What is Sound Meditation? 🧘‍♀️

Introduction

Before I was a Chinese Medicine practitioner, I was a Taichi practitioner, and before I was a Taichi practitioner, I was an actor. Why does this matter? Taichi is a kind of moving meditation which is based on the same theory as Chinese Medicine, and since many patients who seek out acupuncture and Chinese Medicine treatment are suffering from conditions that are either caused or exacerbated by emotional issues, it is really desirable for long-lasting results if they are able to incorporate some kind of meditation practice into their lives. There are different kinds of meditation and some are harder than others, but sound meditation is less well-known than it deserves to be, and is especially accessible for busy people.

I first encountered it many years ago in an acting class, but it was not presented as a meditation, just an exercise in concentration, which is indispensable for actors. We were asked to lie down on the ground and focus on any sounds we could hear in the background, like the sound of car engines, or doors slamming or whatever else. It’s hard to remember exactly how I felt after all these years, but I think I remember being amazed that : 1. all these sounds were there in the background all the time, but I had been completely unaware of them until asked to focus attention on them, and 2. while I was doing so, I forgot all my problems and anxieties. It just felt so natural to become one with the sounds around me.

Now this last thing was very intriguing. This class was either when I was 19, when I was quite lost and confused, or when I was 25, when I was less confused but more lost. In any case, anything that could take my mind off my troubles seemed a blessing. But that is where the fairy story ends, more or less, because when I tried to practice again after class to see if I could obtain the same effects, I couldn’t. Nowadays though when I practice, I can almost use this meditation all day long. So what has changed? Probably the fact that I now use it in combination with other kinds of meditation, and Taichi and Qigong / Chinese Yoga, and acupuncture and Chinese herbal Medicine.

I mention this in order that you don’t get disappointed if you try it and have the same experience that I did when I was younger i.e. you find it intriguing, but the effect not long-lasting. Meditation has different effects on different people though, and not everybody starts at the same baseline, so you might be luckier than me and get quicker and better results, and it doesn’t cost you anything to try. Since I started using this meditation again in the last year or so, when I encountered difficulties, I tried to look them up but found very little useful information either on the internet or in books. That is why I am writing this article.

This introduction was longer than I had intended it to be, so I will move on to the practical sections:

How Do You do Sound Meditation?

I recommend you start with short sessions to begin with, until you are able to build up your stamina. Even if you don’t end up being comfortably able to do longer sessions, short sessions are perfectly adequate and extremely powerful. I think the best way to go about it is to use the timer on your mobile phone. I don’t use a timer for sound meditation any more, but I do for other kinds of meditation. I got the idea of super-short sessions from that scene in one of the Star Wars prequels in which Liam Neeson’s character does short meditations in between bouts of fighting with Darth Maul 👺:

This is a great way to incorporate short meditations in the middle of stressful activities, even if the activity is an exam or a presentation or a board meeting instead of a fight to the death with a red-faced devil. Just set a timer ⏱ anytime your stress level builds up – start with a one-minute timer, and then build up to two, then a 3 minute timer etc. The great thing about these tiny short sessions is that nobody cannot do them. Very few people can do hours or days of meditation, but everyone can do minutes.

Make Notes and Audio Recordings

I mentioned above that I used to be an actor. I still make little films sometimes as a hobby, and because technology has advanced so much since I was 25, I like many people, carry most of the technology I need to make a film in the palm of my hand, in the form of a smartphone. In this particular case though, the crew member we are most interested in is the sound man / woman. Many of the skills of a film sound person overlap with the skills needed for sound meditation – both activities require that the individual become aware of sounds that they are most people usually learn to tune out from.

In finding ways to improve my sound meditations, I have found that writing down particular sounds or categories of sound helps me keep my mind on them, and sometimes I record them too. On iPhones there is a Voice Memos app, and I’m sure there is an equivalent on Android devices too. The way I do it is to make a folder in the Voice Memos app with all my sounds in it. I call it “Sound Effects” and I will probably find a way to include some of them in my little films one day, but you can call yours whatever you like. Here is the contents of mine:

1. The sound of an egg frying in a pan 🍳
2. The sound of the wind in a particular tree (in Oxfordshire)
3. Footsteps in a Haunted Corridor (not really haunted but spooky)
4. The sound of a pencil writing / scratching on a piece of paper
5. The sound of typing on a laptop keyboard
6. The sound of escalators on a London Underground station.
7. The sound of masking tape being torn
8. The sound of a Makita electric drill
9. The sound of wood being planed by hand
10. The sound of my cat drinking water 🐈‍⬛

I won’t bore you by listing the rest, but apart from being enjoyable in its own right, this exercise allowed me to identify certain groups or categories of sound that help me to focus on these sounds in every day life. I hope it will do the same for you.

🎉😮 I just suddenly realised, re-reading this section, that I must have originally got the idea of recording sounds from the beautiful film Il Postino :

Quotations about Sound (Meditation)

Over the years I have collected various quotations about this particular way of using sounds.

