Rhythmic Randomness and Relaxation

Rhythmic Randomness is a concept that I have outlined earlier in this blog, which defines the characteristics of nature sounds and their beneficial effect. This entry is how the presence of rhythmic randomness plays a role in relaxation. The presence of rhythmic randomness in our hearing and sight is most beneficial for relaxation and health.

As a music student years ago, I started taking a course in electronic music, where I was introduced to sound synthesis. Every week, we booked studio time to work with the synthesizer on our own and I developed a habit to begin my studio time with programming the synthesizer to produce about 5 minutes “ocean waves”. It started out as a very simple algorithm and every week it got a little more complex.

Right from the beginning, I found listening to these “waves” helped me relax, regroup, and get the creative juices flowing, but only for short period of time. The novelty would wear thin within minutes and I would want to “enhance” the sound more. These refinements ended up creating more randomness in parts of the resultant sound, which gave the sound more life and reality.

The rhythm part was easy to achieve with the machine. But the rhythm was accurate down to the millisecond, which is not the most relaxing or comforting sound because it always has that hard, relentless, “mechanical” feel to it. The more I tried randomizing certain parameters of the sound generator, the more relaxing and realistic the final result became. Unconsciously, I was trying to develop a sound with the correct amount of rhythmic randomness in it. It was a goal that I never fully realized using machines. Even back then, I ended up recording real sounds to get the exact effects I wanted.

And I never lost my attraction to the sounds of waves. (What a primordial sound!) Over the last several years I have searched out some wonderful recording locations and created wave and beach downloads, each with its distinctive and different character. The natural variability, combined with the slow rhythm in the natural sound recording of waves is both pleasing and comforting to the senses.

This is a perfect example of how rhythmic randomness manifests in real nature sounds. Because of this presence, natural sounds are better than artificial sounds for relaxation, meditation and sleep.

Here is a link to compare different shore sounds on the Nature Sounds.ca website.

Karl Hamilton BFA
Nature Sounds.ca
www.naturesounds.ca
www.youtube.com/NatureSoundsCa