WW 05: Wellness' sonic boom

John Connell on electronic music, meditation, and making self-inquiry accessible

Hello, and welcome back to another edition of Wellwatching. If you’re new, a warm welcome - you can read previous interviews here.

Today’s chat features the brilliant John Connell, the co-founder and head of content of sound meditation startup Soundworks. Formerly working as a brand strategist and creative director of music technology startup 4DSOUND, he has given lectures on sound experiences at Goldsmiths University of London, CTM Berlin and many other arts & media festivals. He is also a board member of the Spatial Sound Institute in Budapest.

We went wide and deep in this conversation, discussing the role of electronic music in meditation practice, the importance of participation and community to wellbeing, and how technology might meaningfully make self-inquiry more accessible. Our chat even conjured up memories of my high school trip to the Taize Monastery. Hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did.

Tell me a bit about yourself: What do you do?

I'm one of the co-founders of Soundworks. We’re using experimental electronic sound compositions to help people start or deepen a meditation practice. My partners and I all have over 10 years’ experience producing music, curating festivals, and researching experimental music forms. When I was the creative director of 4DSOUND, we did a lot of research on the impact of different approaches to immersive listening experiences and functional music composition on personal perception and cognition. 

We’re bringing this thinking to the meditation app experience: the role of music in our lives, the practice of listening, and how both can inform the quality of our communication and the depth of our self-understanding. It’s a very exciting time to do this – there’s an increasing appetite for it.

What led you to co-founding Soundworks?

There are three key experiences that led me here. Firstly, I've been a lifelong fan of electronic music: I’ve listened to it, mixed it, and written commentary on its cultural impact. Secondly, I have a background in brand strategy, helping shape brand visions and their communications. And thirdly, for the last fifteen years or so I've been a daily meditator, which led me to consciousness studies – considering things like the quality of one’s daily interactions, thoughts and general wellbeing. Those three things have come together in this project.  

My co-founders have had similar journeys, and we were all similarly frustrated about the lack of sound meditation content that spoke to us. For example, if you go to YouTube, clips advertised as ‘sonic healing meditations’ tend to be a bit sketchy. It’s possible to find some really good stuff out there, but there isn’t a single destination to explore it in a more focused way. Our aim is to facilitate a deeper knowledge around listening practice, and cultivate a community that’s enthusiastic to learn and share their own experiences. In our minds, that degree of community participation is crucial to deepening people’s meditation experience.

Is Soundworks similar to Calm or Headspace?

Calm and Headspace have both invested a lot of money and energy into music programmes, which is very exciting. It opens up a lot of new interest and discussion about the role of sound and music in wellbeing, which is really important. That said, we see what we’re doing as quite different. Most music presented as meditative content lacks a sense of character. It can sound too much like spa music, which doesn’t evoke a narrative that pulls me in or encourages a deeper level of self-inquiry. Our emphasis is more on the vanguard of sound design in electronic music - working with innovators of the present and near-future - as this resonates most strongly with us and our community of users. 

The inspiration for my partners and I comes from experimental forms of electronic music – the early days of Stockhausen, and Pierre Schaeffer through to pioneers like Eliane Radigue, to name just a few – as well as the most exciting sound design from the techno and ‘post-techno’ scenes. It doesn’t immediately fit into what you might consider ‘meditation music,’ but we think that it absolutely has meditative applications. 

We're working on creating provocative pieces that can help people change their perception, redefine how they engage with their inner monologue, and improve the quality of how they experience their environment. We’re also developing a pretty comprehensive educational series on how to work with sound meditation for people that want to delve deeper into their personal practice.

You mentioned ‘functional music’ earlier. What does that term refer to?

Functional music is a composition designed to evoke a specific experience to the listener. It can take different forms, but it's intentionally engineered to change the state of the listener – whether that’s through rhythm, pacing, or texture and timbre of sounds. I see it as both an art and a science.

It gets really interesting when you think about its applications for wellbeing. So far it’s become really popular for things like sleep aid, anxiety reduction and focus. We’re only at the tip of the iceberg in terms of mental health problems given what’s going on in the world right now, and there’s still more to explore around how sound can meaningfully improve the quality of our lives on a daily basis.

