TIME OUT TO SLEEP

When we looked across the existing range of products, services, and music composed already for sleep, we decided if we are going to explore this field, we wanted to create something that can add value to daily lives and improve our everyday lives.

We didn't want to create a single epic production mapping a night's sleep which would become too familiar and inflexible: it felt too obvious.

We liked the idea of being able to curate based on personal preferences and immediate needs rather than go down a single pathway decided top down by us and not the listener.

We wanted to create something grounded in reality rather than abstract -

we can see already that over-saturation with AI sound and algorithmic presentation of soundscapes is wearing thin as people are increasingly hungry for authenticity. It felt like to go down that path we are almost cheating, and certainly not adding anything new or of real value to the conversation. 

A common strand in this and in other areas of Sonic Minds can be summarized as a desire to bring real-world, real places, and real sounds to people that are grounded in something relatable rather than totally abstract fantasy landscapes. Instead of abstract “tropical beaches” or anonymous rainforests that are so prevalent in the current dialogs, we see a power and a relevance to working with specific locations, spaces in time, and lived experience.

SCANNING AND PLANNING

Having worked with Scanner [aka Robin Rimbaud] over several projects in recent years – including an early Sonic Minds output based on the sounds of the Wonderfruit Fields reimagined as a Hiroshi Yoshimura album remake – we began conversations with him around the initial themes and directions for Sound Sleep: 

How should we create something that can exist in a range of different ways, empowering the user to choose their journey?

How can we integrate our sound into aiding sleep without dominating, rivializing or overcomplicating the process of falling asleep, and the act of sleeping? 

We analysed the sleep cycle and thought about ways we could compose for it - for example a graphical representation, a tonal or dynamic representation, or some kind of elements of complexity in rhythm that correspond with the cycle. 

We looked at the various methods out there to help us fall asleep, such as the ‘military technique’ and ultimately what emerged was a goal of fusing these ideas to create Music for Napping - creating a series of different immersions into sound that can accompany and facilitate the experience of having a 20 minute nap. A 20-minute piece can be composed with a clear arc, designed to carry a listener into a liminal state and back again, rather than fading endlessly.

While we don’t remember it, we felt there is a universal idea that our time spent in womb was probably our best sleep, and it remains a reference point for us even now. As we started out we imagined how we could recreate the simplicity of baby sleep - undistracted and innocent from the demands of our complex lives. 

James flew long haul for the first time with a baby, and listening to the plane’s constant low roar, felt the strange cocoon of recycled air and muffled announcements. It contextualized the conversations about womb sleep - sounding a lot like what the womb might sound like: all bass and blur, with the soft dynamics of a heartbeat somewhere in the mix.

Those two images fused into one of the first nap pieces developed: field recordings from the overhead baggage compartment of that flight [which further accentuated the sense of muffled disengagement], and the heartbeat of James’ daughter when she was in the womb, all processed into a kind of airplane womb - which became its working title.

We decided to double down on sounds that are relatable, everyday, and can lead to a simple transition to daydream, and napping, looking into our imaginations for those sounds must likely to do so. 

Robins studio is in a small town right in the middle of England, and it’s situated in a converted old Victorian textile factory, so rooms are big, and the roof is rather large too.This means that when it rains, as it frequently and famously does in middle England, the raindrops on thestudio roof become a white-noise orchestra of resonant echos on the tiles that resonate. When looking at our own real-world situations further we decided to capture this sound, familiar to Robin as the soundtrack to a mid afternoon hot drinks and powernap in between to dos. Going back again to the womb theme, this merged with a recording James made of playing guitar to his not yet born daughter as she slept [now that she is here, she usually tries to grab the guitar before much playing can be done.]

Having always lived in cities, Nick finds the hum of roads and traffic far more comforting than the usual chillout stereotypes like birdsong and waterfalls, and so another sound journey became based on his recording of early morning car commuters at a familiar junction near his home - a sound that has long brought comfort and an enjoyable 20 more minutes sleep before getting up. 

