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sound wellness and biophilic soundscapes
103 Plays4 years ago
Welcome to episode 49 of the Green & Healthy Places podcast in which we discuss the themes of wellbeing, sustainability and social impact in real estate today. I’m your host, Matt Morley of Biofilico healthy buildings, and in this episode I’m in London talking to Brian D’Souza, a.k.a DJ Auntie Flo, founder of Open Ear Music and Swell sound wellness.
We discuss sound therapy’s mental health benefits, how music can be a window into our soul, urban noise levels and the role of nature sounds in restoring a sense of calm amidst the chaos, how he creates sonic identities for hotels, restaurants and gyms, deep or active listening vs passive, and how to re-create the sonic experience of forest bathing.
Brian is erudite, dynamic and just the kind of guy you want on your team for a musical adventure one Saturday night I suspect.
sound wellness conversation highlights
- Sound therapy was for me an exercise in trying to discover the inner workings of a soul.
- Sound therapy is triggering different emotions, brainwaves and elements of the nervous system, to put people in a place of relaxation, where they can experience more mental clarity, calm and an objective perspective on life, away from the stresses of their day.
- One thing that's going to come to bear post industrial revolution is the amount of noise that we as human beings have created, which takes us away from that natural environment and into this noisy urban environment. We lose touch with the sounds, the beauty and the essence of nature in cities and that's potentially problematic for our mental health. his latest initiative crafting biophilic sounds for interior spaces
- If you're able to find time and space to consciously listen, then you will receive added health benefits in the same way that you might from meditation practice for example.
GUEST / BRIAN D'SOUZA
HOST / MATT MORLEY
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Transcript
Episode Introduction
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome to episode 49 of the Green and Healthy Places podcast, in which we discuss the themes of wellbeing, sustainability, and social impact in real estate today. I'm your host, Matt Morley of Biophilico Healthy Buildings.
Guest Introduction: Brian DeSouza
00:00:26
Speaker
And in this episode, I'm in London, my hometown, talking to Brian DeSouza, AKA DJ Aunty Flo, also the founder of Open Ear Music for Business and the newly launched Swell Sound Wellness concept.
Sound Therapy and Mental Health
00:00:40
Speaker
Brian and I discuss sound therapies, mental health benefits. We look at how music can be a window into our soul. Urban noise levels and the role of nature sounds or biophilic sounds as we're calling them in helping to restore a sense of calm amidst the chaos. How he creates sonic identities for hotels, restaurants, and even gyms. Deep or active listening versus a passive listening.
00:01:06
Speaker
and how to create the sonic experience of forest bathing as he does now with swell. Brian is a bit of a dude. He's aerodynamic and just the kind of guy you want on your team for a musical adventure come Saturday night, I suspect.
Exploring Sound Therapy Mystique
00:01:20
Speaker
Check out openearmusic.com to see what he's up to. Here he is, Mr. Brian D'Souza. Brian, thanks for joining us on the podcast today. Sound therapy is this
00:01:33
Speaker
On one sense, a hot topic, but it's also something that I think there's an element of mystique around it. So I just wanted to get your thoughts on how music can affect us and our senses and how you see that. Yeah, well, thanks for having me. That's great to join you in the podcast. I think you've touched on two things there. You mentioned music and you mentioned sound therapy. Since as early as I can remember, I've been a fan of music, innately,
00:02:03
Speaker
I know and I think most of us know, probably all of us know that music can affect us in many different ways and we probably all had music as a soundtrack to our lives across different life moments from earliest memories to current days.
00:02:22
Speaker
In essence, our expert listeners, we're listening to music, our worlds are filled with music, whether we're choosing it or not, we're always receiving music, our ears are open to that music and that sound. And we're all DJs in a sense where we can select music for our dinner party or for our gym session or whatever. And with
00:02:45
Speaker
The new technologies that exist, we have greater access to all forms of music than we've ever had before. So music is on our fingertips. We innately know how to curate that music for different activities we have and we're playing music throughout
How Music Impacts Brain and Body
00:02:58
Speaker
our lives. So it's a massive, massive part.
