The Decibel - Why some are turning to sound baths for relaxation

Episode Date: January 2, 2025

Life is noisy and stressful for a lot of people. And so sound baths – where a practitioner creates harmonies and chords with singing crystal bowls – are growing in popularity. Many people say that this provides them with a deep sense of relaxation. But what does the science say?Today on the show, Menaka tries a sound bath to see what it’s like. Later, Dave McGinn explains the hype around this wellness trend. And then, music therapy professor Dr. Heidi Ahonen from Wilfrid Laurier University explains what we know about the therapeutic benefits of sound.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Earlier this year, producer Madeline White and I went on a field trip. So we are at Yonge and College in Toronto, just south of Yonge and College. I can hear the subway underneath us. There's like a ton of people walking by. There's cars going by. There's construction up the street here. I walked past a ton of construction on my way here too. There's, yeah, it's just a lot going on. It's a busy day in Toronto.

And we are on our way to go to a sound bath. Sound baths aren't new, but they have been gaining popularity recently as a wellness treatment. In large part because people are talking about how sound baths help them unlock new levels of relaxation. And what is your mood right now? Like if you were to put your relaxation on a scale of one to ten, how relaxed do you feel right now here on Yonge Street in Toronto? I don't think I'm ever relaxed walking down Yonge Street in Toronto. I think like I think most people right here like you're you're like, you're looking all over, there's stuff going on, you're like trying not to step on things, you're trying to swerve people and cars and just, you know, just look out for what's happening around you. So I forget, was 10 the most relaxed? One is the least relaxed?

I don't know. I'm probably at like a four, I guess. Not like super stressed, but not relaxed. Alert. Alert, yeah, that's a good way to put it. After a short walk through Toronto's downtown, we arrive at a sound bath studio called Energy with Julie. It's tucked into the basement of one of the city's old Victorian row houses. Where's the gate? Maybe here?

Oh, there we are. Julie Cook is the owner of the studio and a sound healing practitioner. Before we begin, I ask her how this is going to work. I use crystal singing alchemy bowls Before we begin, I ask her how this is going to work. So to have a sound bath, you would want to have a minimum of three sound bowls. Five is good, two, but seven is excellent. So I have seven bowls here. The sound of the crystal bowls brings you to a state of your body's resonating in a state of harmony.

So to help Julie determine the sequence of sounds she'll produce, you have to set an intention. For me, it was to find some relaxation and peace. With that, I hop onto the massage table, close my eyes, and follow the breathing exercise Julie guides me through. And then, Julie picks up her soft silicone mallets and starts to play the crystal bowls. to let go and let the crystal bowls

sing for a blissful journey ahead. There are six crystal bowls on the floor, and one that has a long handle. As Julie plays, sometimes the bigger bowls reverberate. She stands up and uses the bowl with a handle to direct sound more precisely into my body. And when I say into my body, I mean I could feel the waves of the sound bath washing over me. It felt like it was coming from every direction at once. The End After about 40 minutes, the ringing fades off into silence, and Julie directs my attention back into her studio. Back into your breath. Back into your body.

I'm going to the street with Maddie in the cacophony of the city. So, Menaka, we are back out on the street, as is evidenced by all the traffic noise. After your sound bath, how are you feeling? I feel great. I feel wonderful. That was such a, like, I don't know. I don't have words to describe it. I'm feeling very zoned out, I guess is the way to put it. Like it was so, it was relaxing. It was calming. It was really wonderful. So before I made you rate your relaxation level on Yonge Street, we're now on Church Street, so we're one street over,

but you've had a sound bath in between. So on a scale of one to ten, one being I'm so stressed out, ten being I'm super duper chill. You were a four before. Yeah. What are you now? Yeah, I'm like an eight or a nine right now. I'm feeling great. Yeah, this is great. After the bath, I understood the appeal of this treatment. But what actually happened to my body during that hour? And is there any scientific research to back up the claims that people make around the healing powers of sound baths? To answer these questions, I'm talking to two guests today. Dave McGinn is a reporter at The Globe who looked into the hype around sound baths. And later, Dr. Heidi Ahonen, a professor of music therapy at Wilfrid Laurier University, explains the science between sound,

our bodies, and our well-being. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Dave, great to have you here again. Thank you for having me. So I just came back from my sound bath. It was very relaxing, very nice. And I know you've also had the chance to have a couple sound baths. What was your experience like? I walked into my first one very skeptical. I usually am not someone who takes readily to talk of chakras and energy fields. Things like that tend to make me roll my eyes.

