Sounds Baths Are Like a Quick Hit of Festival Vibes
Anyone who’s stood near the front of a particularly bass-heavy set knows how magically delicious it feels when those thick waves of low-end hit you all over your damn body. It’s a powerful sensation both sonic and visceral, with the combination often affecting places of the soul as well as the body. There’s a reason why, for a lot of us, the dancefloor is basically church.
By connecting us to these higher places and changing our states of consciousness, live music, and music in general, is like a reset button for the brain, body and spirit. It gets us out of our everyday grind and transports us to places a bit more mysterious and profound. But not everyone can make it out for a massive set on the regular, and not everyone is always down for a trip to a club or festival. The question then becomes how we get this kind of audio/physical fix more often.
Enter the sound bath, an alternative method of sonic rejuvenation. Happening at many yoga studios and even out on the festival circuit, sound baths are just that—an immersion into a figurative bath of sound. The events typically happen in enclosed rooms in which a facilitator plays instruments often including but not always limited to gongs, crystal bowls and tuning forks, creating a wave of sound in which participants can bask. Some sound baths are paired with yoga, and some just involve lying down and closing your eyes. The events can last for an hour or more and often result in a meditative state of deep relaxation and even emotional catharsis.
“In our culture, we’re constantly in the fight-or-flight state,” says Ann Zboray, who leads weekly sound baths at Los Angeles’ Urth Yoga. “We’re constantly rushing and on our devices, and we get so little vacation time and work long hours. That’s actually not the natural state to be in.”
Sound baths ease this stressful state of mind by immersing people into a mode of meditation in which the mind is quieter and better primed for calm, innovative thinking. After leaving a sound bath, many experience a perspective shift that makes moving through life a bit more pleasant. You know the high you feel for a few days after a particularly transcendent festival weekend? It’s like that.
The instruments used in a sound bath are often tuned to certain frequencies (for example, 528Hz is purported to be the frequency of love), and Zboray says her gongs are actually tuned to the frequencies or particular planets. Because our bodies are composed primarily of water and thus highly sensitive to vibrations, it’s said that exposing yourself to optimal frequencies can actually cause physical healing. There’s even an app that will retune all of your music to a frequency said to be healthier for us all around.
By exposing ourselves to prime vibrations, we actually retune ourselves on a cellular level, which can promote healing and overall well-being. It might all sound woo-woo, but Zboray notes that you don’t have to believe in it to reap the benefits and says that she herself hated her first sound bath experience.
“It’s very individual how people are going to react to it,” she says. “These are not instruments most people are exposed to growing up, so they can be very disconcerting.”
Even these disconcerting aspects can be positive, however, as the dissonant moments of a sound bath can hit attendees in places where they are holding tension and thus create a method of release. Think of it like a sonic massage. It’s not unusual for participants to cry during a session.
Some on the festival circuit have already recognized the overlap between sounds baths and electronic music. Electric Forest attendees may recall the Sonic Portal, a geodesic dome housing roughly a dozen gongs. A few dozen people get in the dome, sit in the middle of the gongs, close their eyes, and blast off while the folks running the thing bang the hell out of the instruments for 15–20 minutes, creating what they call “deep-frequency psychedelic soundscapes.” Funded by donations, the contraption makes appearances throughout the summer circuit at events including Electric Forest, Wakarusa and, of course, in the parking lots at Phish shows.
“I think electronic music affects people in the same way a sound bath does,” says Zboray. “In a way it’s grounding, and in a way it’s also spiritual and can help you connect with the universal.”
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