00:03:00
Speaker
When it comes to sound therapy and its effects, for me, it was just trying to unpick what music is, the building blocks towards a song and how that song or those frequencies, in essence, would affect our brain and body in different ways. And sound therapy was, for me, it was an exercise in trying to discover a little bit more the inner workings of a song. The way that sound therapy works is
00:03:30
Speaker
Using particular instruments, typically known as healing instruments and you know the type, it's the gold and the singing bowl and things. It doesn't have to be those instruments, but those seem to be the most effective in terms of triggering a state of mind within the listener who in effect receives those sounds in an environment normally lying down.
00:03:54
Speaker
and going through a certain amount of rituals to get into a place where they're susceptible to receiving those subsounds. But in effect, what it's doing is it's triggering different emotions, different brainwave states, different elements of the nervous system to put people hopefully in a place of relaxation where they can experience a bit more mental clarity,
00:04:23
Speaker
but calm and an objective perspective on life and, you know, away from, I guess, the stresses of there to do this that they might have to do on that day. So it's a fascinating way of just being able to bring people out of, you know, the present moment and put them into a space, a safe space where they can kind of delve deeper into, you know, different, I guess, the realms of consciousness, which I find really fascinating.
00:04:53
Speaker
If we introduce, you've made an important distinction there between sound as a concept and music. There's an element there of clearly a differentiation between the two, which introduces the idea of perhaps sounds of nature that are in some ways the baseline from an evolutionary
Nature Sounds and Cognitive Performance
00:05:13
Speaker
perspective. We were surrounded by that as we evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. So how do you see that relationship between
00:05:20
Speaker
let's say a connection to nature and our mood and our state of mind, perhaps even how our brain functions, cognitive performance or memory. Yeah, absolutely. I think evolutionary, the evolutionary perspective is important here. You know, from the earliest forms of man, we had
00:05:43
Speaker
Music, you know, mankind created music, you know, music perhaps predates language. I think that's the first thing is, you know, we're listening to music before we're even born in the womb.
00:05:55
Speaker
You know, we're hearing rhythm of our mother's heartbeat, we're hearing the musicality of our mother's speech. So inherently we're open as human beings to receiving music and to understanding kind of music and musicality within speech. And when we're born, we immediately are immersed in a world of sound. From an evolutionary perspective in terms of the natural environment,
00:06:20
Speaker
when you're talking about birds so you know if the birds are singing I think there's a representation of safety. You know they're singing and all things being well if they stop singing you know perhaps there's a predator lurking around the corner.
00:06:35
Speaker
And alternatively, they might change their types of calls to warn other birds of their species about a predator or danger or whatever. So it really just starts to activate the sympathetic nervous system as fight or flight.
00:06:52
Speaker
And that's something that has been with us since the earliest days of the universe. So it's super intrinsic to who we are as people. And I think the natural environment is something that innately we feel an attachment to. And I think that one thing that's going to come to bear
00:07:17
Speaker
I guess post-industrial revolution is the amount of noise that we as human beings have created, which takes us away from that natural environment and into this noisy urban environment that we often live in in cities. And we lose a little bit of the beauty and the essence of nature, and that is potentially problematic. So you've introduced the third concept there around noise, which I think has an inherently
00:07:44
Speaker
negative connotation. And if we bring it back to neutral, at least within that perspective of our evolutionary past, then you get to something close to what you're trying to do with the ambient flow project, it seems, at least on the birdsong side. So talk to us a little bit
Ambient Flow Music Project
00:08:00
Speaker
about that. It's a 24 seven music online radio, but there's an angle there around mental health. So describe that project for us.
00:08:11
Speaker
Absolutely. I'm influenced by radio. It began life as a live stream. A DJ set I set up in my garden. It was the earliest days of lockdown. If you remember, I remember where I was in London. The sun was shining.