But, you know, I decided when in Rome, I will join the group that I was doing with. And I absolutely loved it. I do find there's something about marketing against the noise of modern life that makes it a very strong selling point. When you think about car horns honking and your phone always dinging and phones ringing and people yelling. The idea of enjoying these vibrations and sounds that will surround you and soothe you is really compelling. Yeah, it was really like being enveloped in sound. Yes, it's very tangible. People who are advocates of sound baths will tell you

there's probably a lot more going on to it than just that. But just the simple fact of having that deep of relaxation for an hour where you're surrounded by what are really incredible sounds, that I think is really driving the popularity of it. So you mentioned that proponents say it gives them more than just an hour of relaxation. What have other people who've done sound baths told you about what they experienced? One woman told me that it made her a better listener because it made her less reactive. People have talked about how it reduces their anxiety. It reduces their stress.

It helps them sleep better. It helps them feel more sense of focus throughout the day. So all kinds of different people from all kinds of different walks of life talking about what's ultimately a pretty wide range of benefits to the whole thing. And how long do those benefits tend to last for people? Some people by the next day, maybe you're mostly back to square one. Maybe it lasts a little bit longer. I think everyone's experience of it is very subjective. I certainly know in my, albeit very brief, experience with it, by the next day, it's a kind of max 24 to 48 hours. And what kind of price points are we talking about here? My Toronto sound bath was an hour long and just

under a hundred bucks, which is a little pricey. I have been told you can find them for 40, $50. It's a decent chunk of change for sure. I've also seen that there's a bunch of like sound bath videos online, right? Like can, I guess, could someone just do it for free over the internet? You just kind of play the sounds there and sit in your own room and zen out? There are a lot of sound bath videos online and they will give you a pretty strong sense of what you're going to be experiencing.

But the drawback of online videos is that they don't convey the vibrations that you're going to experience when you're actually in the room having a sound bath. And it's those vibrations that are believed to be really kind of the main ingredient to all the benefits they have. I guess the big question, Dave, is how much science is there here to back up some of the claims around this service? Because we're talking about general relaxation and stuff, but there are a lot of claims to what this could potentially do for you. Oh, yeah, for sure.

Right now, there is not a lot of science. There have been a few studies. Most of those studies are based on self-reports. So people afterwards saying, do you feel less stressed? Yes, I do. Do you feel as if this has been, this has lowered your heart rate? Yes, I do. So I think there's still a very strong desire to want to apply greater scientific rigor to it.

But at the same time, there's a lot of challenges in terms of just how you do that, in terms of how do we actually get good measurements? How do we distinguish between what's actually causing what here, right? Like, is it the darkness? Is it your affinity to the sounds? Is it the person who's doing it? I think there's just a lot of variables that make it harder to study, but there certainly is a lot of interest in understanding what's happening. Dave, great to have you here. Thanks so much for doing this. Thank you so much. Always a pleasure. While there hasn't been a lot of science around sound baths,

there is a lot of research around the effect of sound on the body and music therapy. So after the break, I'll talk to Dr. Heidi Ahonen, a professor of music therapy at Wilfrid Laurier University and a low-frequency sound expert. Dr. Ahonen, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for inviting me. So I did have a chance to actually do a sound bath. And when I was lying there listening to the crystal bowls, I was hearing the sound waves, I guess, kind of wash over me. Can we just do kind of a quick biology lesson here, if you will?