Looking again domestically at our own everyday sonic universes, Nick’s home washing machine provided the basis for another sleep journey - and an exploration of familiar frequencies and their power to reassure and comfort, 

In our selection of locations, we include some more “classic” soothing sounds - from a series of bays in the Miura Peninsula, just south of Tokyo, in the middle of summer, bridging a cicada-heavy afternoon to a moonlit slow tide and background traffic cruising the Shonan beach road. These beaches are a place James visits as often as possible, and swims year-round at, so become an important embedded sound memory and tool for relaxation too, rather than a stock “ocean” file.

On paper, these ingredients might not all look like typical wellness assets. They’re domestic, urban, and somewhat mundane. But for many of us, they’re exactly the sounds that tell our bodies it’s safe to let go for a while.

We also noticed that, in making these pieces, we were making portraits. Each 20‑minute world became a glimpse into someone’s life – their home, their travel, their habits, their comforts. In an age where you can stream endless, anonymous “calm” audio that could have been generated yesterday by an algorithm, that human specificity started to feel important. Sound Sleep, as we see it now, is partly a small rebellion against that dumbing down of expectations and flattening of the source material. 

We are not against AI as a tool in music, and see how it could help to shape and personalise the audio for such experiences in the future, to help assemble, sequence, or adapt human-made materials in response to context. But we maintain that the raw material should still have the grounding and scent of real places and real people.

We’re interested in what happens when you bring memory into sleep work more consciously. Many of us have had the experience of stumbling across an old cassette, or a half‑accidental phone recording of family noise in the kitchen, and feeling a sudden rush of safety or sadness or belonging. Those sounds – the clatter of plates, a parent’s voice down the hall – can be a kind of medicine.

The research side of this is just beginning, and we are beginning conversations about how to study these 20‑minute journeys with neuroscientists and cognitive scientists.

We were able to test out the 6 journeys with a live performance of all of them, presented non stop during a 2 hour live show at Wonderfruit’s Decade of Wonder in Thailand. While the situation and environment is definitely not controlled, and the audience were already signed up to the idea by choosing to watch it, we think their response was validating. 

Some excerpts of the performance -

“Your music made me feel like I was floating weightless in a deep sea” [audience member]. 

The next phase for the first 6 journeys is that we will test them out in the more everyday environment of a shared offices bunk bed space.

We will trial them at CIC Toranomon, in Tokyo, to find out if the effect is (i) that a short nap in the daytime is easier with our music and that (ii) the sounds resonate with users to assist with sleep [and which ones work best]?

Even before the data arrives, we know a few things:

Not everyone falls asleep to gentle rainforests. Some sleep best to trains, traffic, or even the hum of a fridge or washing machine

One universal “sleep frequency” is about as realistic as one universal dose of medicine. The where and the when – the room you’re in, the time of day, the state you’re in when you lie down – matter as much as the waveform.

In practice, this suggests a future where nap experiences and sleep-supportive soundtracks might be tailored: to individual histories, to the time of day, to location, to emotional state. Here, AI and data science may help assemble, sequence, or adapt human-made materials in response to context. Yet the core design challenge remains: to preserve genuine human communication in the work.

Experiments to date have highlighted another under-explored dimension: memory as medicine. Accidental recordings of family life, of a childhood home, of a favourite street or station, can become powerful anchors. Listening back can evoke safety, belonging, and a sense of continuity. Sound Sleep is beginning to ask how we might intentionally incorporate such memory traces into future sleep ecologies—not in a nostalgic way, but as live resources for rest and regulation.

We aim to expand on the content developed so far in the Sound Sleep program by exploring and creating more 20 minute journeys into everyday sounds, mundane household experiences, and the sonics that create those basic wombstate reactions in us. 

In the long term we can envisage developing a platform that brings these together as a solid user experience: an app; wearables; smart home integration and the development of a sound-sleep machine for playback are all at this stage, very feasible. 

We can see the potential for this to integrate with hospitality, and will seek to expand our collaboration with the Slow boutique hotel and facilities, as well as seek further partnerships in this area - including hotels, airlines, and wellness. 

For now, Sound Sleep sits at the edge of consciousness, mapping short routes into and out of in-between places, using sounds that have been with us all along.