00:08:27
Speaker
You know, we were entering into territory unknown. I think there's a lot of people, myself included, that were quite stressed at what the outcomes might be. Obviously, there was this real risk and danger to our health in terms of the COVID-19. And a lot of people in my community, DJs and musicians, were starting to do live streams. They were trying to bring the club or the live experience into the home by doing streams, internet sets.
00:08:56
Speaker
And to me that felt really kind of alien because for me as a DJ I need to perform to a crowd and be there in a room with people and it's the interaction between myself and picking the tunes and the people and dancing and responding to those tunes that really mean that it makes some sort of sense.
00:09:16
Speaker
doing that on a live stream on an internet broadcast didn't necessarily make sense. So what I decided to do instead was set up a live stream thing, just ambient music, where people could, in essence, receive the music. We did it earlier on a Saturday morning. So people were in essence just waking up. And with my very rudimentary technical setup,
00:09:44
Speaker
had a couple of different ways of broadcasting. And one of those was on Instagram Live. And that was just literally from my phone. And what would happen is that it was an inadvertent thing. It was the the my phone would on Instagram Live would pick up the sounds of birdsong from my garden. And all of a sudden,
00:10:03
Speaker
The combination of music and birdsong was the experience, the sonic experience that people were listening to. And actually, I get so many comments from listeners saying, this is so brilliant. I love the music, but actually really drawn to the birdsong and the natural environment made me think, I'm very privileged to have a garden in London.
00:10:21
Speaker
and to be able to listen to birdsong as frequently as, you know, as I can do. Something I just suddenly started to pay much more attention to. It just sounded so loud and actually there were some studies done around like, you know, the way that the pandemic affected the noise levels in the cities and actually noise levels dropped because it was less traffic sound. The birdsong, although it didn't actually get louder, the birds were not actually singing louder.
00:10:45
Speaker
the perception, it did sound louder to us because there was just like this reduction in the ambient traffic noise and other kind of noises that we were so used to hearing.
00:10:55
Speaker
But anyway, the main takeaway was that the birdsong and the natural sounds were such a precious kind of feature for all the listenership. So when I eventually turned it into a radio station, I said, well, we need to try and recreate this. So on the radio with ambient flow, you have two channels, the music channel and you have the
00:11:18
Speaker
the Birdsong Field Recording Channel and it's your choice. You can just listen to music, you just listen to Birdsong and you can blend the two, which I think is a nice touch. And again, we've now been running the station for a year and a half and continually gets great feedback from people going back to your point around the health aspects of this.
00:11:40
Speaker
You know, obviously music is a personal choice and ambient music isn't for everyone. We mentioned and touched on the noise paradigm and obviously, you know, one man's music is another man's voice. So it's a very much a subjective thing. For me, I wanted to put together a selection of songs that really helped me kind of like lower my stress levels and feel calm and give myself the sort of safe space in amongst this
00:12:08
Speaker
you know terrible situation that the planet was having to endure that you know the health crisis and everything and just you know use this this moment to sort of take myself out of that and be able to immerse myself in in these sort of sounds and i guess at the same time
00:12:24
Speaker
I was studying sound therapy and I was training in that. I was kind of like leaning on a lot of the kind of learnings in terms of how sound can trigger, you know, different mood states, you know, bring yourself to that sense of kind of relaxation. And I thought, well, this music is, in my opinion, perfect for that. And it seems like the listenership agreed. So, yeah, there was an element of health. I mean, we just had someone message
00:12:49
Speaker
yesterday to say you know they had a bike motorcycle accident and ambient flow was something they had on every day and and it really helped get them through you know the recovery process for that most bike I sense so these kind of comments from listeners are really amazing.
00:13:03
Speaker
Yeah, I had it on for an hour or so yesterday and definitely once I figured out that I could have both tracks playing at the same time so that the ambient stuff and the background and the birdsong was like, okay, now I took it to the next level. So, Ambient Flow FLO.
