Forest Bathing

The forest can be still, but it is never silent.  Its stillness is full of sound, a conversation that changes the more you become one with it.

Before I knew there was a term, Forest Bathing, from the Japanese Shinrin-yoku, I was immersing myself in the NZ rainforest on the farm where I grew up. The sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste of the New Zealand rainforest was a source of reverence and wonder to me as a child. The native birds were messengers of a more ancient primordial world. My Grandfather taught me about the forest edibles and medicinals and showed me how to track and listen with my whole being. The forest can be still, but it is never silent.  Its stillness is full of sound, a conversation that changes the more you become one with it.

Now, a lifetime and thousands of miles away, I bring the treasured sounds that I have collected from my journeys in Aotearoa, NZ into my studio and alchemize  the sound into music.

As I am creating and refining the music that becomes an album I reach a very important part of the process. At this point the composition and recording are finished, and I am working with the layers of sound and how they interact in the mix. At this stage of production I bring it into my Nashville treatment room, and here is where the magic happens.  This audition is often with musician and sound engineering clients, who are aware of and interested in my work in the field of therapy music and sound healing. These folks have discerning ears and  minds that switch into left brain analysis at the drop of a note. If I can facilitate a hypnagogic/relaxation response from these highly-tuned individuals, I know I am closing in on a finished composition and mix. One recent experience with my new album, Forest Bathing, is particularly notable.

I was working with a very accomplished guitar player, who has sadly experienced so much hearing loss that he has had to retire from performance and has become very adaptive in his studio recording work.  Not only does he have severe high frequency and midrange hearing loss, but his relative pitch perception has become distorted, so that he hears bass notes a semitone off true pitch. The mechanism that facilitates this is a psychoacoustic phenomenon that allows our minds to infill missing bass notes based on the harmonic overtones present in the music. This phenomenon is leveraged all the time in small speaker manufacturing when the speakers are too small to actually play the bass. My client’s mind is filling in notes from the limited sonic data he is hearing, but because some harmonic information is missing, his mind is coming up with the wrong answer.

My client takes his hearing aids out during treatment because if he unwinds and turns his head it can cause feedback between the two hearing aids. I hadn’t used Forest Bathing with him before, and as the album progressed I noticed his breathing change and my proprioceptive senses felt the signs of the relaxation response and the shift into the hypnagogic healing state that often accompanies immersion in the sound field I have set up in the treatment rooms in our clinic.  This is all very subtle, to the point of being unnoticeable, but  that is the point!  Music and sound can engage with the vast unconscious in ways that have been known since the beginning of time, yet are only now being proven by advanced imaging and testing. In this case my client had a profoundly transformative treatment and afterward, with his hearing aids back in, I told him what I had observed and postulated that perhaps he was experiencing the music through my reaction to the tempo and harmonics, since I also enter a slightly altered but focused state while working.

I asked him what he had felt, knowing he had obviously reacted to the music without being able to fully hear it.  He said that he does hear reasonably well in a limited range up to 800 Hz, so he was processing the river and forest sound that underlies the music in Forest Bathing, allowing him to let go.  It was then that I realized my intuitive creative impulse to work with this forest sound field, in particular the forest river, was providing a therapeutic benefit of Brown Noise or fractal Brownian Motion along with the music, and this subliminal flow of sound was adding considerable therapeutic value. It turns out that Spectral Noise has an effect beyond blocking unwanted environmental noise such as road noise, a function called masking.

Beyond masking, the neurological benefits are being studied and evidence amassed to show a range of benefits from enhanced focus to a facilitated relaxation response. Sound is one of the fundamental pillars of human consciousness. Developing an open field of sound perception is a way of anchoring oneself in the present moment. My new Album, Forest Bathing, is an evolution of the ‘ambient’ principle. Ambience is a feeling or mood associated with a particular place, person, or thing. - Miriam Webster Dictionary. “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular…” Brian Eno.  Ambient music has a spaciousness to the overall sound field that allows each note to fully evolve and resolve. In the case of Forest Bathing the resolution is the forest itself.

I am excited for this one, and I can’t wait to hear what you experience with using Forest Bathing in your practice and in your life!