Anyone who lives in a city like New York knows all too well that the most precious commodity is silence. Like any longtime New Yorker, I have spots where I go to escape the cacophony outside: The New York Earth Room at Dia in Soho featuring Walter de Maria’s interior sculpture of 250 cubic yards of dirt; the vine-cloaked pergola overlooking the Hudson River at Wave Hill; the morning hours in the far corner of Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery; the top-floor reading room at Jefferson Market Library; and St. Paul’s, an austere Catholic church on the corner of Congress and Court Streets not far from my home.
After all, even a conversation on the platform of the 6 train at Union Square station can be a challenge. The high-pitched screeching of incoming trains regularly sends decibel levels skyrocketing; last year the measurements at that particular station hovered around 107. (For context, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health says that exposure to anything over 100 dBA for more than 15 minutes a day will increase your chance of developing hearing loss.) But whether it’s the screeching of a subway, the jackhammering of construction work, or the low-grade buzz of traffic outside our windows, we’ve all become eerily accustomed to noise in our daily lives. Immune we may seem, but we often don’t clock the impact all this sound has on our physical and mental well-being—how it exacerbates anxiety, sleep problems, and even cardiovascular issues, while also impairing our memory and attention span.
The Environmental Protection Agency has known that noise can be dangerous to our health since 1972, when Congress passed the Noise Control Act, which states that it “presents a growing danger to the health and welfare of the Nation’s population, particularly in urban areas.” But the EPA has failed to act for decades (the advocacy group Quiet Communities sued them in 2023 for that gross inaction) and the Trump administration is unlikely to right this wrong, particularly considering that the agency recently (and quietly) bypassed Clean Air rules allowing companies to ignore limits on mercury and cancer-causing emissions.
The healing power of sound
But just as sound can amplify many health issues, wielding it in a more intentional manner can help mitigate those issues, too. Therapeutically working with sound isn’t simply about listening to mellow music, but instead about creating a specific sonic setting where, with proper guidance, a downshifting of our brain waves from an active beta state to a more introspective and calm alpha and even theta state can happen. “Viewed through the lens of physics, everything in the world is vibrational, including us, and when we start to explore the effects of sound as part of this vibrational experience, then it’s easier to apply the concepts of resonance and dissonance,” says Nate Martinez, a Brooklyn-based sound therapy practitioner and corporate wellness consultant.
In other words, sound can soothe the effects of sound. The way that Martinez harnesses its vibrational power is via sound meditations—or, as they’ve become more commonly known, sound baths—wherein particular instruments like singing bowls are used to facilitate a shift in participants’ nervous systems from the heightened, stressful sympathetic state to the more relaxed, parasympathetic one. The practice, Martinez emphasizes, is not just about someone playing a bunch of instruments for people lying down but requires a knowledgeable practitioner who can establish set and setting and instruct participants in how to lean on their breath as a tool.
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