00:13:19
Speaker
So you mentioned ambient music, which I think is, you know, it's very may or may not appeal to everyone but it has a very calming effect there's that immediate sense of it, just bringing things down and
00:13:35
Speaker
Encouraging a sense of rest and relaxation, but it is clearly distinct from music, which is just the poor quality background noise that we often end up hearing in commercial spaces so.
Creating Music Identities for Brands
00:13:50
Speaker
Your open ear project is all about counterbalancing that and taking a more conscious approach to the music that is associated with brands, particularly in physical spaces. So when you're thinking about creating an acoustic identity or filling a space with sounds and presumably music primarily that connects with that brand, how you
00:14:16
Speaker
How do you go about that process? I saw that you work with, say, the Frame Fitness Studios in London, for example. Is it about their values and their mission? Or is it just, what's the vibe? What's the personality of the brand? And then you sort of just spin off that for a few hours.
00:14:32
Speaker
Yeah, in a sense, yes. It's trying to tell their story through a selection of songs. In essence, every song is a piece of communication, in essence. And it says it'll say a different thing. And that could be not just the lyrical content. It could be just sonically how it sounds, the rhythm, the tempo, et cetera, the key signature, whatever. So a piece of music is a fantastic thing. It's packed with so much information.
00:14:59
Speaker
and that means that in actual fact it can be quite complicated to think about you know what a song could mean to you know a listenership and then when you take that song and put it in a context that could be a brand space like frame gems or
00:15:15
Speaker
or wherever, then you have that additional layer where there's a certain expectation for the customer in terms of functionally what that space is set up to do. If it's a gym space, if it's a restaurant, if it's a bar. And then also their perception of that brand. You know, what type of brand are they? You know, what type of brand personality do they have? You know, does the music match up to that? And you mentioned Music before, and I guess Openear has now been running for almost 15 years. And, you know,
00:15:44
Speaker
The quality of musical choices in businesses, because remember pretty much every business plays music. The quality has got a lot better over the last 15 years. I think because people are slowly understanding like the music they play is having an impact and can be a brand positive thing and can be positive for customer experience and that's going to be a win-win for everyone involved.
00:16:07
Speaker
wasn't the case 15 years ago and it's interesting to track that and obviously music as a corporation as a thing goes back you know right to the early stage of recording music. It's been around for a long time. Music was interesting because
00:16:23
Speaker
Conceptually, it was designed around increasing productivity in factory spaces, and this was around the wartime. And they would, they took quite a scientific approach with it. The music that they played, it was a thing called stimulus progression. So they didn't play music all throughout the day. They only played it in short, sharp bursts.
00:16:43
Speaker
at different times throughout the day. And that was really just as a motivational thing for the workforce, to be able to like bring a bit of more energy, bring them back, you know, when they're kind of concentration levels kind of dwindled or whatever.
00:16:57
Speaker
And so therefore, like, there was this kind of inherent understanding that music had this sort of functional purpose and benefit. Unfortunately, what then it became was this kind of like elevator, literally kind of like wishy-washy pastiche of what, you know, music can be. And I think when Open Ear started, and certainly our mission today is to say, well, music is beautiful. We're filling our spaces with music.
00:17:21
Speaker
It's having an impact. And again, it goes back to this paradigm of one man's music is another man's noise. Let's get it right. If you get it right, it's going to be a positive. It's going to be a positive for the business. It's also going to be a positive for the customers. And they're going to appreciate that. And now we touched on a little bit the accessibility of music. Well, that's actually meant for the general public and the way that they listen is they're much more open minded.
00:17:45
Speaker
to all forms of music, to a lot more rich and diverse array of music. So actually, that gives brands and branded spaces a much more, a bigger chance to become creative with the music selections. You know, 15 years ago, it was the charts.
00:18:01
Speaker
and the classics and not much else outside of that. Now you can really get into the long tail of all the independent, quite left-field experimental releases and really start to tell the story through the selection of songs. Functional, yes, but also beautiful and inspiring at the same time.
