We are continuously surrounded by and affected by sound. Some good, some bad; some conscious, some unconscious. Yet relatively little is known about the mysterious reasons why particular sounds can be settling, unsettling or restorative, or make us feel attentive or at ease.

At the same time, “sound and wellbeing” continues to underpin a growing number of propositions, from live performances and recordings to technologies and apps, events and retreats. Many of these come with prescribed outcomes for the participant, musician or listener.

Influenced by this, we started Sonic Minds as a collaboration between MSCTY and Wonderfruit in late 2024. We were motivated by a need to explore more deeply what it is about sound that can help us to have better experiences, how to create these sounds, and how to do so in a way that is grounded in lived realities and shared experiences, rather than dictated by algorithms.

In 2025, to bring focus and an initial language to this enquiry, we came to divide our processes and outputs into four distinct pathways:

Sound Mind: sound that is rooted in the mind and wellbeing
Sonic Ground: sound that is for and about particular places
Sound Sleep: sound for a better sleep
Choomchon Sound: sound that begins with shared experience and community

Rather than a fixed system, these pathways gave us a useful starting point, and as the work has developed through projects, collaborations and encounters with listeners, the relationships between these four areas have also begun to change. What have we learned since putting these ideas into practice

From the outset, Sonic Minds has been more than a venue at Wonderfruit.

Wonderfruit provides the perfect conditions for Sonic Minds precisely because of what it is: a temporary community where sound, architecture, ecology, hospitality and daily life intersect.

The festival has become a living and breathing testbed for projects as we make them. These include live performances in a range of venues with distinct audience, atmosphere, layout and demands; installations dotted across the fields, drawing attention through sound to both the natural landscape and curated or constructed spaces; listening exercises and workshops with attentive and curious participants; and spaces of rest, recuperation and sleep for a temporary community carrying out its full daily rhythms onsite.

We have always set out to develop Sonic Minds through making, observing, listening and continually revising our ideas and expectations, rather than remaining tied to any particular pathway or intended result. In this regard, we see it as an iterative, research-led process: one that remains responsive to what actually happens as people encounter the work.

The work we have been developing for 2026 is the latest stage in this process.

As with previous iterations of Sonic Minds at Wonderfruit, the projects we are presenting in 2026 form an interconnected conversation. They share ideas, themes and goals, even when their forms and executions are different.

Each project within the Sonic Minds programme explores sound, place and lived experience in its own way, for example:

Music for Rest Rooms which is found, surprisingly enough, within the restrooms of the festival, emerged from a series of shared experiences with pianist and composer Yumiko Morioka in the rural area of central Japan where she lives. 

Our new Small Actions project takes the form of a self-help pocket book, facilitating new encounters with listening and compositional practice based on the everyday experiences of our lives. 

Our explorations of sleep and sound have developed into Music for Napping , a growing archive of site-specific, 20-minute napping journeys that transport listeners towards better rest.

Across these projects and the others that we have also been working on, some recurring qualities have emerged. We might even think of them as becoming something like the ‘foundations’ of Sonic Minds [although such a term is necessarily provisional because the practice continues to shift as we learn]. 

They include attention, memory, repetition, rest, place, participation and transitions between states. 

Together, they have helped Sonic Minds develop over the past year as a way of working rather than simply a framework for classifying our projects.

When considering sound, mind and wellbeing, we tend to have some predictable expectations. For example, the well-trodden pathways lead towards music [especially ambient music] or tunings and pitches that promise to make the body respond favourably and induce a state of “wellbeing” or sound mind.

While some of these approaches may have precedent, we have developed our practice through an ongoing dialogue between scientific research, creative exploration and lived experience.

We have noticed that our state of mind can improve when we become meaningfully attuned to our experience: when our attention is directed towards a sound or action, when we gain a new perspective on an experience or place, or when something triggers an associated memory.

Small Actions explores these ideas by encouraging the reader of a little pocket book to become a more focused listener. It provides small prompts from what surrounds us in everyday life: the sound outside a window, making a hot drink, taking a bath. These familiar actions can then become triggers for attention, memory, emotion …  and creativity.

The book is designed not only to be read as a source of listening practice, but to be used to generate compositional and performance ideas. The reader becomes an active participant, and forges new connections between their everyday life and a potentially new world of creativity and imagination, through listening, remembering, imagining, composing and performing. We are in the early stages of testing it, but we believe this accessible format can be useful for people who have difficulty focusing, feel bored or uninspired by daily routines, or simply need a small invitation to listen and create.

Our performance project Music for Small Actions, made in collaboration with May-T [of the Thai band Modern Dog] takes the Book as its score. May-T and our responses to its modest prompts become the foundations of a series of fully formed miniature musical journeys.

The Book of Small Actions therefore marks an important expansion of Sonic Minds’ work around the mind. Rather than treating sound as something delivered passively to produce a promised effect, it uses attention and focus to evoke memory, feeling and new creation, all of which we believe can have a positive effect on wellbeing and the mind. 

A related and perhaps more familiar destination for sound and the mind is restfulness. This is where we began our journey in 2025 with Music for Rest Rooms, made with Yumiko Morioka.

The project is well documented elsewhere, but briefly, it begins with what is around us and with the sensory memories attached to it. Taste, smell and sound become ways of returning to experiences and places, creating a temporary respite or pause.

There is already a great deal of “wellness music” and “rest music” in the world. Our natural question was how to cut through a swelling sea of relaxation sounds to produce something that feels like us, and like Sonic Minds. What emerged was something inherently human: a genuine experience shared through sound that may not be easily described in words. Its honesty mattered more to us than making it conform to an ideal of beauty or calm.

