Soundscapes to soothe infants

You might think the children’s classics “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, and “Puff The Magic Dragon” might be the best lullabies to help soothe a little one to sleep. But might there be a superior sound? The founder of the British Academy of Sound Therapy, Lyz Cooper, has produced a new research-based lullaby in collaboration with a top music producer and she reckons it sounds a bit like the Floyd. She’s been speaking to our man, Will Tingle...

Lyz - I collaborated with a really good producer called Silky. We worked over Zoom on the piece and, at one point, I saw him looking down while we were playing the piece back and I thought, "he's texting, he's on his phone and he's texting, not paying attention." An at the end of the piece he looked up and he said, "oh, I'm sorry, I just dozed off for a minute there."

Will - Well, I was actually going to mention that my sister had a kid fairly recently. He's coming up to sort nine months and he is in that window where they won't sleep. So I'm going to forward it to them and I'll give you some feedback.

Lyz - Definitely. Yeah, absolutely. We'd love to hear from anybody that uses it.

Will - Brilliant. On the subject of sound therapy, to take a step backwards from this individual project, when you do sound therapy, what elements work best? Or does that depend on what you're hoping to achieve?

Lyz - It really does depend on the intended therapeutic outcome. Now, of course, there's never any guarantee, but we've done quite a lot of research at the British Academy of Sound Therapy over the last 20 years. And we've developed formulae that are based on the way that the brain is wired to respond to sound. So what we're mainly aiming for in what we might call a passive session, which is where a client comes in, we obviously take a full case history and we ask them what it is they'd like to work on, they lay down on a treatment table, so like a massage couch, and we make them all lovely and comfortable. And then we begin to play and we'll play continuously for around 30 to 40 minutes

Lyz - And the sonic prescription that we put together will be designed to help people to go into a deep, altered state of consciousness. So that's a very, very deep relaxed state, almost like that lovely, fuzzy place just when you're about to wake up or when you are about to go to sleep. People are still conscious, but drifting in that place. And our research has shown that there's lots of lovely positive benefits to health and wellbeing when we're in that place for a sustained period of time.

Will - There's a lot going on in it. It's a very multi-layered piece of audio. How did you decide what to put in that track?

Lyz - Well, that's a really good question. First of all, obviously we have our brief. So the idea is we know that we need to do our best to induce sleep. But we're also appealing to a particular audience, in this case, babies. If they're very newborn, then they'll be used to the sort of safety sounds like the womb sounds. Now even big babies, because, at the end of the day, we are all big babies, we have that memory of being in the womb. And so that's one of the reasons why we find those lovely watery sounds, the white noise-y sounds of waterfalls, ocean sounds, really relaxing. So, with this particular piece, the design that I created was to start off by allowing that feeling of safety to happen. We took out a lot of the high frequencies because low frequencies relax. A lot of the work that I do involves lots of layering up of textures. Beautiful drifting soundscape sounds.