How do you think people’s understanding of wellness has changed over the past few years? What do people need, want and expect?

The mass acceleration of health & wellbeing trends, largely the work of influencers putting their own self-inquiry out into the world on social media, has educated a large number of people on how to go on a similar journey towards some sense of personal fulfillment. For example, interest in yoga increased around the same time that Instagram and online visual culture became popular about 10 years ago, and was really propelled by the visuals of beautiful people doing physically intensive poses online. Over time, we’ve seen the mainstreaming of an understanding the mind, self-inquiry, and physical wellbeing practice through social media, and now the discourse around meditation and mindfulness as we know it is in full swing.

As digital wellness culture matures, people familiar with the practices they’ve been following over the years are now looking for more personalised information or niche subcultures to deepen their own practice. Curiosity and expectations are both higher, leading to a leveling up in knowledge and education about what wellbeing means, and the demand for better solutions to achieve it.

What do you think is wrong with the way business and culture currently approach wellness and wellbeing?

I’m not the first to say it, but the discourse around wellness practices needs to evolve – they’ve been the esoteric domain of the privileged few for too long. The aesthetic aspects of these practices have been commodified and mass marketed, but the full power of wellness rituals and experiences haven’t yet reached the mainstream in an accessible way. The question is how to make things like meditation and sound practice accessible to diverse groups of people who can explore and experiment with them, in a way that doesn’t dilute the integrity and potential of the disciplines involved.

It also has to do with the fact that we’re experiencing wellness at scale primarily through social media. People have woken up to the fact that this visual presentation of wellness isn’t wellness itself – in fact, it’s one of the biggest drivers of anxiety today. An influencer’s discussion of vulnerability accompanied by a highly-filtered photo is anathema to a deeper, intimate connection where people truly open up to each other. At the same time, tech’s use of reward mechanics associated with addiction to encourage participation, rather than contentment, is the opposite of wellbeing. It's not conscious and can lead to serious psychological repercussions. When our lizard brain is being activated so effectively by big corporations en masse, there's only so much our conscious brain can do to override that instinct.

As such, there’s a growing shift away from those visually oriented media platforms into social audio, where people can discuss wellness-related topics (or anything, really) in a more open and ‘real’ way. With Clubhouse for example, there is no visual element;  you’re just focused on engaging with a person, rather than judging a visual that might alter your perception of the exchange. It remains to be seen how this will evolve.

Do you think that the tech agenda is fundamentally at odds with wellbeing?

Technology should only ever provide you with a way to feel more grounded and more active in the exploration of your own wellbeing. Engaging with technology itself shouldn’t be a passive proxy for charting your own journey. That’s definitely something we’re conscious of developing an app ourselves.

I think our relationship with technology is beginning to get healthier than it was in the early-mid 2000s, when we were enraptured with the possibility of new platforms and couldn’t yet see the flaws that would impact our collective sense of wellbeing.  We’re now making more conscious decisions about how to interact with technology and where it can serve us better. To that end, I hope that future technology applied to the wellness space will allow us to retain our sense of agency over our own decision-making.

Recently, I think technology has been great at facilitating wellness knowledge and activism at a community level, even in the most surprising places. Despite some inevitable misgivings about something like TikTok, for example, it’s also serving as a source of wellbeing knowledge and support for some of its communities, which is really refreshing.

How do you see the wellness industry evolving to cater to people’s overall wellbeing? What are the trends that you’re most interested in at the moment?

In general, the pandemic has been an accelerator of wellness trends that had been teetering on digitalisation, but hadn’t yet had the market incentive to fully realise their potential. As part of this we’ve seen a boom in mindfulness-focussed apps – whether they’re for meditation, sound, or streamlining our lives.

