Musicians John Legend, Erykah Badu get in on meditation apps to help us chill out

“I feel like life is a process of healing after healing after healing,” Badu said. “Anything I make is going to reflect that.”

Badu’s composition is part of the ever-expanding swirl of music and mindfulness that’s only grown stronger during the pandemic.

With no dance floors or concert halls to fill, many listeners turned toward gentler, unobtrusive music to help quiet their restless minds. In response, artists who might not have publicly ventured into this sometimes esoteric terrain now feel emboldened to do so.

Last September, Diplo released his first ambient album, MMXX, while in early May, Sufjan Stevens put out a five-volume collection of keyboard music called Convocations. Alicia Keys recently conducted a 21-day “meditation experience” with Deepak Chopra that is available through his meditation app website.

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Though new age artists have released music for meditation on cassette and CD for decades, now tech companies have become happy to financially support musical experimentation that meshes with their own goals.

Over the past 15 anxious and uncertain months, wellness apps have grown flush with new subscribers looking for different experiences.

In the past, musicians might align themselves with initiatives connected to Vans, Red Bull or Toyota – powerful brands willing to use their deep pockets to gain credibility with young consumers.

Now, mindfulness apps are playing a similar role, offering artistic opportunities at a precarious moment for the music industry.

Headspace wanted to develop more music that helps people concentrate on a task, and last August the company announced the appointment of John Legend as its chief music officer.

Legend inaugurated the monthly Focus Music project with a licensed playlist of mellifluous jazz tracks. In addition to Badu’s contribution, subsequent installments have featured original, vocal-free pieces by artists including acclaimed movie-score composer Hans Zimmer and rock band Arcade Fire.

“Musicians have always been about, can they evoke a particular frame of mind through a song or a sound,” said William Fowler, head of content for material that appears within the Headspace app.

He noted that Focus Music arrived “in a year where musicians who had other plans found themselves with time for a project like this”, giving the company access “to people that otherwise might be doing other things”.

In March 2019, Moby debuted Long Ambients Two, an album of extended compositions intended to help listeners fall asleep, exclusively on Calm, which started as a meditation app.

Afterward, the company got inundated with inquiries from other musicians. Calm had limited experience with this world, and hired Courtney Phillips, the former director of brand partnerships at Universal Music Group, to become its head of music and grow its library.

She has continued the streaming premieres, but also commissioned artists like country star Keith Urban and genre-twister Moses Sumney to create original tracks. Calm also released a series of hourlong “sleep remixes” of songs by Universal artists, including Post Malone’s Circles and Ariana Grande’s Breathin.

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“We’re a tech company, so we love to look at: What are people coming here for? What do they want?” Phillips said.

“Piano is the most popular genre of all time, according to Calm, so I want to make sure that I’m offering a variety of different piano music for people. And at the same time, I want to work with artists and be like, let’s do something that maybe people don’t expect.”

Endel, a Berlin-based tech company, has developed an approach toward fostering mental health through music that embraces European sophistication.

Instead of the bright colours and feel-good iconography of its competitors, its app is strictly black and white with a minimalist interface.

Oleg Stavitsky, the company’s chief executive, is an avowed music obsessive, who during our video interview, proudly pulled out his Laurie Anderson and Ornette Coleman albums. He said he got interested in delving deep after mining his parents’ vinyl collection.

“Once you start digging you inevitably end up at Brian Eno at some point,” he said, referring to the producer and composer responsible for several of ambient music’s landmark works.

While the music on most meditation apps either loops or has predesignated start and finish points, Endel’s output is more dynamic. The company developed an algorithm that it says considers factors like time of day, weather and a person’s heart rate to deliver an individualised sonic experience each time.

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Neo-classical composer Dmitry Evgrafov is one of Endel’s co-founders, and he provides the original stems of music that the artificial intelligence incorporates, but naturally those within the company got curious about what would happen if the source material came from other artists.

Grimes devised the sleep aid AI Lullaby, and Endel recently released a productivity piece called Deep Focus from Plastikman, the minimal-techno alias of DJ and producer Richie Hawtin.

“When we’re talking to a lot of these artists, either they have been thinking about doing something like this, or they have already been doing something like this,” Stavitsky said. “They are looking for low risk and interesting ways to put that content out there.”

Hawtin enrolled in a series of Transcendental Meditation classes shortly before the pandemic engulfed Western Europe, where he resides. Now twice a day he takes 20 minutes to repeat his mantra. Those experiences remind him of a DJ’s ability to guide and almost hypnotize a receptive crowd.

“For all its beauty, the techno and electronic dance music community has been on this hamster wheel for so many years,” Hawtin said.

“This has been a real introspective moment to reconnect to the music, the machines, and alternative ways of thinking and producing.”

By Eric Ducker © The New York Times 

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/arts/music/meditation-apps-music-tech.html