00:18:20
Speaker
Let me dig into that because I think you're absolutely
Democratization of Music Access
00:18:23
Speaker
right. What's happened is there's been, in a sense, democratization of music via these platforms such as Spotify. And suddenly we're all able to dive in and out of country rock and Afro-Latino beats and wherever else we want to go in the space of an hour. So in one sense, it's all too easy for a brand just to say, well, OK, we're going to follow these playlists. And that's more or less our mood. And Spotify will just keep spinning off that.
00:18:48
Speaker
concept more or less and then we've got our soundscape. And I think all too often we see that still where it's an improvement for sure, but there's not quite enough effort being made and therefore it can still go wrong. So I think that leads you into the idea of
00:19:04
Speaker
more conscious listening, right? Because there are spaces where it's clearly background music. If it's, for example, a co-working space, you don't want it to dominate. If it's a retail space, you don't want it to dominate. When you're in a fitness environment, like a gym, it's a really central part. I mean, do you think of spinning studios, for example? I mean, it's like one of the main levers that they have
00:19:24
Speaker
to do it but then in a sense like the ultimate peak of that then is is this space where you're able to engage people in a conscious listening experience right and so how do you with the latest project with swell and the idea of a biophilic multi-sensory experience how have you integrated
00:19:46
Speaker
what we discussed previously about nature sounds and that idea of really engaging with the music and what does that become in terms of this new brand that you've spun off from Open Ear?
Biophilia and Sound Therapy with Swell
00:19:58
Speaker
Yeah so Swell is a sister brand to Open Ear and we've just launched it as you mentioned. I think Open Ear just back to the point around functional sound I mean yes we we fully understand that you know music for most people
00:20:13
Speaker
in the spaces that we work with, gyms, restaurants, bars, shops, et cetera, it's periphery to the main activity. So yes, it has to be right, but you're not necessarily listening to it consciously.
00:20:25
Speaker
It might be, and we do have lots of examples of this, where one track perts your attention, and you really want to know what that is, and that's a great thing for music discovery. But most of the time, you're going to be just passively receiving the music, and you'll know when it's not right. I mean, that is the thing. If it doesn't feel right, you will know, and you might take action by leaving that space and tons of examples of that.
00:20:51
Speaker
but in essence if it's if it fits the surroundings and it makes some sort of sense then you know that's going to make you feel comfortable in that kind of space. On the other side you have a kind of more you know a different kind of form of listening I guess and there's different ways to describe it you mentioned conscious listening it can also be referred to active listening it can also be referred to deep listening and this is
00:21:18
Speaker
really based around an intention by the listener to be more conscious or to be more active, to be more present in terms of listening to the sounds. We're very good at processing sonic information.
00:21:39
Speaker
as well as performing an activity, whatever that might be, it's cooking or driving or whatever, we're very good at that. And often that's meant that what we listen to and sound becomes this kind of passive thing, which is just, as I said, is the soundtrack to whatever activity you're doing.
00:21:57
Speaker
in a way that's that's that's great and that's that's totally acceptable I think obviously with the birth of recorded music that's made it completely you know easy to do I mean if you think before recorded music you would have to you know probably we only did active or conscious listening because you would go to a concert and you would you know that would be a real treat to be able to do that if you could or you would go to you know a folk music kind of gig or whatever and um
00:22:21
Speaker
and you you know you'd be actually involved in the process probably then of making the music you pick up an instrument etc so recorded music is it's really transformed music massively into this largely passive thing i guess what we're saying with swell is we're trying to put forward that notion that conscious listening is important it's important for health and if you if you're able to find time and space to consciously listen
00:22:45
Speaker
then you will receive potential health benefits from that in the same way that you might gain that from meditation practice or another type of holistic therapy. So conscious listening is a way for us to just say, look, if you were able to just pay more attention to the sounds and give yourself that space to do that, then there's potential health benefits to be gained. Now, the way that we
00:23:13
Speaker
deliver that through the Swell project is this kind of combination between biophilia, you know, understanding that nature sounds, you know, as we talked about before, from an evolutionary perspective, super intrinsic to like all of our beings and something that really grounds us and we can all feel, you know, a relationship to
00:23:36
Speaker
music, the music composition, which is like understanding this whole canon of like how we have managed to create, you know, music through different frequencies, through intervals, through, you know, ways of performing, to be able to trigger different emotions and mood states and feelings and actions from the listener.