We’re now at the beginning of another new phase driven by integrated multimedia systems. AI is already changing the hyper-personalisation of services across the board. New levels of integration of haptic feedback into augmented environments and VR seems very promising. And I think spatial sound systems are next to fully round out highly nuanced sensory experiences in the so-called ‘metaverse’. Off the back of major investments from companies like Epic Games, we might see their mainstream adoption within the next five years, definitely ten. Harnessing the metaverse to foster wellbeing feels like a deeper, more meaningful potential application of the technology- with a new set of ethical questions and concerns to answer, but I don’t think we’re even really asking the questions yet.

It reminds me of why a practice like chanting, which has been around for centuries, is so powerful physically and emotionally.

This is a really important point. There's something happening at a cellular level when you're repeating a mantra: there's a kind of hypnotic element of entrainment that occurs. You’re affected by the nature of the vibration moving through your body, but also by the communal experience of participating together. 

For as long as human culture has existed, people have experimented with sound as a part of ritual, communal exchange, creative expression and emotional release. These are extremely old, powerful practices. I think the validity of their positive effect on wellbeing is legitimate, but we’re only now beginning to examine this rigorously enough to separate what we should focus on and what we can leave behind. 

It’s the same reason why people love techno, right?

Yes. It’s a sound language unto itself: visceral, physically intense, and totally dependent on participation. Unless you're a DJ, listening to a techno track at home doesn't really make any sense but when you're in a space with, say, 500 people, it’s euphoric. You're part of an interdependent circuit, and it only exists and is meaningful because you're all participating in it.

Where do you think the wellness industry will be in 5 years? Where do you think growth in this space will come from next?

I think fully integrated media environments will unlock a new level of discourse between wellbeing technologies and ourselves. We’ll move beyond unwieldy barriers like VR headsets into a much smoother experience. We’ll begin to have a different kind of dialogue with the intelligence within those systems that’s more proactive and predictive, thanks to AI and data that we input. These services will be able to tell us more about our own health and potential health conditions than we know ourselves. We’re already seeing this with things like Apple’s push into health tech across its ecosystem.

I can only hope that these advancements will aid what I think is the most crucial aspect of wellness moving forward: the need for personal agency over, and active participation in, our journey to wellbeing. Systems can tell us how to optimise, but we need to retain the joy of exploring new things and the curiosity of examining our own experiences. Within sound and music, there's such a rich amount of detail to explore that reveals new information and insights on every listen. It’s similar to meditation: rather than mindlessly consuming, you really take the time to deconstruct the experience as it unfolds. The sensory information that then opens up to you is far richer than you would have imagined.. Fully participating in and engaging with the intricacies of sound can be a very effective tool for meditation.

What does wellbeing mean to you?

For me, wellbeing is a holistic, methodical and rigorous approach to physical and mental health. It can only be achieved through an active daily commitment that you make – it’s not something that simply happens to you. That commitment is about examining your experience as it unfolds, so it's inherently meditative by nature. It’s a beautiful mindset to adopt, but it’s not easy to maintain. But certainly it’s something to aspire to.

What's been your biggest wellbeing breakthrough over the last year?

My wife and I have two young kids, one of whom is actually a ‘pandemic baby.’ Everyone says that parenting is wonderful, but I wasn't really expecting the psychological changes that it brings about.

As a dad, I’ve had much deeper recollections of childhood memories that have been unlocked by spending so much time with my kids. I think it’s because you're witnessing a young soul experience the world for the very first time – it makes you realise how developed your filters are on the world, and affords you a fresh, open perspective on your environment and feelings. My kids are a regular reminder for me to refresh my own filters.

What’s the next challenge that you’d love to take on?

Work-wise, I’m totally focused on Soundworks. I am really excited about what we’ve built so far. As our community grows we’re building the app and our content around different needs and interest levels in the discussion around sound meditation as a practice, and listening culture as a movement. 

So people can go straight into our catalogue of exclusive daily sound meditations and focus on their personal practice, or do guided courses exploring some themes we haven’t seen anywhere else, which are a bit more involved. 

We’re also rolling out more fundamental educational content focused on theory backed with practical exercises, along with a series of talks from academics and artists in the field. We’re in the process of partnering with some established artists and institutions, and planning some meet-ups later in the year so our community can start to connect in real-life.

You can find out more about John and Soundworks here.