What Makes Ambience Music Good to Sleep To?
I listen to ambiance music as I fall asleep.
gave me a wonderful experience that started maybe an hour or two after I feel asleep. I don’t remember any specific sights, sounds, people or situations, but I when I woke up, I felt like I’d experienced a wonderful world, and was thrilled. Imagine I went to Mars and returned. How would I be feeling the morning after?
is wonderful in its own way. I had a vision of my now-deceased mother1 in her 20s, with long hair as she told me she had, walking down a corridor towards a garden of eternal delight awash in full moon and with wonderful breeze blowing, as cool as can be, infinitely cool, but not cold.
What makes for good ambience music? Is there some undiscovered science to it?
Here are a few factors a musician Sarat Rao and I brainstormed:
✅ There’s no beat.
✅ The frequency range is limited. The second video above doesn’t have bass, while the first doesn’t have much of high frequencies.
✅ There’s less change minute to minute, unlike a normal song, which may transition from one sound to another (like instrumentals to vocals or loud to quiet) over 30 seconds. As Sarat put it, there’s less entropy. In other words, it’s repetitive. That helps you fall asleep, while a lot of new information wakes your brain up to process it.
✅ The music is sparse. Silence constitutes a greater fraction of play time, and even when there’s sound, there aren’t too many instruments layered.
✅ The notes are long, like drone music.
The camera angle was 2-3 m behind her.