00:24:03
Speaker
And then the third part of what we're doing with Swell is this kind of like unpacking of sound therapy and the techniques that sound therapists might use, you know, in particular to trigger, you know, potentially an autistic consciousness, but certainly a state of deep, deep relaxation. And there's a few interesting tricks and tools that sound therapists will use.
00:24:25
Speaker
that we've tried to then bring forward into the swell sound treatment compositions that we're putting forward and we'll work with a range of different companies on. I think immediately there, what I picked up on when I came across this was this concept of the set piece within the context of a healthy building or say an office building that's designed for occupant wellbeing. So workplace wellness,
00:24:53
Speaker
concept where you create a space and it's often an unused meeting room, you might get 30, 50 square meters or so, not much more, but you're able to create a recharge room, a quiet room, a meditation space, a restorative area where you're given permission to rest and step away from the work that you're doing. And I think there, that's where what you're doing with swell can be so useful because you're able, in a sense, you're giving
00:25:20
Speaker
the workers in that office space, the right and the, and you're allowing them that maybe just 20 minutes or so to really engage with that space. And I think that leads us into the project that you've done recently around the ceniferous forest, right? So again, they're by a filling environment. Can you try and paint that picture for people so they can get a sense of what that looks like?
00:25:41
Speaker
Sure and absolutely it's a really good manifestation and it's one of the first projects we've done as well. It's a good example of what we're looking to do and the potential of this type of work.
Forest Sound Installations and Urban Masking
00:25:54
Speaker
I guess the Nifris Forest is firstly it's an installation it's based in Browns which is a fashion retail store in central London in Mayfair. They have what they call the immersive room where they have a small space that
00:26:10
Speaker
They do a range of different pop-up and partnerships throughout the year. We've currently got the installation live.
00:26:17
Speaker
and it will run now. It's just been extended by popular demand through to the end of April. So if anyone's in London and want to go and check out, it's absolutely free. It's a 15-minute experience. In essence, it's inspired by two things. One was my experience going forest bathing, so getting out into nature, Shinrin yokos, Japanese practice of forest bathing, and really just trying to like,
00:26:46
Speaker
a kind of mindful approach to being in nature, paying attention to all senses, and gaining benefits from that. There's plenty of studies now that have been done around how forest bathing will reduce stress levels, reduce anxiety.
00:27:05
Speaker
our courses all balance out your NK cells and natural killer cells etc. So that was all very interesting and I guess taking what we're talking about with the ambient flow kind of idea where a lot of people don't have access to nature especially if you're in an urban environment this was like trying to you know bring nature to them by in essence creating a forest within this retail store.
00:27:29
Speaker
So visually it's designed kind of like a forest. We've got bark on the walls and grass on the floor, etc.
00:27:41
Speaker
The other part of the inspiration and the Sniffer's Forest name is derived from a concept called the Sniffer's Garden, which was coined by R. Murray Shafer, who's an ecologist, a Canadian who actually passed away last year. And his whole career was based around documenting the world's soundscape. He wrote a book called The Soundscape and the Tuning of the World, and that really looked at the rising noise levels in cities,
00:28:09
Speaker
potentially detrimental health impacts that that's having. And he really advocated for this cultivation of sniffers gardens in our urban environments or across our different spaces that we create this recovery of what he calls positive silence.
00:28:25
Speaker
And, you know, really creating spaces are sympathetic to the natural environment, give space for, you know, as a result from mental, spiritual, decomposure, et cetera, you know, renew the life, life's energies, et cetera. So he was talking about this in the 70s, you know, and you think when he was writing, I mean, you know, he's quite a good sort of
00:28:48
Speaker
writer for nice kind of throwaway lines but he would say stuff like, you know, we're all destined for universal deafness, if this continues and we've reached the soundscape has reached the apex of vulgarity in our times and stuff so he was talking about this in the 70s and 80s.
