Meditation is an ancient practice that originates from several Eastern cultures and has hundreds of variants, each with different levels of difficulty and style, but the ultimate goal of all traditions is to achieve mental clarity in which you can evaluate and understand your thoughts, detached from the stresses of an immovable past and an unknown future.
I’m the kind of person who needs to have inbox zero, whose banking app takes too long to update, and who gets mentally drained when put into a hyper-active group chat. For these and other reasons, I needed meditation even before my personal life started to make it harder for me to fall asleep. Even when I was only using online videos and dedicated apps like the free version of Insight Timer, my meditation practice finally helped me stay in a baseline state of calm before falling asleep. Now I meditate morning, noon, and night, and I still can’t stop my heart.
In theory, many of these meditation techniques can be done in any situation, even with a barking dog (or brain). But in reality, internal and external noise can be an insurmountable obstacle. That may be why millions of people turn to meditation music to give themselves an edge in their meditation practice. It’s a form of “mindfulness,” and Healthline It means “focusing your attention on the present, everyday activity,” which in this case is musical harmony and movement, never overpowering but lively enough to drown out the sounds of a family of raccoons scurrying across the roof.
While meditation music commonly shares sonic characteristics such as hypnotic repetition, slow tempos, and resonant vibrations, it is not a genre with a clear aesthetic or unique sonic signature. Rather, it is a loose collection of various calming sounds, chants, and songs, united by function rather than form. Whether it’s a simple, sustained beat or a fully composed song, meditation music helps practitioners settle into a basic state of calm.
According to current market reports, the number of Americans using meditation apps has tripled in the past decade, and a plethora of focus meditation and mindfulness music apps have been released. One such app is Calm, which adds content and curated playlists based on what head of music Courtney Phillips calls “scientific research that shows how certain sounds and frequencies are linked to specific outcomes like reduced stress, better sleep, and improved focus.” Such apps are especially helpful for beginner meditators who are likely to need meditation music to help them enter a relaxed state. alpha According to a survey conducted by the Korea Electronics and Communications Science Research Institute in 2014, the state of brain waves is:
A look at Calm’s library shows just how vast its web of meditation sounds is. There are music playlists featuring artists like Julianna Barwick and Laraaji, and an exclusive album by DJ BKLAVA called “Silk: Music for Focus.” There’s also “guided meditations” filled with pure color noise, ambient instrumental soundscapes, and affirmations, and even a “Sleep Stories” series narrated by celebrities like Matthew McConaughey, whose Southern accent sets a dreamy backdrop for gentle, lullaby-like melodies.
This meditation music and others like it have infiltrated every corner of the internet, catching the hearts of unlikely advocates. Spotify has a “Peaceful Meditation” playlist with over 2 million followers, and even a collection of ultra-niche, customized “lofi meditation” playlists targeted at Spotify’s Gen Z listeners at moderate frequencies. YouTube has become a hub for millions of videos with mantra readings to open chakras, the seven major energy points thought to influence our emotional and physical health. And TikTok is full of sound frequencies that some believe can help heal, protect, and manifest.
There’s a lack of neuroscientific research on how the brain (or plants) respond to meditative sounds, let alone whether the frequencies can heal the soul and body. But Lil Jon believes it. Best known for raucous party-rap anthems like “Turn Down for What,” Jon recently founded a new age company called Soul Chakra and released two guided meditation albums. Total Meditation and Manifesting abundance.
When he turned 50, Lil Jon remembers feeling a pain in his side. He was worried. He’d been drinking a lot, so he thought it might be affecting his liver. The thoughts soon spilled over into a strained relationship with his then-wife, and a music career that hadn’t seen a new album since 2010. Crank Lock.
“So all of this is affecting me,” he says. Fader.[But] Instead of getting depressed and going to the bathroom and letting bad situations get to me, I started meditating and trying to release all the tension and anxiety from my life.”
According to Athanasia Konturi, a neuroscientist at the Centre for Music in the Brain at Aarhus University, there are two theories about the brain’s response to repetitive sounds: One is a biomusical function called “entrainment,” in which brain activity “synchronises with the frequency of the musical signal” of a given external rhythm.
The second theory is linked to the work of Dr. Michael J. Hoeve and Dr. Johannes Stelzer, who in 2016 studied shamanic trance states and found that “monotonous drumming allows the shaman to detach from their sensory environment and enter into a long inner stream of thoughts.” Dr. Konturi says this supports the theory that repetitive rhythms induce a state of “perceptual detachment,” allowing the brain “to actually ignore external stimuli and turn its attention inward.” However, she cautions that neuroscientists have not yet made conclusive findings about the effects of meditation sounds.
When asked about the appeal of meditation music, Lil Jon offered a similar hypothesis, saying people need these sounds “to help them focus on something — to not get distracted or distracted by what’s going on.”
“The problem most people have with meditation is they can’t quiet their mind,” he says. “They can’t switch off and stop thinking, ‘I have to do this for my kids,’ or ‘My husband needs this,’ or ‘I don’t want to go to work tomorrow.’ The distractions of life keep them from freeing their mind and detaching. I think sound gives them something to focus on.”
Of course, not all meditative music sounds like a Lil Jon album or the Calm app library. Humans have been incorporating meditation into music for as long as we’ve been making music. Slowly, as our lives have gotten busier, these ancient principles have become a more familiar part of our culture. Los Angeles-based artist Kim Kranz knows this well. Her music incorporates chanting, which she learned over a decade from shamans in India, Africa and Europe. Over video chat, she recalled a scene in a Whitney Houston documentary where she said her mother trained her to “sing from three different places in her body.”
“For example, when she wanted power or when she wanted to communicate sexuality, she would sing from her navel center,” Klans says, “or when she wanted to move people, she would sing from her heart center. That’s what makes her music so incredibly beautiful. And it’s one of the anecdotal ways in which we see people practicing systems like chakras in pop culture who aren’t part of a spiritual lineage.”
Kranz finds most solace in rhythmic chanting, especially in non-Germanic languages with many vowels, such as Sanskrit. “It gives it a rounder, more spacious sound,” she says, adding, “I can sleep or rest while singing it, because there’s a sense of, ‘This is sustaining me.'”
“It makes you feel like you understand something, you have control, you can get better, you can fix something,” Kranz says, “because that sound is bigger than our human frustrations and complexities.”
Meditation music reduces anxiety and helps us stay in the present moment. During the weekdays, I used to think of my phone as my enemy, dreading the adrenaline rush of seeing 100+ unread emails and dozens of unread texts. Now, when I lie on the ground and pick up my phone, I sometimes feel a strange sense of relief, knowing that I’m just a few taps away from a few minutes of sonic retreat.
“Any time we focus our attention, it’s nourishing,” Kranz says, “because we’re just focusing on the repetition of a soothing sound.”
