Health

Healing Tones & Audio Therapy: An Interview with Michael Joly – Part 2

September 8, 2021 by Jodi Krangle

“I came into the world listening. Other people came in noticing, visually, or touching things, tactically, which is why there are sculptors and visual artists, and some of us were just innately oriented toward the sound of the world.”

– Michael Joly

This week is the second half of my interview with Michael Joly, founder of solu® and maker of the n.o.w. Tone Therapy™ device, where we talk about microphones, share tips for improving your sound recordings on a budget and look at the future of sound healing.

Sound is a Doorway

“I think sound is a doorway,” Michael says, “that can help us experience truth.” We begin with a discussion of microphones and audio recording equipment, comparing such diverse microphones as the Shure SM7 cardioid dynamic microphone, the Electro-Voice RE20, and the classic Neumann U47 microphone. Michael also shares his tips for creating an optimal sound environment for recording at home, using such everyday items as a clothes closet, furniture-wrapping blankets, and curtain rods to achieve surprisingly effective results. “What we’re trying to achieve here is to communicate to people through a voice, and people love the intimacy of the audio medium.”

The Future of Healing

We wrap up the interview with a look at what the future of sound healing might bring as audio continues to play a bigger role in our everyday lives. Michael also talks about the emerging field of “well buildings,” an international standard of wellness that includes sound reduction and ambient sound systems. “Sound is dynamic and always changing, and I think that we connect to this and we know something about ourselves and the way that the world is constructed.”

Get your complimentary mini e-book and learn how to create your personalized and branded audio branding strategy with my Top Five Tips for Implementing an Intentional Audio Strategy.

Do you need a voice talent for your next project? Visit my voice-over website to find out more about how my voice can help you with your audio brand. You can also subscribe to the Audio Branding Podcast on YouTube to watch the show’s latest episodes.

Please leave the Audio Branding Podcast a written review or a spoken review so others can find the show on their favorite podcast player!

This interview episode was very skillfully made to sound beautiful by the talented Humberto Franco.

Connect with the Guest

Website: https://www.nowbysolu.com/

Connect with Michael Joly on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-joly-043513144/

Healing Tones & Audio Therapy: An Interview with Michael Joly – Part 1

September 1, 2021 by Jodi Krangle

“In tone therapy, we’ve created a space which is both safe and intriguing so we can solve some of the discomfort problem with mindfulness meditation and we can also solve some of the boredom aspects of it.”

– Michael Joly

This episode’s guest is the founder of solu®, maker of n.o.w. Tone Therapy™, a sound meditation device. Before solu®, he designed a range of professional and consumer audio products for motion picture sound, home theater, and recording studio use. He has a background as a musician, an on-air announcer and radio business development executive, and he’s also been immersed in the study of metaphysics, focusing on the intersection of sound, listening, and consciousness.

His name is Michael Joly and you can find the n.o.w. Tone Therapy™ System at nowbysolu.com. There’s a lot to unpack here, but Michael’s enthusiasm for audio and its proper use is something I really think you’re going to enjoy hearing. If you’re one of those people who are extremely sensitive to sound, I think this episode will validate and soothe you. I know Michael understands your pain!

Sounds in the Fog

Michael tells us about his first memorable experience with sound at the age of five when he heard the sound of distant foghorns on a misty morning in New Hampshire. That early memory not only sparked his interest in such experimental sound projects as Brian Eno’s Music for Airports but also paved the way for his own work with ambient audio and tone therapy. “I realized,” Michael explains, “I heard something like what Brian Eno is doing when I was a kid, that is, quasi-random overlapping of simple sounds to make new compositions. And that’s what eventually led to tone therapy.”

Listening to Nothing

We also talk about Michael’s early professional work, a career in cinematic audio technology that introduced him to a surprising new way of considering sound. “I spent a lot of time listening to the noise floor of optical soundtracks and the noise floor of magnetic tape, so I got really, really experienced at listening to nothing.” Listening to nothing became a big part of his approach to tone therapy, and turns out to be harder than we might expect. As he puts it, “I realized that you can’t be thinking and listening attentively at the same time. It’s just not possible to do. You’re either giving your full attention to what you’re hearing or you’re thinking about it, or you’re asking a question, or you’re judging it.”

The Power of Now

Michael admits that when he first read the book The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle, he wasn’t impressed. But a series of changes in his life several years ago, including his struggle with depression, helped him see it in a new light. We discuss how the name of his n.o.w. tone therapy system is an homage to the book and its role in shaping his approach to sound healing, and how the sound of church bells in Frankfurt, Germany inspired the distinctive sounds of tone therapy. “I remember hearing two bells ringing, then one bell ringing, then no bells, just the foot traffic on the street,” he says. “And then, like out of the movies, the clouds parted and this beam came down.”