The world is rarely silent, even when we take time out to rest. The music that emerged from Music for Rest Rooms acts as a gentle companion to that process. Field recordings, scent, memory and spatial experience create something that can remain in the background rather than directing or guiding the listener with great force. Above all, it is grounded in life, experience and memory.

We saw the music received warmly in the restrooms at Wonderfruit in 2025, and since then it has travelled elsewhere, with plays on BBC Radio 6 Music and a successful European tour in summer 2026. This included a full-capacity performance at the Royal Albert Hall’s Elgar Room and a day of listening at Berlin’s Reethaus attended by almost 600 people. Each hour-long session at Reethaus was fully booked, and some listeners wanted to remain for another session but were unable to do so because no further places were available.

Another familiar territory within the sound, lifestyle and wellness field is music and sound for sleep.

When we began exploring this area, what interested us most was how a soundtrack could provide a guide, basis or narrative for taking time out to close our eyes and nap. There is already a whole world of endlessly streaming, algorithmic “sleep music”. We were more interested in the almost unlimited places and times to which a composed journey might take a listener: real places and lived memories that can serve as blueprints for a nap.

For us, a sense of familiarity coming through within the voice of the composer, with the assurance that somebody is sharing an experience they have lived, may offer something more reassuring than a synthetically generated sound. This thinking is informed by the work of our research partner, OIST Sonic Lab, which is currently investigating how people respond to natural sounds compared with man-made or synthetic sounds.

The nap gives us not only an endless resource for worldbuilding, but also a useful sequence of transitions from which to make music: preparation, drifting, the hazy dreams a nap can bring, and finally awakening. Each becomes a structural and musical point of reference.

We have been working with Robin Rimbaud [aka Scanner], on this project and are continuing to build new “nap journeys” based on places and experiences we have lived. The work is currently being trialled in a dedicated sleep room for tired office workers at CIC’s shared offices in Japan. In 2027, we hope to bring it to further locations across their global network. The feedback we collect will help us understand how this music might work in such settings and guide us as we move forward.

While this research is generating feedback from potential listeners, we remain cautious about assuming that the same sounds will produce the same response in everyone. Sleep is personal, and our responses to sound vary according to our experiences, expectations and situations. Feedback will inform our creative work, but we do not want it to prescribe the music we make.

This work may eventually become an application available for domestic use, alongside specially curated versions for hospitality, healthcare and travel. In 2027, we hope to explore these possibilities further. At Wonderfruit 2026, the sounds will be available to Wonderers in the Boutique and Slow Wonder facilities.

Over the past year, we have looked back at the four pathways with which we began and considered where they have taken us. All four remain important to Sonic Minds, but putting them into practice has revealed that they do not necessarily operate at the same level.

Sound Mind and Sound Sleep identified particular relationships between sound and our mental and physical states. Sonic Ground and Choomchon Sound described something different: how, where and with whom the work is made. As our projects have developed, this distinction has become clearer.

The work itself has also revealed that a third distinct area between mind and sleep, rest, exists in its own right rather than as an element of Mind. Through the projects described above, three connected directions have therefore emerged: Mind, Rest and Sleep.

Sonic Minds develops creative, research-led approaches to mind, rest and sleep through sound. Its work is grounded in real places, lived experience and participation with others.

This does not mean leaving Sonic Ground or Choomchon Sound behind. Instead, we have come to understand them as principles that run through all three areas.

MSCTY_Studio is a site-specific practice, and Sonic Minds remains grounded in particular places and the people who inhabit them. Music for Rest Rooms emerged from shared experiences in the rural place where Yumiko Morioka lives. The Small Actions book begins with the sounds and gestures of everyday environments. Music for Napping transports listeners through places, times and memories drawn from lived experience. There is “ground” within each of these projects, even when the work eventually travels beyond the place in which it began.

Community is equally integral. Wonderfruit, Sonic Minds’ other founding partner, began as a gathering of people in one place and has developed a community that exists both within and beyond the festival. Our projects have been shared, tested and reshaped through encounters with its audiences and collaborators. Participation is therefore not confined to one pathway: it is part of how Sonic Minds listens, learns and makes work.

So, for now, Mind, Rest and Sleep describe where our work is leading, while place, lived experience and participation describe the means by which we intend to get there.

Our next stage will be to develop Mind, Rest and Sleep as three connected areas while continuing to draw on the principles and processes that have emerged through our work so far.

The Sonic Minds Lab held in Bangkok in June 2026 allowed us to share our processes and outcomes while they were still developing. We will continue this approach through further labs, workshops and participatory events, including at Wonderfruit 2026 and through future activity in Thailand and Japan.

These creative and research-led processes also open practical opportunities. Sonic Minds may take the form of compositions and recordings, participatory workshops, listening tools, spatial installations or specially developed experiences for hospitality, healthcare, workplaces and travel. Commercial applications and creative enquiry do not need to be mutually exclusive. Each can help the other produce work that is distinctive, accessible and genuinely useful within everyday life.

There are others exploring the relationship between sound and wellbeing. What makes Sonic Minds distinct is its combination of creative practice, research, place and participation. The work does not begin with a promised outcome or a generic solution. It begins with people listening to particular sounds, in particular places, at particular moments in their lives.

Sonic Minds has evolved and will continue to evolve as it grows. The past year has guided us towards greater clarity and a better understanding of where we are and where we now want to go.

We remain curious and open to new inspiration, and we will not limit ourselves to a pathway simply for the sake of maintaining it. For now, however, our practice has brought us to Mind, Rest and Sleep as the connected directions we need for the next stage.

Sonic Minds began by asking a simple question: what does sound do to us, and why? We remain fascinated by this question as we move into the project’s next stage and ask where, with whom and in what situations we can apply our work.