By Christopher Lloyd Clarke, composer and founder of Royalty Free Meditation Music.com
White noise is an incredibly effective sound-source for encouraging deeply relaxed states of consciousness and it has a number of therapeutic benefits, for example:
- It can help to cure insomnia, which makes it fantastic for guided relaxations for sleep.
- It can be used to enhance meditation (especially when combined with binaural beats).
- It can be used to eliminate tinnitus (ringing in the ears).
- For restless babies, especially crying babies with colic, white noise is often used as a sleep aid.
- It can help with hypnotic induction – especially with patients who are resistant to hypnosis.
- A Swedish study in 2007 even found that white noise helped children with ADHD to concentrate and pay better attention while learning.
What Exactly Is White Noise?
Just as white light is the aggregation of all visible light frequencies, white noise is the sound that is produced when all possible sound frequencies are played at once. It is a pitch-less drone sound.
In its raw synthesized form white noise isn’t particularly nice to listen to, especially at loud volumes. That hissing sound on your TV when it’s not tuned in properly – that’s raw white noise. Fortunately, there are plenty of other types of white noise that are far more enjoyable to listen to. The soothing sound of ocean waves is just one example of this type of sound.
But natural white noise sounds aren’t the only type of white noise that we can utilize. Synthesized white noise can be “sculpted” and then combined with music to create sounds that are deeply hypnotic and profoundly relaxing. Two albums that illustrate this very nicely are “Constellation” and “Hypnotica”. These are great example of sculpted white noise music. You can hear examples of them on the following page (the albums are listed alphabetically): https://royaltyfreemeditationmusic.com/category/royalty-free-meditation-music/
It’s Absorbing Stuff!
What I love about white noise music is that it absorbs the attention of the listener, but without stimulating a strong emotional response.
This idea of absorbing the attention of the listener without overstimulating them is one of the most important principles that I observe when I create meditation music – even more so when I’m creating music for hypnotherapy. White noise music is one of my favourite tools for achieving this.
Of course, there are times when it is entirely appropriate to stimulate your listeners’ emotions through music. If you were creating a guided meditation for releasing past hurts, or for opening the heart to love, then I would steer you away from white noise music and towards something more musically expressive.
But if you were aiming to guide a person into a very deep state of meditation – to a silent space beyond the realm of emotion, or if you were looking for a tool to assist with hypnosis, then white noise music can be a great asset to you.