Surprising Yet Familiar

Tone therapy can be a challenge at first, he explains, because so many of us simply aren’t used to sitting still and turning off all our thoughts and worries. That’s why he’s worked to create a sound therapy system that, as he describes it, is both safe and intriguing, and incorporates the harmonic sequence to create an instinctively soothing quality. We also take a look at his upcoming tone therapy software service, including a brand new sonic logo.

Next week we’ll continue with a discussion of the best quality microphones, share helpful recording tips to try at home, and a look at what the future might bring when it comes to tone therapy.

Get your complimentary mini e-book and learn how to create your personalized and branded audio branding strategy with my Top Five Tips for Implementing an Intentional Audio Strategy.

Please leave the Audio Branding Podcast a written review or a spoken review so others can find the show on their favorite podcast player!

This interview episode was very skillfully made to sound beautiful by the talented Humberto Franco.

Connect with the Guest

Website: https://www.nowbysolu.com/

Connect with Michael Joly on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-joly-043513144/

Healing Harmonies

January 13, 2021 by Jodi Krangle

When you close your eyes and think about being in a hospital, what do you imagine hearing? Are the sounds soothing, or do they make you tense up with even more anxiety? Hospitals aren’t usually relaxing places, and they don’t always sound very relaxing either. Heart monitors beep, respirators pump, and voices murmur in the background or occasionally ring out over the intercom.

They can be surprisingly loud too. The nighttime background noise at a hospital can sometimes reach over a hundred decibels, louder than a chainsaw. A National Institute of Health study in 2009 recognized noise as a hazard to patients; sleep deprivation weakens the immune system, which has a direct effect on mortality rates. Hospital noise isn’t just annoying, it can be dangerous.

Some hospitals are working to change that. Apart from lowering the noise, they’re also focused on weaving it into a healing soundscape that harnesses the link between music and the human body. You can check out my blog for a short but insightful video by electronic musician Yoko Sen about how her experience as a patient inspired her to help create a more melodic ambiance:

Last year Aalto University won the International Sound Award for Soundscapes and Ambient Sound for its own work in creating an innovative series of ambient soundscapes for New Children’s Hospital in Helsinki. Each floor has a unique and constantly changing theme, from the ocean on the first floor all the way up to space and the stars at the top, and is designed to help put children at ease, taking their thoughts away from the hospital and into an imaginative journey filled with natural sounds and delicate instruments.

There’s a link on my blog to a presentation video by the project’s director, composer and lecturer Antti Ikonen, as well as a link to an interactive demo of each of the nine soundscapes so you can hear them for yourself:

https://international-sound-awards.com/media/ISA2019/2019-1037_New_Childrens_Hospital_Soundscape_KB.mp4
https://newchildrenshospital.aalto.fi/

The idea that sound can play such an important role in healing has been around for quite a while now. Music therapy as we know it today got its start soon after World War II, when musicians visited hospitals to play for veterans. Doctors and nurses started to notice that these visits made a very real difference in their recoveries. They began to incorporate music into the idea of creating a “healing environment” where each aspect of the hospital setting, both visual and audio, plays its own part in helping the patients.

Florence Nightingale wrote in 1859 that carefully controlling the lights, colors and sound in a patient’s room could help them recover more quickly, and in 2013 Brian Eno credited her for inspiring his own “Quiet Room for Montefiore”, an immersive audio project at Montefiore Hospital in Essex. A few years later the “Healing Soundscapes” research project at Hamburg University began, uniting music therapists and composers to find new ways of improving the well-being of hospital patients.

There’s no doubt that sound can have a very real effect when it comes to health care. One study in 2016 showed that listening to just fifteen minutes of music before surgery reduces a patient’s anxiety, while another study found that creating an immersive natural soundscape is more relaxing and effective than simply masking the background noise. These nature sounds significantly reduce your cardiac stress markers and cortisol levels, and, for some patients, lower stress can make a literally life-or-death difference.

Most of us probably aren’t ever going to find ourselves looking forward to a trip to the hospital. But for the children at New Children’s Hospital, as well as a growing number of hospitals all around the world, soundscape and audio design are helping transform that clamoring background noise into a soothing melody.

Would you consider reviewing the Audio Branding Podcast? If so, here’s the Apple Podcast link: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/audio-branding/id1489042453 And if you like what you hear (and read!) – please do share it with anyone you think might be interested. Thanks so much!

