Meditation and Music: What Happens When We Slow Down?
​
Put on some slow, gentle music, close your eyes and sit quietly for a few minutes.
Nothing very remarkable seems to be happening.
And yet your breathing may begin to slow. Your attention shifts. The noise of the day becomes a little less important. Five minutes later, you may feel quite different from when you started.
Why?
Perhaps we should go back a very long way.
​
Before Meditation Had a Name
Imagine a group of people sitting around a fire thousands of years ago.
There are no headphones, no streaming services and
certainly no three-hour Deep Relaxation Playlist.
But there is sound.
Someone taps a piece of wood or stone. Someone else repeats the rhythm.
There may be chanting, clapping or a simple melody.
​
And there is the fire itself.
Anyone who has sat quietly watching flames knows how strangely hypnotic they can be. Combine that with a steady repeated rhythm and we have something remarkably close to techniques still used for relaxation and meditation today.
We don't know exactly what our distant ancestors thought while they sat around those fires. But rhythm, repetition and communal music have been part of human life for an extraordinarily long time.
​
Perhaps music wasn't only entertainment.
Perhaps sometimes it was simply a way of changing how we felt.
​
The Power of the Drone
Travel across cultures and another musical idea appears again and again: the drone.
A drone is simply a note, or group of notes, sustained underneath the music. Because it changes very little, the ear gradually stops waiting for the next chord or musical surprise.
Indian music has made extensive use of drones for centuries,
most famously with instruments such as the tanpura.
On the other side of the world, the Australian didgeridoo produces a deep,
continuous sound, traditionally maintained using circular breathing.
​
Different cultures. Different instruments. Different traditions.
But there is something they share: continuity.
Modern meditation music frequently uses the same principle. A synthesiser pad, a low sustained note, a slowly changing texture or even the sounds of wind and water give the mind something constant to rest upon.
The music doesn't keep demanding:
What happens next?
It gives us permission not to care.
​
Slow Down — Largo
Western classical music found its own ways of slowing things down.
One of the traditional Italian tempo markings is Largo — broadly meaning slow and spacious.
Composers have used slow movements for centuries to create music with a very different sense of time. Handel, Bach, Vivaldi, Beethoven and Dvořák are among the many composers whose slower works still have an extraordinary ability to make us stop and listen.
​
One of the most famous is the Largo from Dvořák's Symphony No. 9, From the New World. Its beautiful English horn melody seems almost to float above the orchestra.
Then there is Handel's famous Ombra mai fu, which became so widely known as Handel's Largo that the name stuck — even though Handel actually marked it Larghetto.
But perhaps the important thing isn't precisely what somebody wrote at the top of the manuscript.
It is what happens when the music slows down.
There is more space between musical events. We are no longer being hurried towards the next beat, chord or melody.
And sometimes we seem to slow down with it.
​
From Largo to Superlearning
Slow classical music acquired a rather unexpected new role during the twentieth century.
Bulgarian educator Georgi Lozanov developed a teaching method known as Suggestopedia, which included the use of classical music during parts of the learning process.
During the 1970s these ideas became much better known through something called Superlearning.
Slow classical music — particularly Baroque music and music around 60 beats per minute — became associated with the idea that we might be able to reach a state in which we are relaxed while remaining mentally alert.
And suddenly slow music wasn't being used only for relaxation.
People were using it while trying to learn.
Whether it actually worked quite as spectacularly as some people subsequently claimed is another matter.
We'll come back to that.
​
Why Repetition Works
Normally, composers are taught to keep music interesting.
Change the melody. Change the harmony. Introduce another instrument. Build towards something.
Meditation music often does almost the opposite.
A phrase repeats.
Then it repeats again.
Perhaps one note changes. A soft sound appears somewhere in the distance. A chord gradually develops.
Nothing much happens.
And that is precisely the point.
The listener isn't supposed to sit there thinking:
Excellent modulation to the dominant!
The music is creating an environment rather than demanding attention.
It becomes somewhere to be.
​
Does the Body Follow the Music?
Human beings are remarkably good at responding to rhythm.
Put on dance music and before long a foot starts tapping. At a concert, hundreds or even thousands of people can begin clapping, swaying or moving together.
Often we don't consciously decide to do it.
Our brains are constantly looking for patterns, and rhythm gives us one of the strongest patterns of all.
So what happens when that rhythm is slow, gentle and predictable?
Our heartbeat doesn't simply lock itself to a piece of music like a metronome, of course. Human beings are considerably more complicated than that.
But music can influence our level of arousal, our attention, our breathing and even our perception of passing time.
Perhaps this helps explain why slow, repetitive music has found a home in meditation.
​
From Campfires to Headphones
Today we have sophisticated names for all of this — meditation, mindfulness, ambient music, relaxation music and soundscapes.
But perhaps the basic idea isn't particularly modern.
A repeated rhythm.
A continuous drone.
A slow melody.
The sound of water.
The crackle of a fire.
And a few minutes in which nobody expects us to do anything.
After thousands of years of technological progress, perhaps we've simply invented much better headphones.
What Happens Next?
The connection between music and relaxation raises another question.
​
Can music actually help us learn?
That takes us into the strange and fascinating world of Superlearning, alpha and theta brainwaves, the so-called Mozart Effect, concentration music and some claims that may require a reasonably large pinch of salt.
And eventually it brings us right up to the present day — lo-fi study music, deep-focus playlists and Pomodoro timers.
That's where we'll go next.
