Malcolm Owen
Sound Therapy is Apple Music's new audio wellness collection with special sound waves, aimed at helping users focus, relax, and sleep.
Music is often used to help people relax or to focus, providing an auditory backdrop for listeners that can make them feel better in some situations. In an extension of the concept, Apple Music is going further by making the music even more beneficial.
Working with Universal Music Group's audio technology, Sound Therapy is an audio wellness collection exclusive to the streaming service. Rather than simply being a playlist of tracks that users associate with relaxation or focus, the project uses special versions of existing tracks that seamlessly include special sound waves without disrupting the artist's vision.
Based on the science-led Sollos Initiative, and using psychoacoustics and cognitive science, the UMG sound waves are intended to enhance a user's daily routine. Auditory beats and colored noise are introduced, such as gamma waves and white noise for improving a person's focus on the Focus playlist.
The Relax playlist contains tracks with added theta waves. Meanwhile delta waves and pink noise are included in the Sleep collection.
The songs in the playlists include popular, well-known tracks from major artists. The list of artists include Katy Perry, Imagine Dragons, Kacey Musgraves, AURORA, and Jeremy Zucker, among others.
The initiative is an extension of existing playlists, such as personalized mood playlists and the Apple Music Chill radio station, said Apple Music co-head Rachel Newman. The new initiative with UMB, Newman adds, is an experience that is "grounded in artistry, shaped by innovation, and designed to support wellness."
Apple's auditory wellness has also previously stretched itself in non-music directions. In iOS 15, Background Sounds allowed users to listen to rain, a stream, and other noises, to avoid silence.
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William Gallagher and Malcolm Owen
3 Comments
These are all great, but I'll never be able to use them or any sleep sound, white noise playlist in Apple Music because they take over your charts and recommendations. It took me years to stop getting ocean sounds in my New Music Mix. Apple needs to learn we like this kind of stuff, but attribute it to a different algorithm dedicated to making algorithmic focus playlists and recommendations.
or, at a minimum, let us turn off algorithmic learning on a per song, per album, per genre, and per playlist basis. A simple "don't learn from this" button in the drop down. That's it.
Today, I have to rely on Focus modes and shortcuts to turn off the algorithm before playing something like this.
Yes, best to avoid using this feature until Apple gets some brains and figures out how to exclude items from the recommendation algorithm. In the long run, they need to figure this out without user intervention. Joe Consumer isn't going to spend the time flagging content. And Apple is making their data collection less valuable by weighting this stuff normally. In fact, it should be the opposite. For certain kinds of content (like white noise), it should be opt-in. By default it should be excluded from the recommendation algorithm. Same with things that you rarely listen to. If I listen to one or two country songs in a row whereas I've listened to none in the past six months, those should be kept out.
Until Apple can figure this out thoughtfully I'll stick with a third party app for white noise. White noise apps were amongst some of the earliest apps on the iOS App Store (2008). Surprisingly a couple of those early apps have been maintained by their developers and run on both older hardware and recent devices. I still have TMSOFT's White Noise and White Noise Lite apps that I originally downloaded in 2008 (App Store). Another benefit: no Internet connection necessary to run these old-school standalone legacy white noise apps, they're just looped sound files.
Strange, my recommendations don't include anything related to my "babbling brook" track I play every night, instead I'm inundated with "Country" recommendations which I have to flag "Suggest Less" over and over again. Would like a more general flag, "No Country" e.g., wonder why my recommendations don't include "relaxation" or "sleep" tracks. Agreed the algorithm needs tweaking, but I do love my sleep track and am curious about this new feature.