The Healing Qualities of Spatial Sound
As expressed on our Testimonials page, Sound Gardens offer a unique immersive experience that is increasingly recognized as holding great potential for wellness and recovery. In recent years, we have partnered with the Minneapolis-based People’s Center Health Clinics to offer outdoor community Sound Garden events as part of their “Because Your Health Matters” community wellness initiative, and with San Francisco’s Rhoda Goldman Plaza to offer pop-up Sound Gardens in their terraced garden for residents and memory care families. We are also working with The Human Touch, a new online support resource for individuals with dementia and their families and caregivers, to promote these new modalities for treating neurological conditions such as dementia and Alzheimers.
The healing properties of sound have been long studied and are gradually finding their way into mainstream therapies for physical, mental, and emotional health.
Hearing is essential to how we perceive the spaces we are in. It is how we construct meaning about the world and track changes in the environment. Sound affects us on both conscious and unconscious levels, and particularly neurologically.
Our brains use sophisticated filters to prioritize sounds that are most meaningful. For those who are unable to filter sounds due to sensory or cognitive processing overload, the world becomes overwhelming and can feel out of control. To address these emotions, sound-based therapies incorporate music, rhythm, and movement to relieve the mind and body. Our experience of sound shapes our ideas, mood, performance, and ultimately our mental and physical health.
An important aspect of human hearing is that sound gives us a very detailed, three-dimensional understanding of our world. Conventional stereo audio breaks the world into two halves, left and right; though it has come a long way, stereo speakers and headphones still fall short of capturing the complexity of the world as our ears and brains truly experience it, and as they’ve evolved to discern it. Real-world sounds have dynamic direction, velocity, tone, and timbre – all playing out in the acoustics of real three-dimensional walls, forests, valleys, and cities. Our ears tell us so much about the world that we often don’t notice, and the sounds of music that we hear affect us deeply in profound ways.
This understanding points to the incredible medical potential of spatial sound as a healing modality. Recent advances in our understanding of how we process sound suggest that we have only begun to scratch the surface of how we process dynamic sound-based experiences. New audio technology is opening doors to transformative therapeutic potential by making audio highly immersive, and deliverable in outdoor, natural settings that combine the healing effects of both spatial audio and the natural world.
Hospitals across the nation have already begun to prototype and implement immersive sound therapy experiences using evidence-based approaches, such as auditory beat stimulation (ABS), to help frontline healthcare workers relieve stress and re-balance the parasympathetic system.
Recently, the Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital in Southern California prototyped ‘resiliency rooms’ for clinical team members. The rooms were designed by students from the California Institute of the Arts and Reimagine Well, a company that creates tech-enabled immersive experiences for patient care. Sound Gardens are bringing this approach outdoors, for a unique experience of re-connecting with nature in a grounded, durational way.
If you or your organization are interested in bringing a Sound Garden experience to your community, please contact us to explore the possibilities for bringing a new kind of healing experience to your world.
