessarily, looked inward and more locally, our Sonic Elements collaboration invited global participants to listen, record, and share their own sounds in the space around their home. 

We were taking time to in a sense, start from the beginning with the sounds of what we can immediately know and experience – simple elements to build from.  

We created physical and sonic sculptures onsite dedicated to the elements of earth, water, air, metal, wood, and in doing so worked with brilliant collaborators Chris Watson, Kate Carr, and Sirasar Boonma, creating interactions that helped us to connect with the natural land and soundscape.

This reduction to simplicity and the basic elements allowed us to see things quite clearly, and we realised that when we strip back to the fundamentals of sound and space, that none of these sonic experiences can exist without the element of being-experienced; the listener’s mind is always there having the experience.

Read more about Sonic Elements

In establishing Sonic Minds, what interested us was whether we could step back and bring different ways of knowing, and different forms of experience into the same room to create innovative new music and sound outputs: scientific research we are doing with Sonic Lab at OIST, long-standing spiritual practice, contemporary architectural thinking, site-specific sound and art design. 

Obviously Wonderfruit felt like the right place to test this, and Scratch First’s ambition and approach made them the natural partner. Wonderfruit is not a laboratory in the conventional sense, but it can function like one in the sense that we have 25,000 people–a village and a community that is curious, interested, and hungry for new experiences–and whose flow and movement responds in real-time to our work. The hospitality facilities, food and wellness experiences, partner promotions, and spaces where we can present our outputs are endless, and it is easy to gauge quickly if something resonates or not.

The Chonburi site has also allowed us to begin presenting Sonic Minds to smaller groups, and with diverse applications beyond Wonderfruit. Our inaugural Sonic Minds camp in September 2024 saw us soft launch the project, and included Dr Mark James [Embodied Cognitive Science Unit, OIST], Thai Buddhist Forest Monk Tan Poom and Japanese Jodo Shinshu monk and beatmaker Tatsumi Akinobu [Ta2Mi], Sirasar Boonma from Hear and Found - whose work focuses on the empowerment potential of indigenous sound, alongside musicians, sound recordists, producers and practitioners, community organizers, hospitality experts, and more.   

We quickly realized that in this world of increasing sound and health solutions, it is important to us that we begin from a point which is rooted in people, in real places, real times, and real interactions, and which looks both inwards, and outwards, to personal and shared spaces. 

Thus Sonic Minds has naturally organised itself into four specific focuses that we have begun with:

Sound Mind, which is about listening inwards. How sound shapes attention. How it supports mental health. How you create small sanctuaries in the middle of a crowded day.

Sonic Ground looks at the places we move through. Bridges. Hotel corridors. Forest clearings. Public toilets. What happens when those spaces are tuned, not just visually but acoustically?

Sound Sleep sits right at the edge of consciousness. Twenty-minute naps. Night-time sound. Circadian rhythms. The question of whether the low hum of traffic might sometimes be more comforting than total silence.

And then there’s Choomchon Sound — from the Thai word for community. That strand asks what changes when sound is made together rather than delivered. When listening becomes shared, not directional. When a group starts to feel like a “we.”

Sonic Minds isn’t a finished system–we still have a way to go, but now we have a way of organising our curiosity, and a structure for the ongoing cross-pollinating collaboration with science, spirituality, space, place, and the collective. 

The work shared on this site should be viewed as a journal that articulates and consolidates our navigation of this diverse territory, and within the limitations of what  it is possible to share online, we will bring the experiences to those who are curious to experience Sonic Minds to these pages. 

For the full experience as intended, we are optimistic that in the months and years to come we will be able to create activations in the real world in spaces beyond Wonderfruit - and are already planning applications of it in partnership with hospitality, retail, automobiles, and more. 

We’re at the beginning of this journey, and couldn’t be more excited to see where it takes us.