In what could have probably started life as a bad inside joke based on Brian Eno’s defining ambient work Music for Airports, our R&D for Sound Mind focuses on creating music for Rest Rooms – a dedicated conceptual space that could allow us to use sound to create individually-tailored escape from the chaos through sound. 

In Central Tokyo, and it seems in many other large cities too, the private booth has been repurposed from a public phone box to a rentable micro-office—a cubicle for hurried video calls in crowded stations, that conjures the idea of a quick turnaround, a missed train, being frantic and late for a meeting, and in even the most unassuming spaces in our cities, there being a reminder of busy calendar appointments, and an invasion of all spaces by work and to dos. 

What if these small spaces, scattered across train stations, office towers, and shopping centres, were not for working, but instead dedicated to much-needed rest? A small, personal sanctuary threaded through urban space, offering something that is so obviously needed in a non-stop world. 

The Rest Room, in this sense, is a thought experiment about dignity and permission in a world which is exhausting, and demanding of our time. A metaphor for an imaginary, tiny, sound-conscious capsule in which people can disengage from the demands of the city for a few minutes; a place where carefully considered sound offers containment, decompression, or gentle reorientation.

Our first application of the Music for Rest Rooms concept - the collaboration with Yumiko Morioka - has helped set a precedent for the next phase of the overall Sound Mind [iteration of Sonic Minds] pathway development. We aim to build on it by continuing to apply real-world sounds, spaces, scenarios, memories, and sensory connections to place, in such a way that people can meaningfully tune in to something deeply reassuring. 

Sound that carries a trace of real lives and places can affect us differently to anonymous library audio [and in a world increasingly soundtracked by the algorithm and AI, we see this as more salient than ever]

From these glimpses into something that is experienced by a real person in a real place, it’s a short, empathetic step back to the individual mind of the listener too. Sound Mind’s ambition is, in many ways, about these tiny shifts: a booth in a station, a nap pod in an office, or the corner of your home that becomes a place you instinctively go to reset. We’re interested in how sound might quietly support personal rituals of rest without enforcing isolation or endlessly redirecting people back onto a screen.

As we move forward, Sound Mind's Music for Rest Rooms has ambition to integrate outputs with innovators in technology, urban planning, and infrastructure, and we look to take the concept into applications like smart homes, workplaces, public transportation, automotive, and more.

And of the utmost importance to us is how such sonic collaborations could improve people's personal everyday lives, create sonic sanctuary in the chaos, and ultimately, how to help listeners to reconnect with others and their surroundings through Rest Rooms.

We are at the R&D stage, collaborating with researchers and looking to develop more iterations of Rest Rooms with partners. We will keep prototyping answers, from headphone sanctuaries to festival toilets, and keep listening to what people tell us when they step inside.

[James Greer + Nick Luscombe]