We all know that music has healing properties. It can work its magic by simply cheering a person up, reminding them of a good time in their life, or painting images that promote happiness, thoughts that provoke positivity. However, acoustics may lend itself to art, but it is a serious science too, and Steven Halpern creates music through an understanding of the effects that specific sound frequencies have on us, on our mind, our body, and perhaps even on our very soul…Although I may be deviating from the academic core of what he does by using such mystical concepts.
Music for Microdosing is a collection of fourteen ambient, digital soundscapes, all operating at 432 Hertz, a frequency said to resonate more closely with the natural pulse of life, which obviously includes humans. At this acoustic sweet spot, it is said that the body remembers how to heal, the mind opens to new streams of creativity, and performance finds its sharper edge. It makes us more…
It pays to discuss the music found here more holistically, rather than in the traditional way a music review typically unfolds. It is smooth, weightless, and quietly luminous. The weaves of soft electronic tones that are conjured hang in the air like mist, formless, gently shifting but never rushing. Chords are sustained rather than struck, dissolving into one another with no sharp edges, so the listener feels carried rather than directed.
It is a beat-free zone, running on grace rather than groove; the pacing is slow and fluid, without urgency and in the moment. Manipulated drifts of music create shimmering textures, hushed tones, and beguiling atmospheres that feel as if you could blow them away with the softest of breaths. And, at its core is a resonating force that seems to connect and vibrate through your body, as if you and the music are one.
Tracks like “Whispers on the Wind” are cloaked in breathy flutes, the sound drawing lines between Andean panpipes, Chinese dreamscapes, and Celtic mystery, a sound as old as time. “Time Being II” is a rolling, formless sonic haze that encompasses and cloaks our consciousness, if we are open enough to let it, and “Transformation” is the sonic embodiment of change and renewal, musical lines that sound as much part of our primal past as our enlightened future.
Whether you are an advocate of the on-trend, titular Microdosing or not, this is music that speaks subliminally through acoustic action; it talks directly to us on a cellular level, of healing, of change, of self-development. It is music made where the artistic world and the academic view dance, slowly, purposefully, and deftly, in perfect harmony.
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