In bed alone there is no escape from your woes, especially if you’re a light sleeper. Kennedy Between foreground and background I even press play on “Sleep Waves” when my pets are feeling stressed. I turn to these sounds when my thoughts are colliding in my head when blocked in my writing or when the day has overwhelmed me.
Ambient noise playlists - “ Deep Focus,” “ Deep Sleep,” “ Atmospheric Calm,” “ White Noise” (all on Spotify) - also get heavy rotation in my house. My Sonos is programmed with 10 hours of various water sounds - soft, rolling waves thunderous rainstorms steady sprinkles against a windowpane - that can pour out of my bedroom speakers at the touch of a button. Counting - not sheep but things around the room. And yet I still found it startling when that propensity for burning the midnight oil shifted to full-blown insomnia. I had always been a sensitive sleeper and a “night owl” - late nights studying in undergrad and years of pounding the pavement going to concerts. I’ve spent much of the last three years exhausted. Their selections lean toward the branch of instrumental art music known as minimalism, but nerdy or not, they’re certified sleep-worthy and, unlike the real benzos, have no known side effects. For those restless souls who may be seeking something more closely resembling music qua music, but still with the lulling repetition needed to help the Sandman enter, we asked our music writers to share their most cherished audio benzos, the songs and soundtracks they use to drift away after a late night of concert-going and then some. Most of the tracks comprising such playlists are ambient to the extreme, the kind of burbling sonic woo-woo that might accompany your full-moon detoxification at an Ojai spa. The “sleep” category on Spotify has dozens of popular playlists to choose from, with heavy-lidded titles such as “Peaceful Piano” (5.4 million followers) and “Nightstorms” (not be confused with “Night Rain”). Streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music have been a godsend to insomniacs who turn to music to help them doze their infinite loops of tranquilizing sound baths mean no more being jostled from slumber by the end of a CD (or quietly panicking that the disc is halfway over and you’ve been grinding your teeth for 20 minutes). We’re living through a bull market for the anxiety economy, and when sleep won’t take, many of us turn to some form of white noise, hoping that the bleeps and bloops and lapping waves blot out our inner chatter. With more than 52 million downloads, Calm is the leader among a number of like-minded wellness apps, themselves just a sliver of the booming sleep-aid industry, which is expected to be worth more than $100 billion in 2023 (think everything from CPAP machines to Ambien to weighted blankets). Calm is currently valued at $1 billion, and, says Smith, “sleep” has become the most popular part of the app. Today, the “sleep” tab on Calm features exclusive hourlong compositions from alt-rock instrumental stars Moby and Sigur Rós, among soporific New Age-y playlists like “Chasing Wonder,” “Healing Piano” and “Sleep Like a Baby.” All told, its tracks have been streamed more than 200 million times. The stories, sometimes read by velvet-throated thespians such as Matthew McConaughey and Stephen Fry, still didn’t satisfy the demand of Calm’s bleary-eyed followers, who (quietly) clamored for just the musical beds, unencumbered by voices, words or other triggers of our daily grind. Now they were using our meditations,” Smith concluded, and so the company began commissioning what it calls “stories” - breathy, soothing, grown-up bedtime tales with a feather bed of tinkling music beneath the murmured words. “People had been using white noise or Netflix or podcasts to help them sleep. A few years ago, though, says Michael Acton Smith, co-founder and co-CEO of Calm, it began to see a sharp spike in traffic every evening between 10:30 and 11 p.m. When the “sleep and meditation” service Calm launched its app seven years ago, the company was largely focused on the meditation half of its offerings.
0 kommentar(er)
