Will an ‘aural Cleanse’ Make You Sleep Better?
My face feels hot, and strangely numb. Then, a slight tingling sensation starts. It’s not comfortable, but I would liken it to the final five seconds of waking up a foot you’ve sat on for too long. Are we up to the last song? I wonder. Before I can think too much about it, I’m asleep.
I am lying on the floor under a blanket at the Indigo Project, a mindfulness studio in Sydney’s Surry Hills headed up by psychologist Mary Hoang, about three-quarters of my way through one of their monthly lunchtime Listen Up sessions.
With a big pair of noise-cancelling headphones pumping a mix of popping and surging sounds into my ears, apparently this is what it feels like to be “aurally cleansed”, a process Ms Hoang developed alongside music producer Rich Locano.
“It was designed to help people discover active listening and mindfulness principles through sound and music,” Ms Hoang explains.
“Mindfulness is about being present in the moment, and that can be achieved by attending to our senses, such as listening … Aural cleansing is also a process whereby participants can attune to different sounds and to notice how they influence their emotions, and visual capacities.”
And, in my case, our physical capacities.
“[Tingling is] absolutely normal,” Ms Hoang says. “Sound has a direct impact on our emotions and this in turn creates sensations throughout the body … It is a rare treat to have our body physically moved by beautiful sound.”
The playlist for my aural cleansing session begins with an unexpectedly boppy excerpt from Brian Eno’s 1978 Music for Airports (“the White Album of white noise,” a friend who is into ambient music jokingly later says of Eno’s fame in the genre) which starts my tingles (almost like watching an ASMR video), before moving onto tracks by German contemporary musicians Nils Frahm and Jan Jelinek. As the music gets louder and dronier, I doze off.
“We deliberately choose music which can help people become present, trigger different emotions and that can potentially give people a visual aspect of what they are listening to,” Ms Hoang says, although my ability to become quite absent is not uncommon.
Dr Amanda Krause is a researcher at the ARC Centre for the History of Emotions at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. She is presenting on “active listening” at the International Symposium on Performance Science in Melbourne next week.
“Most of the time, we’re listening to music while we’re doing something else … you might be exercising or commuting,” she says, adding that active listening is a “very different way of experiencing music in our digital age”.
Dr Krause has been following a group of 162 people who have taken part in aural cleansing at the Indigo Project. The group completed two surveys: one immediately after they took part (which she has analyzed), and one a month later (the results of which she hopes to release later this year).
Ultimately, despite responding to the same stimulus, people’s reported emotions during an active listening session with ambient sound varied, with participants in the survey reporting a mix of happiness, sadness, frustration, surprise or awe, and calm.
“People found it to be a positive but complex experience,” she says. “Many people found that it was a challenge, or they found themselves drifting out of being very focused, or that their mind was wandering. While some people found it evoked very strong memories, and not necessarily positive ones, like losing a loved one, but it became positive because they were able to have time to process that.”
Then, Dr Krause says, some people do fall asleep. “It can be energizing and relaxing at the same time. The response is very layered.”
Sleep podcasts are all the rage at the moment. US podcaster Drew Ackerman’s Sleep With Me podcast draws three million downloads globally each week, with Ackerman, who bills himself as the “world’s most boring podcaster”, saying 150,000 Australians fall asleep to his rambling bedtime stories.
Earlier this year, homewares retailer IKEA released a podcast which is just 35 minutes of people saying the Swedish names of IKEA products (it starts at the bedroom section of the catalogue, working its way all the way down to the bathroom, and you can choose either a male or female narrator).
Could it have been that I just found the aural cleanse to be boring, like someone talking about the Malm and Marius?
Professor Sean Drummond, director of the sleep and circadian rhythms theme at the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health within Monash University, says it sounds like there were “a number of ingredients” present in my workshop which could have seen me drifting off at midday: I was lying down, in a dim room, and quite comfy with my pillow and blanket.
The active listening, he says, would have assisted me in lulling myself to sleep if it meant I was not thinking about what I had on at work that afternoon.
“Distracting your mind from whatever you would normally be thinking about and focusing on something specific and benign to relaxing (as one often does in meditation) can help set the stage for sleep,” he says.
However, Professor Drummond says there is limited research on how sound might play into this.
“Nature sounds are used as ‘white noise’ machines and can help people block out the world and relax,” he offers. “[But] I do not know of any data evaluating whether they are any better or worse than any other kind of sound.”