00:29:04
Speaker
know, I don't think we've done much, you know, to counterbalance the rise of noise levels and the impact of sound and certainly, you know, from a kind of architectural perspective, you know, like the use of, of hard surfaces, you know, create very reverberant spaces, you know, really kind of like, you know, amplified noise levels. So anyway, so the carnivorous forest was our
00:29:28
Speaker
Yeah, our sort of project to flip that on its head, to create this cinniferous garden, this type of safe space where people can go in. And we have a biophilic sound, so a few recordings recorded in local forests around London. And you also have a headphone experience. We work with Brian Olufsen and we create this sort of spatial audio 15-minute composition
00:29:52
Speaker
which in essence resembles a sound therapy sound bath or gong bath, but uses acoustic instruments instead of a wider range of acoustic instruments, let's say, instead of the traditional instruments, the gong and the singing bowl. The reason for that was we experimented using gong recordings, et cetera,
00:30:14
Speaker
And the feedback that we got was very mixed at best because we felt like we needed the gong player in the room, needed the instrument in the room, needed this physical object to kind of have that association. Without it, it could be a very dark and ominous and almost scary kind of sound. So our take home from that was actually like, let's try and figure out how it's working from a kind of frequency perspective.
00:30:40
Speaker
you know, recreate that using sounds that maybe feel a little bit more comfortable to listeners with just headphones on because headphones, you know, especially these noise cancelling headphones would be using, you know, very immersive. So you want to make sure that it's triggering in the right kind of moods and sensations within the listener.
00:30:58
Speaker
So yeah, you can go and you pop your headphones on, consciously listen to the soundtrack and hopefully receive some benefits as a result. And so similar principles being applied then to things like with the Ishka sound wellness treatments and spas that you were involved in and the forage sounds for Native in London. Native is also at Brown's.
00:31:23
Speaker
Yes, yeah, two separate brands. And this is a coincidence almost that the two projects came about around about the same time. But yeah, Native's challenge was that they have this outside space, which is beautiful. But unfortunately, next door to them, they have, I think it's Claridge's, they're doing lots of building works, right? So in the daytime, there's lots of noise. And it's really, really intrusive. So
00:31:51
Speaker
We were tasked with creating a soundscape that would try to mask some of the noise. And actually, you mentioned office spaces. This is another project we've done with some cool workspaces that we worked with, the office group being one of them. Very similar challenge where the noise levels would be very distracting for people trying to work, or in a native case, distracting for people trying to eat.
00:32:18
Speaker
The lack of sound in the co-workspace meant that people were very self-conscious with work conversations, meetings, et cetera. And they would actually take an action to go out to the vestibules or even outside so they can get some privacy to their work conversations, which is totally counter what a co-workspace should be all about.
00:32:41
Speaker
So introducing music in a co-workspace in that case and with Native introducing a nature sound by a philic soundscape helped to mask these unwanted sounds and make the space more pleasant and functional. And whilst obviously you're not going to get away from
00:33:03
Speaker
you know, the really interest of building site noise, it does actually psychologically have a really positive impact. And that's been the feedback we've received so far as it does just take your way a little bit from, you know, the building work being the most prominent thing in your kind of audio perception.
00:33:22
Speaker
Awesome. I feel like we could carry on for quite a while, but I'm going to cap it there. Be respectful of your time.
Swell Studio's New Initiatives
00:33:27
Speaker
Thank you so much. So we've got OpenInMusic.com. You've got Ambient Flow without the W.com. How are people connecting with Swell? Does that have a separate website now, or is that running through OpenInMusic?
00:33:38
Speaker
We have a separate website for that now. So that's swalestudio.io just launched. So it needs a bit of work. But yeah, please check it out. And if anyone's interested, they can get in touch with me. And I'd be delighted to chat. Awesome, man. Thanks again. Thank you.