The rise of meditation music

In 1970, master yogi Swami Rama reportedly stopped his heart for 17 seconds during a demonstration at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas. He was participating in a study on voluntary control over the autonomic nervous system, demonstrating his ability to fluctuate his muscle temperature, form cysts beneath his skin, and rapidly cycle through different brainwave frequencies using yoga nidrā, a form of meditation where the mind is conscious, but the physical body enters a state of restful “psychic sleep." According to a summary of lead researchers Dr. Elmer and Alyce Green's findings, it took five minutes for the EEG machine to show he'd entered a deep and dreamless sleep. Twenty minutes later, the Greens reported that Rama woke up and was able to repeat a whispered conversation between two nearby lab techs verbatim.

Meditation is an ancient practice originating from several Eastern cultures with hundreds of subvariants varying in difficulty and modality. But the ultimate goal of every tradition is to help us achieve a clear mind, where we're able to evaluate and understand our thoughts, detached from the stress of the immovable past and unknown future.

I’m the kind of person who needs my inbox at zero, who spends too much time refreshing my banking app, and who has a mental breakdown if I’m put in an extremely active group chat. For all these reasons and more, I needed meditation even before events in my personal life made it difficult to fall asleep. While I was only using online videos and specialized apps like the free version of Insight Timer, the practice helped me melt into a calm base state before finally falling asleep. I now meditate every morning, afternoon, and night; I just can’t stop my heart yet.

In theory, many of these meditative practices can be done in any setting, even if you’ve got a barking dog (or a brain) that won’t shut up. The reality though is that internal and external noise can be an insurmountable hurdle — and that may be why millions of people have turned to meditative music for a leg up on their meditation practice. It’s a form of “mindfulness,” a discipline described by Healthline as “focusing your awareness on the present moment everyday activities.” In this case, it’s the harmony and movement of the music, never overwhelming, but still active enough to muffle the sound of the family of raccoons running across my roof.

While typically sharing sonic qualities like hypnotic repetition, languid pacing, and resonant vibrations, meditative music isn’t a genre with a definitive aesthetic or distinct sonic signature. Instead, it’s a vague way of grouping together a variety of calming sounds, chants, and songs, united by function rather than form. Whether it’s a simple, sustained beat or a fully composed song, meditative music helps the practitioner ease into a basic state of calm.

Current market reports indicate that the number of Americans using meditation apps has tripled over the last decade, with plenty of focused meditations and mindfulness concentration music. One of those apps is Calm, which Head of Music Courtney Phillips adds content and curated playlists based on “scientific studies that show how certain sounds and frequencies can be tied to particular outcomes such as decreased stress, better sleep or increased focus.” Such apps can be especially useful for novice meditators, who are more likely to need meditative music to slip into a relaxed alpha brainwave state, according to a 2014 study conducted by the Korean Institute of Electronic Communication Science.

Calm’s library reveals just how wide the net of meditative sounds can be. There are curated music playlists featuring artists like Julianna Barwick and Laraaji, and an exclusive album by DJ BKLAVA called “Silk: Music for Focus.” There are pure color noises, ambient instrumental soundscapes, “guided meditations” filled with affirmations, and even a series of “Sleep Stories,” narrated by celebrities like Matthew McConaughey, whose Southern drawl is set against a dreamy backdrop of gentle, lullaby-like melodies.

This and similar strains of meditative music have reached every corner of the internet and found their way into the hearts of some unexpected advocates. On Spotify, there’s a “Peaceful Meditation” playlist with over two million followers, mid-range frequencies, and even hyper-niche collections of customized “lofi meditation” playlists targeting Spotify’s Gen Z listeners. YouTube has become a hub for millions of videos containing mantra recitations to open the Chakras, the seven major energy points that are thought to affect our emotional and physical well-being. And then there’s TikTok, filled to the brim with sonic frequencies, believed by some to help heal, protect, and manifest.

