It’s well known that music is a stimulant that can improve the listener’s mood. Music can make you smarter and happier, as well as be a source of inspiration and entertainment. Music has the ability to lift someone’s spirits or put them in a relaxing calm mood.
Have you ever listened to the music that’s played in a spa? It usually features a combination of classical instruments, nature sounds, or other world instruments and creates a calming, peaceful, ambient environment. Creating a playlist of similar music, with the same beats per minute or instruments, can help to create or set the mood, allowing a person to tap into their creative potential and feel inspired. Songs with higher beats per minute are usually high energy music, fast-paced and rhythmic, while songs with lower beats per minute or classical instruments tend to be more calming and almost meditative.
Since listening to music can be meditative, we’ve put together a list of some of our favorite relaxing songs:
Rose Rouge by St Germain
Whether you’re gearing up for a workout or ready to indulge in a painting session, listening to some jazz fusion music is a great way to feel inspired. The fast tempo and range of instruments featured in this song are high-energy, and puts the listener in a can-do mood, but isn’t high-energy like techno or dance music. Rather, it’s a happy medium that puts the listener in a zone and they can focus on the task at hand.
Bison by Session Victim
Another jazz-fusion song similar to the first one, this upbeat song is also good for creative activities like writing or dancing. The music is jazzy but not distracting, and the slight hip-hop beat creates a catchy rhythm that makes the listener feel good. It’s a great song as background music when you need to listen to something that will allow you to focus on your work, but not put you to sleep.
Release by Utopian Sounds
Instrumental music is always best for meditation. Soft sounds like the piano and the strings quartet can be very calming and help slow the body down into a relaxing, meditative state. Playing soft, repetitive music in the background while meditating creates a rhythm that can help the listener focus on their thoughts as well. This song utilizes the piano, some light choral singing, and nature sounds to create an almost ethereal soundtrack, similar to the type of music played during the cool-down part of a yoga session. This is the type of song one would play while doing any sort of meditation exercise, like candle meditation, to really focus their thoughts.
Balance by Intjay
There’s a whole subgenre of music known as DIY music or lo-fi music that relies on harmonic distortion to create an aesthetically pleasing sound. Many of these harmonic distortions are usually what would be the mistakes in audio engineering, like audible hissing or out-of-time notes. Oddly enough, lo-fi beats and their imperfections actually make for really great studying music. Short songs like this one tend to repeat the same beats and notes, which makes for a very calming soundtrack.
Binaural Beats Music
One interesting aspect of listening to music is how it helps to reduce stress and anxiety and listening to music while meditating capitalizes on those benefits. There are forms of music therapy or sound wave therapy that believe that listening to certain music frequencies can affect people’s behavior and sleep patterns, in a positive way.
Finding the right frequency of music, or a binaural beat as it’s called, can aid in stress reduction, improved concentration during meditation, and even a better sleep pattern. Binaural beats rely on the fact that the right and left ear might hear different frequencies and perceive it as a single tone, and that difference in frequencies is identified as the binaural beat. Music with a binaural beat or frequency pattern from 30 Hz or below can help with relaxation, improved sleep, and better alertness and concentration.
While there is no particular binaural beats song to recommend, checking out a local music shop and looking for instrumental world music or even relaxation music can help you find soothing binaural beats music.
