Before I knew there was a term, Forest Bathing, from the Japanese Shinrin-yoku, I was immersing myself in the NZ rainforest on the farm where I grew up. The sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste of the New Zealand rainforest was a source of reverence and wonder to me as a child.

Brown Noise has an even deeper sound than Pink Noise and is prevalent in nature in the form of waterfalls and ocean waves. It is characterized by the roar of rushing water.

Did you know that noise is color coded? We are all familiar with white noise. In areas of the world that use air conditioning and heat white noise is ubiquitous. It is the sound of air being sucked into intake filters and expelled through cooling vents. But white noise is rarely truly ‘white.’ Just like light which contains all colors, white noise contains all frequencies.

The experience of music is infused with time. Notation outlines the melody and harmony, and these can exist (sometimes for centuries) on paper. Melodies are stored in memory on magnetic tape or as 0’s and 1’s in a digital file, but only time brings music to life.

Noise. We all know it when we hear it, unpleasant sound that upsets our equilibrium by either being jarring and discordant or too loud. Sometimes it is both. In audio engineering noise is an unwanted signal, a hum from ungrounded wiring or the bleed of background sound in a microphone. But what is noise really? The very word ‘noise’ does not conjure anything particularly pleasant.  It’s etymology references the latin root noxia or nausea. The English language borrowed noise from the French, and it originally referred to strife or quarrel.

Music used in therapy can be thought of as a form of energy work, encoded sound waves oscillating and traveling through matter. As music traverses the delicate hearing mechanism it becomes neural energy, ultimately triggering an array of biochemical responses, which translate to meaning and emotion.