Meditation on sound is a classic and popular technique that can be useful towards developing such meditative attributes as concentration and a deeper richness of perception. In recent years, when I have guided mindful meditations on sound in classes, I have played recordings of ocean waves, rain, flowing creeks, wind chimes, and/or gongs and bells.
It was only when I intentionally looked for the ideal audio to play for classes that I came to realize why such sounds are often called “meditative”. I have chosen them not just because they are generally soothing and refreshing to listen to, but also because they generally 1. spark less thought and fewer mental associations than other sounds that we could listen to, and 2. have a rich and full field of auditory texture and detail to them, which makes them relatively easily engaging for our minds to investigate and soak into meditatively.
Most of the meditation on sound that I have done in my life, however, I have done with naturalistic sound, no audio recordings, just listening to the sounds of the world around me. While doing this is often not as immediately engaging and textured as listening to say a recording of ocean waves, it has created a deeper and more nourishing intentionally mindful relationship with normal everyday life. It has helped me to discover a freshness and a newness to mundane sounds that I hadn’t discovered before. It can also be useful for us to cultivate mindfulness to have available during the many times in life when we may want to meditate, but an audio recording is not available.
The composer John Cage had a piece called “four minutes and 33 seconds”. And the score was just whole note rests after whole note rests, measure after measure – the orchestra doesn’t play anything. And one of the meanings of the piece seems to be that it invites the audience to listen to the ambiance sounds around them as the performance – people coughing or shuffling, the building creaking, the orchestra adjusting their instruments, whatever.
What I have found with naturalistic sound meditation is that it is often more interesting when I have done so outdoors, or when I have opened a window to let in the soundscape of the outside world. Also, steady sounds – a computer or refrigerator fan, the hum of freeway in distance – are often not as interesting and engaging as sounds that pop up at random times, like bird singing, wind arising and dying down, a train station, or traffic sounds that come and go.
Another option for an object of sound meditation is to play some of our favorite music, and to, for example, listening precisely to the rhythm of the bassline, the crispness of the snare drum, the rising and falling of the vocal melody, and the interplay of it all. Music can be a useful object in that it can make meditation more enjoyable and increase our motivation to do so. Also, it can pleasantly deepen our relationship with the music that we listen to, and have us find greater richness and vividness in it. The danger of using music as a meditative object, however, is that it often has such an emotional and narrative flow to it, and it sets off so many mental associations for us, that it can be difficult to actually meditate and not just slip back into our normal, default, and relatively unconscious way of perceiving.
Human conversation and language is usually even more difficult to detach from and to meditatively just hear as pure sound. This can be a useful practice, however, if we are able to do it, to help us create more spaciousness in our lives, and not be trapped in language’s meaning. Another possible chosen object for sound meditation would be to do “trigger practice” and see if we can just open our ears to the shrieking sound of industrial machinery or something else unpleasant as if it were the wind through the trees. And one could combine the two, and try to stay mindful while listening to a speech by a politician who gets a strong reaction out of us. All of these though are relatively advanced practices that a meditator probably would want to slowly build up to.
In general, as with so many other things in meditation, it is useful to experiment with different objects for sound meditation, and see what seems most productive to you.