1. The first one that comes to mind is something Nobuyuki Matsuhisa, the chef at Robert De Niro’s Nobu restaurant said in an interview when he was asked whether he listens to music when he cooks, and he said No, he listens to the sounds of the kitchen. So there is another exercise for you to try next time you are cooking – just make sure you take care not to cut or burn yourself while you are doing it !

What Are Soundscapes?

Soundscape is just another way or categorising sounds into groups. Soundscape is an invented word on the analogy of landscape. For example, see the Nobu quote in the previous section – he listens to the sound of the kitchen when he cooks, so..

The kitchen

Is one kind of soundscape. This is an especially rich soundscape, though for some reason, it doesn’t work that well for me. Maybe I think too much when I am in in the kitchen, and thinking is the enemy of meditation ! I don’t know why I think too much when in the kitchen. Maybe something about food makes me emotional, I don’t know. I will have to ask a psychoanalyst. But anyway, let me pick this computer up and go to the kitchen and see what I see (or hear what I hear, rather)…well, first things first – the click of the light switch. In the background I can hear the hum of the refrigerator. The sound of water in the sink when washing dishes or hands. The sounds of knives on chopping boards when chopping vegetables and so on.

One of the sounds in my Voice Memos folder is of a hand plane on wood. A workshop, if you have one or can visit one is a soundscape. I don’t have a workshop myself, but I built a tiny workbench from a couple of 2 x 4’s that a chain-smoking construction foreman working on a museum renovation gave me.

I use the London Underground a lot.That is definitely a distinctive soundscape. When one is on the train itself, there isn’t much to listen to because Londoners are famously taciturn on the underground, and perhaps there is a certain amount of soundproofing in the design of the trains themselves. In any case, what I focus on when I am on the underground is the sound of the acceleration and deceleration of the train when it leaves and arrives at the stations. When the train leaves the station, the acceleration makes a sound that rises in pitches, and the inverse happens as the train slows down and approaches the next station.

When the doors open onto the platform, they usually make a beeping sound. I have noticed that the beeping sound varies from station to station and I wonder why. I am tempted to ask a London Underground Employee but I don’t know if any of them would be weird enough to take an interest in that kind of thing. Anyway, the why doesn’t matter that much for our purposes. Our purpose in listen to sounds is just to take our attention away from our (inner) thoughts, which are often painful and disappointing and anxious, and onto other (outer) phenomena. The last two sounds as one leaves the train and moves upwards to the station exit are the sound of the escalators and the beeping of the electronic ticket barriers.

A city street

is a very different soundscape to a country lane. I think it is probably the most challenging soundscape for the purpose of sound meditation. I think the reason is that the sound of many cars blends into a kind of “white noise” or shapeless blur, which makes it difficult to pick out distinctive sounds to focus on, which is what you really need for meditation purposes. Today though, for some reason, I was able to use sound meditation all the way from home to Soho, all the way down Oxford Street, which is exactly the kind of busy street which usually provides a poor environment for sound meditation. I don’t know if I can retrospectively remember all the sounds I used, but one of them was certainly the distinctive clicking or ticking sound that bicycles make when they are coasting, or being pushed.

Apart from bicycles, motorcycle engines are usually more pleasant to listen to than car engines. I remember one I heard somewhere today which had the thick, pleasing sound of a Harley Davidson engine but when it got close enough for me to see as well as hear it, I noticed to my surprise that it was a BMW motorcycle. As far as car engines are concerned, they are not as easy to use for sound meditation as bicycles or motorcycles are. I don’t really know why. Maybe they are designed to be quieter. There is one kind of car that makes an easy-to-focus on sound for our purposes though – cars with Diesel engines. I am not an engineer or a mechanic so I don’t know why Diesel engines sound different to petrol engines but they do, and they are easier to listen to because they make a more clear and distinctive sound.

A bar / pub

I’m sitting in a pub in South London with a lovely outside terrace, particularly on a (rare) sunny day like this. Pubs and bars aren’t the best of all places for sound meditation, because there is usually (though not always) loud music playing in them, which drowns out most background sound – and most conversation !! In this case though, since I’m sitting outside, if there is music playing within, I can’t hear it. I can only hear the occasional clinking of glasses behind me, and in front of me a motorcycle – not a Harley Davidson alas (they sound beautiful) but a pleasant sounding motorcycle nonetheless.

Useful Side-Effects of Sound Meditation

I have noticed a few useful side-effects to this meditation:

It is like amphetamines for housework. In the 1950’s, women could buy amphetamine based drugs from pharmacies and many of them found it helped them keep their houses clean. Well I too need help to keep my house clean because I am soooooo lazy when it comes to housework. You can’t buy amphetamines over the counter anymore, so what’s a girl / guy to do?! My advice is….use a metronome. After I have done my laundry it usually takes me days to fold my socks and pants, if I get round to it at all. But if I use a free metronome app with builtin timer, in 4 minutes flat I am all done. If you struggle to keep up with your chores, then give it a try.