Like what actually happens to our bodies when sound waves hit our ears? Sound is vibration. So I think that's what explains the waves. And because sound is a vibration, it's almost like transmits like an acoustic wave through our body. That's why we don't only hear the sound, we can also feel it. For example, if somebody is playing an instrument, like for example, if they're playing a guitar, it vibrates. And you can actually hold your hand on the guitar and you can feel the vibration. And it means that this vibration is disturbing the surrounding air particles and then

these vibrations they travel as waves and they reach our ears and then they cause our ear trumps to vibrate as well. I think it's interesting that it's called ear-trum you know when you think about the drum at the top of the drum and you play, you actually feel the vibration and that's exactly what happens. In the inner ear, there's actually this tiny little organ that looks like snail

and it's called cochlea. It's filled with fluid and it begins to move in response to these vibrations. When the fluid moves there in that area of the air, there's 25,000 nerve endings that are also moving. And then these nerve endings, they transform these vibrations into the electrical impulses,

and they travel to the brain, basically. Then, of course, because most of our body is liquid, and there's all kinds of matters there, the acoustic sound waves also travel through the body, and they interact with anything there, like muscle cells, for example. And some low-frequency sound waves can be felt in our soft body tissues, like a massage. So what does the research say about how sound baths, and even music therapies more broadly, about how they can affect our bodies, like in terms of relaxation and other therapeutic effects? If, for example, the goal of the therapeutic

intervention is relaxation, it's very important to understand what happens on hormonal level. Like, for example, there's lots of studies about adrenaline and cortisol. Both of them are stress hormones. And lots of studies prove how the levels of cortisol and stress-related symptoms basically drop after listening to relaxing music. Of course, then if the cortisol in our body decreases, then maybe the sensation of pain decreases and the anxiety decreases. But then there's other things like endorphins and oxytocin and dopamine. Those are all these good hormones that make us feel relaxed or enjoyment.

And they give us this sense of trust. It would explain why sometimes we start to cry when we are sitting in a concert hall or we are listening to our music. And I would say that during the sound path as well. I guess I wonder how we know these things, Heidi. How do researchers measure something like the effect that sound has on a person's ability to, you know, release tension, for example? You could study the heartbeat, you know, and the blood pressure, and then the amount of cortisol in the body. Then we can do kinesthetic relaxation tests on muscles.

Basically, what EEG does, it evaluates the electrical activity in our brain, and then it records the brainwaves that we have in that moment. So then different waves, different brainwaves take place at different times. And it's always totally based on what we are doing and how we are feeling. So this is an excellent way to measure how relaxed I am. You know, the EEG, right away, it will tell that, oh, this kind of brainwave, this person is under extreme anxiety and tension, highly alert, or they are extremely extremely relaxed which is like the delta wave would be the one that we are we are sleeping you know in deep states of sleep but then some other other ways like theta waves for example we they are activated when we are maybe lightly sleeping, but interestingly also when we are daydreaming, when we are in a deep, relaxed state while we are awake.

I could imagine that during the sound path, some of the people would go into that state. And I know that during some music therapy listening, I've experienced it myself. And I think many of my clients have experienced that. And sorry, these are basically inside your brain then, right? These are what you see inside your brain when you're in these states. Exactly. And which is interesting, waves are everywhere. It's all about waves. Sound is wave and brain brain waves and it's just waves. So this is some of the benefits, the potential benefits then, Heidi, of this. I wonder, though, about the other side.

Are there possible drawbacks to maybe using sound in a therapeutic way like this? Music can be very powerful. It has lots of healing impacts. But at the same time, we can also do harm with music. If we think about that music retrieves memories and emotions, it can also retrieve trauma memories. If it happens at the therapy situation, it's very important that the therapist knows what to do, how to help the person now to work through these memories and emotions and sound path or music listening sometimes this may find really fascinating for people but I think it's really

important to also say that none of these treatments should ever replace any medical treatments or medications. Somebody's taking that, and I think that's very important. Sometimes people get really excited. They have this great feeling and relaxation, and they may feel that, oh, I don't really need to take this medication anymore because I feel better. But no, that's not the case. You always have to consult your doctor first and I don't think it's bad idea to ask doctor's referral to participate things like sound baths or music

therapy especially if you have psychiatric disorders or anything like that because music and sound may actually trigger something that may be surprising. So it's always good to keep your doctor aware. Heidi, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. Yes, thank you. Thank you for inviting. It's always nice. Somebody's interested in low frequency studies. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wellms.

Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.