And if you’re interested in crafting an audio brand for your business, why not check out my FREE download – 5 Tips For Implementing An Intentional Audio Strategy at https://voiceoversandvocals.com/audio-branding-strategy/

This Might Make You Uncomfortable

December 11, 2019 by Jodi Krangle

ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. It has to do with certain triggers, usually having to do with sound or sight, giving you “tingles in your brain”. It may seem like a strange reaction to have while hearing unintelligible whispers, someone using a marker on a pad of paper or seeing someone use a makeup brush to caress your “face” (when the face is the camera). But it’s very real!

And interestingly, music in this particular context, seems to take away from the experience, rather than add to it. In Duncan Geere’s article about this phenomenon in Science Focus: https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/asmr-more-than-a-feeling/ – one of the scientists he questions has this to say:

“We’re interested in things like whether particular settings might be helpful, or particular object interactions,” explains Davis.

“[The results] were actually a bit of a mix. But the one thing that was really clear and surprising is that people didn’t like background music. That to me is really odd, because we use music all of the time to enhance a mood that you’re trying to experience. That doesn’t seem to work for ASMR. It seems to distract from the sound of an object being interacted with.”

Huh. So the two types of sound, don’t seem to go together. Our brains are strange.

In my own deep dive into this topic however, I actually did experience these “brain tingles”. I first heard about ASMR when IKEA used it in one of their commercials. It’s included below.

When I first saw and heard this video, I have to admit, it kind of creeped me out. I didn’t understand why the woman’s voice was so whispery-soft, and I truly didn’t understand what the attraction was to all those sounds of sheets being stroked, pillows being squished and desk lamps being tapped with fingernails. I didn’t get it. And at the time, I didn’t particular want to explore what it was all about.

In my research into sound and the science of sound, ASMR kept coming up – again and again. And now that I’ve experienced what it actually IS, I’m impressed by what they put together. (And if you watch the video, read the comments below. They’re hilarious!) While I didn’t mind the voice they used, she was a bit louder than I was expecting for this particular genre. Of course, I get that she had to talk above a whisper so that she could be understood. She was, after all, there to sell a product. And that meant you had to hear what she was saying.

I’m not sure it works as true ASMR as a result, because you have to concentrate too much for it to really be as relaxing as it should be. But as an example of how this could be used for a different kind of advertising experience, it’s not half bad. If you get it. Seeing as they’re trying to appeal to college students, I don’t think that’s a bad bet.

I’ll also point out that the pops and crackles of lips smacks and tongue movements from a voice being that close to a mic, would be a nightmare for most voice over. But for ASMR? The intimacy of it is supposed to be relaxing. That’s the point.

One of the best “performers” of this that I’ve seen while going down the rabbit hole of YouTube, is Gibi. I’ll link to one of her videos in my blog & show notes so you can have a look and a listen. But I’ll admit, I’ve subscribed to her channel. In this video (the link is below), she collaborates with a couple of other performers so you get a good overview of a bunch of potential triggers from different performers with slightly different styles:

ASMR | Tingle Immunity Treatment Test | Ft. Goodnight Moon & Marno ASMR – YouTube

For those of you that have been following my blog here, you know I’m a gamer. Gibi even did a video where she interacted (the video was about wood tapping and scratching) with a product from Wyrmwood! (They were a sponsor for this video. And she promoted them perfectly for her audience.)

And if you’d like to know more about this from Gibi herself (and, coincidentally, actually hear her real speaking voice – which I admit, I was curious about), have a look at the video I’ve linked to from a YouTube channel called Rooster Teeth. They had her on the show as a guest and asked her a bunch of questions that she very intelligently answered.

It’s a very interesting conversation, on a whole bunch of levels, and I highly recommend you watch it.

Ultimately, you have to decide if this works for you. If not, it might make you very uncomfortable. If it does work for you, watching these videos might well be the most relaxed you feel all day. You’re welcome.

December 02, 2020 Edit: Gibi just added a video called “New to ASMR?” – that I think those of you who haven’t really experienced this before, will find SUPER helpful. Check it out here:

Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital Voice Over

August 25, 2017 by Jodi Krangle

The production company behind these commercials does such wonderful work that it’s always a pleasure to voice something for them. I’ve been working with them on the Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital spots for some time now and I love everything they produce. Here’s just one (outstanding) example:

Voice Overs for Dayton Children’s Nurses

August 25, 2017 by Jodi Krangle

This spot is a bit longer than your typical commercial. It’s also incredibly moving. The cinematography and concept are top notch and watching this always brings me really close to tears. In the end, that’s why I do what I do. To move someone. The production company did their part. I certainly do my best to do mine.

Jodi Krangle

Healing Tones & Audio Therapy: An Interview with Michael Joly – Part 2

Healing Tones & Audio Therapy: An Interview with Michael Joly – Part 1

Healing Harmonies

This Might Make You Uncomfortable

Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital Voice Over

Voice Overs for Dayton Children’s Nurses

If you need help…

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