Meditation and Sounds: a wonderful way to relax

3 minutes

Contents

Gemma’s story

The start of most years are almost always a quiet one in my line of work as I am a wedding photographer. Work starts to pick up late March/early April as the spring weddings begin. 2020 was slightly different for me. Just as I was beginning to prepare for a year full of weddings, it felt like my world was turned upside down. Within a couple of months almost all of my weddings had postponed to late 2020 or 2021/22.

Suddenly with all this extra time on my hands I wanted to spend my time doing something creative (whilst helping me financially) and so that’s how ‘Meditation and Sounds’ came about. With so many people in lockdown all around the world our aim was to create and share calming music and relaxing nature sounds in the hope that they’d bring some calm and peace into people’s lives during the crazy times we were living.

The Process of creating the music/sounds

The process of creating the music begins with firstly recording the nature sounds. This is my favourite part of the process as it involves me going out on regular walks finding new calming sounds to record. For example, I would record the trickling streams, flowing rivers or waves coming into shore (these include some of my favourites). When you are next out on walks pay attention to the sounds around you, you’ll be amazed by the smallest of sounds you’ll hear. Having done the same walk again and again over the years I was pleasantly surprised by the beautiful sounds we could record that we had previously not noticed.

After the recording the sounds we tidy them up a little bit and remove any distractions. The next part I had some help with and that was the creation of the music to compliment the sounds. We start by building up different elements in the tracks making them feel ambient and ethereal. Slow tempos that are similar to our resting heartbeat pace also helps keep the music relaxing and soothing.

Listening to calming music

Music has always managed to make us feel different emotions with different styles, genres and tempos. Listening to soft and calm music regularly may help people relax and the combination of that with the incorporated nature sounds could help to reconnect people to nature. Listening to simple music can also be a good way to help slow down people’s busy brains and thought patterns.

Here are some potential benefits of listening to calming music:

music can improve your health and performance (1)
it has a calming affect on your stress response system (2)
it can have a positive effect on health conditions such as depression and attention deficit disorder (3)

Music is part of being human, we hum, sing, and react so quickly to different sounds and tones. Music is a wonderful way to soothe and alter your mood.

We have created a couple of Spotify playlists so you can enjoy the music we have created and you can access them below:

Plans for ‘Meditation and Sounds’ in 2021

In 2021 we plan to bring new music to our listeners and increase our listenership around the world, as well as planning to collaborate with other musicians. If you want to follow our music journey feel free to follow our Instagram page or our Spotify artists profile. We look forward to having you join us!

I also hope that in 2021 I will be able to get back to photographing weddings too, as I really missed that in 2020!

How to connect with Gemma

Gemma’s Spotify profile link

Gemma’s Instagram link

Photographs by Gemma Giorgio Photography

Research links