Guided Decompression
By miraclemiles on April 24, 2022 9:00 pm
Made for this week's Disquiet Junto 0538 project: https://disquiet.com/0538/
The Assignment: Get someone from tense to chill.
Step 1: Your goal with this piece is to guide someone from a place of intense stress to something more sedate. Keep that in mind.
Step 2: A lot of meditation-oriented music takes the end point as the start. Consider that it can be jarring to listen to calm music when you are anything but calm.
Step 3: Compose a piece of music that starts in a state of accelerated tension, allows the listener to align their own tension with that of the music, and then slowly proceeds to calm down, until the music is sustainably peaceful.
So those were the instructions. As these things usually go, they can be a starting point, but what we create ends up being our own, and perhaps something a little differnt. I didn't really start with "intense stress", but I started at higher tempo, with lots more going on. I played these "African drum" kit sounds on the e-drums during the work day (I work from from home), when my mind was busy and filled with multi-tasking thoughts and perhaps a little stress. Then later, once the work week was done, I made the second half more chill part, later at night, and it seemed like something I could chill out too, though haven't really tested it yet 
Randomly stumbled on this guitar sample on the hard drive, and chopped and played with that until it eventually became the focal point. Have a drone going underneath, hope I picked frequencies that are calm-ish.
Would this take someone from stressed to chill? Not sure, but was an inspiring idea to try out, and had some fun creating!
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Share Alike (BY-SA)