There is a dearth of neuroscientific research into how the brain (or plants) respond to meditative sounds, let alone whether frequencies can heal the soul and body. But Lil Jon is a believer. Famous for rambunctious party rap anthems like “Turn Down For What,” Jon recently founded a sundry new age company called Soul Chakra and released two guided meditation albums, Total Meditation and Manifest Abundance.

Upon turning 50, Lil Jon recalls feeling a pain in his side. He was concerned — he drank a lot, and wondered if his liver was affected. These thoughts soon spiraled to his strained relationship with his then-wife and his music career, which hadn’t seen a new album since 2010’s Crunk Rock.

“So all of these things are hitting me,” he tells The FADER. “[But] instead of getting depressed, going down the toilet, and then going to a bad place, I started meditating and trying to release all of that tension and anxiety from my life.”

There are two schools of thought surrounding the brain’s response to repetitive sounds, according to neuroscience researcher Athanasia Kontouli of Aarhus University’s Center for Music in the Brain. The first involves a biomusicological function known as “entrainment,” where “brain activity is synchronized to the frequencies of the music signal” of a steady external rhythm.

The second theory is linked to research by Drs. Michael J. Hove and Johannes Stelzer, who found that “monotonous drumming helps the shaman disengage from the sensory environment and enables an extended internal stream of thought” during their 2016 study of shamanic trance states. Kontouli says this supports the theory that repetitive rhythms induce a state of “perceptual decoupling,” where the brain “actually ignores the external stimuli, which allows the attention to turn inwards.” However, she warns neuroscientists haven’t made any conclusive findings on the effects of meditative sounds.

Lil Jon shares a somewhat similar hypothesis when asked to speculate on the appeal of meditative music, saying that people need these sounds “to tune in to something, so they're not distracted by what's going on or… letting their mind drift off.”

“That's most people's issue with meditation is they can't quiet their mind,” he says. “They can't turn their mind off and stop thinking about ‘Oh, I gotta go do this for the kids,’ or ‘My man needs this,’ or ‘I don't want to have to go to work tomorrow. The distractions of life are pulling them away from letting them release and detach, and I think the sounds give them something to focus on.”

Of course, not all meditative music sounds like Lil Jon’s albums or the Calm app’s library. Humans have incorporated the meditative into our music for as long as we’ve made it; slowly, as our lives get more frantic, these ancient principles become a more ever-present part of our culture. This is apparent to Kim Krans, a Los Angeles-based artist whose music incorporates chanting she learned over 10 years from shamans in India, Africa, and Europe. She recalls in our video chat a moment in a Whitney Houston documentary when the singer talked about how her mother trained her “to sing from three different locations in her physical body.”

“Like, she was singing from her navel center if she wanted power or to convey sexuality,” Krans says. “Or from her heart center if she wanted to move people. That’s what makes her music so devastatingly beautiful. And that’s one of the anecdotal ways people are practicing these systems like the Chakras in pop culture without belonging to any spiritual lineage.”

Krans finds the most comfort in rhythmic chanting, especially in non-Germanic languages that feature more vowels, such as Sanskrit. “It gives things a more rounded and spacious sound,” she says, adding that “we can kind of fall asleep in it or rest in it, because we have a sense of it being like, ‘Hey, this is holding me.’”

“It makes you feel like you can figure something out, control it, get better, fix something,” Krans says, “because the sound is bigger than our human grievances and complexities.”

By lessening our anxieties, meditative music allows us to ground ourselves in the present. During the work week, I used to think of my phone as the enemy, dreading the sudden adrenaline spike of seeing 100+ unread emails and dozens of unread texts. Now, there are times where I’ll feel a strange comfort in lying on the ground and grabbing my phone, knowing I’m just a few taps away from a few minutes of sonic retreat.

“Anytime we focus our attention, it's nourishing,” Krans says. “Because we’re just focusing on the repetition of a healing sound."