It can be useful as a kind of general self-defence / safety awareness. For example, when walking down the street, if you are concentrating on the sounds around you rather than wrapped in your own thoughts and oblivious to your surroundings, then you are more likely to hear the car behind you, the drilling or hammering above you etc etc It is not just about danger though. You might notice all kinds of useful things about your environment by paying attention to sounds, even if the effect of it is not quite as useful as the scene in Zatoichi, in which the blind samurai, whose sense of hearing and concentration is so acute that he finds out that the games at a gambling den are rigged by the sound of the dice:

As you can see in the trailer, the film is punctuated by a kind of Japanese tap dancing. I’m not sure this is coincidence as I have long thought that the joy-bringing effect of tap dancing is because it is none other than a form of sound meditation. As soon as you take your attention off your feet and the sound that they are making, you are out of time, rhythmically speaking. And while your mind is on the sound, your mind is free, and your problems have ceased to exist.

As to why the sound of tap dancing is so mesmerising, my own theory is that it is for the same reason as shamanic drumming was / is used to induce trance. Which also leads me on to the question…

Can I use Music instead of Random Sounds?

Kind of. That is the short answer. I have to give you the short answer because it is late at night and I’m supposed to be meditating, not writing ! But the slightly less short answer is… if you have to use music instead of random sounds, try focussing on the rhythm section, in particular the (shamanic?) drums. Vocal music doesn’t seem to work so well, perhaps because it stimulates the verbal part of the brain, which we are trying to bypass here in order to calm it down.

To see if you can do it using music, try this. The E Major Prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier by J.S. Bach. It’s only one and a half minutes long, which is a good length for a beginner. And it is divine:

If you don’t like classical music, give this one a try:

Sound Meditation in Action | A Real Life Example

In order to pay attention to a sound, your mind and your awareness are forced to remain in the present moment, because the sound is happening now, it is not happening yesterday or in an hour from now. And in the present moment, your problems do not exist, because the things you fear have not yet come to pass, and painful and traumatic memories from the past ? Well, they exist, as memories, but since your attention is on the sounds made in the present moment(s) your attention cannot simultaneously dwell on the pain of the past. Well it can, but only with half of its usual strength or less, since there are a limited numbers of things that the mind can pay attention to at the same time. 

All that sounds great, but it also sounds like the kind of hippy nonsense you read anywhere and everywhere about “the present moment” and the “power of the now” and whatever else. In my experience, when I read those things and then try to apply them to my real life and real problems, somehow it doesn’t work. But sound meditation does work, and it does show you the meaning of trying to grasp the present moment, and the power of doing so. So here’s a real life example for you. I am writing this while waiting in a long phone queue to speak to Central London Court about a long-running legal matter which someone else’s misbehaviour left me in significant difficulty. 

I don’t know if you have ever been involved in a court case but they are pretty stressful, but luckily the phone line to the court has one of those usually annoying pre-recorded music loops. This one is particularly repetitive, I think there are only about 4 lines of piano music in it, 3 of which are identical and then it loops back to the beginning again. So why did I say “luckily” the phone line has a looped recording? Because the loopy-ness of it, and the repetitiveness of it are very useful objects for sound meditation. Most ordinary music is a bit too complex for this purpose, but this simple annoying loop is perfect. So far I have been on the phone for 30 minutes, which normally would drive me (and most other people) mad, but not only am I not upset about it, I am happy. Why? Because this nasty life experience has just given me a 30 minute (sound) meditation for free. 

So while I’m listening to this loop, what is actually happening to my mind and to my thoughts? Well it might be clearer if we think about what is not happening; what I am not thinking. I am not thinking forward to the trial date, in less than a month than now, and fearing lest the outcome goes against me. Of course those fears occur to me from time to time, but just not in this present moment, and not in any of the present moments in the last half an hour I’ve been on the phone. I am also not thinking of unpleasant events in the past that resulted in the court case. So, while I am doing sound meditation, neither the pain of the past nor the pain of the future exists, and what is more, when I put down the phone to try again another day, I do so with a cheerful mind, even the midst of all of this unpleasantness. 

Some of My Favourite Sounds

These are some of my favourite sounds, to misquote Julie Andrews. If you make your own list of favourites, I think it will help you to focus on sound and make your meditations easier and more successful:

1. I love the sound of running water; a cliché, I know, but nevertheless. There is a small piazza near here, which used to have a fountain in it, and every time I walked past on my way home, for the 30 seconds or so that I passed it, the sound of the water was like an elixir to me.
2. I love the sound of the wind in the trees. Beyond the piazza above, there is an urban garden square and sound of the wind in the trees in that square is so soothing and beautiful. One day I suddenly noticed that this sound only occurs in summer, when the leaves are lush and full, and the fact that it only lasts as long as summer, which in England is brief, makes it all the more precious.