Entering a meditative state with sounds from ancient instruments
To create this pack, sound meditation expert Alexandre Tannous went into a meditative state and started playing without a plan while expert engineer, Jesse Flower-Ambroch recorded the tracks. Tannous finds this to be the most appropriate way to record meditative sounds.
His intention for this pack is to encourage a different way of experiencing sound. Meditative sounds played with these soft, delicate, and intricate instruments require more active participation instead of listening to something in the background.
He said, “an individual’s mindset is involved—their intentions, attention, awareness, curiosity, and discernment. So there's more presence, deeper listening, and a greater level of attention to the nuances, to the harmonic spectrum. How sound can change in a way that’s different than when we play a normal instrument.”
He added, “For example, if one is playing the gong, the gong sound is full of harmonics, but the sound changes based on how I play it and with what kind of mallet. These mallets have many variables—its weight, how hard or soft, how heavy it is, the way I play on the gong. What is happening to the gong when I hit it, is it already vibrating or not? So by exploring different sides of the harmonic spectrum, different clouds of harmonies, and clusters, the experience becomes one based on an exploration of how the gong can be experienced.”
“This is different than a normal instrument where one plays different notes. You can't do that on a gong, you can just explore its potential. And that by itself is a different modality of experiencing an instrument where there are a greater presence and attention to the nuances. And at the same time, as the person is listening deeply, they go into a meditative state due to the impact these harmonics have on your faculties—the brain wave cycles, the heart rate variability, nervous system, the vagus nerve. Which means that the person would have a different presence. There's a meditative state being established—a mindful state. I'd like people to experience that because what the instruments are able to evoke in you.”
“We always have to push the envelope of what we can do in music, how the fact that music is so important to humans. We've always used it in all sorts of realms: the shamanic, the traditional, spiritual, religious, the sacred, the secular, so on and so forth. That means it's indispensable art form, it does something. And that is what entrainment is. It changes the way we are. And the way we are is not just being in physical reality. Physical reality seems to be within us. It's in our consciousness. It's a concept that we’re experiencing ourselves from certain perspectives. So music seems to affect the body, that is doing the following, transducing and/or transceiving reality, filtering it and creating it all at the same time.”
Tannous hopes you use the sounds in this pack to craft something completely unique and different from what you’re used to. He said, “We need to get to this point where we're using music as natural organic technology to unravel the self, to show us what we are, to give us answers or, how can we change things toward the better in these times? Not just to create an industry, which is what we did actually in the West.”
The instruments used in making this pack are very delicate, so the mics and environment played an important role in achieving a high-quality recording of these sounds. We used Neumann U47s, U87s, KM185s, and a Neumann Binaural Head to record.
