Guided meditation is a practice where the listener is guided through a sonic experience in order to achieve various results, usually in the form of finding peace or comfort. The instructor during these guided meditations may ask you to control your breathing, let go of unwanted thoughts, or focus on your visualization/ imagination, and may use other sound ques to provide additional avenues to achieve that.

I was inspired to make a sonic piece that explored the concept of guided music – but rather using vocals to guide someone along a journey, I wanted to play around with sound affect theory. Through cognitive routes, our emotions, memories, or bodily movements react to the sounds we are exposed to. This piece is an example of inductive reasoning, where the listener is presented sound data of a shower, leading the listener to create the meaningful association of ‘shower thoughts’ through the additional sounds overlaid.

These shower thoughts were inspired by the current COVID-19 pandemic, where most of the population in the UK is practicing social distancing and self-isolation. The background noise of water whilst in the shower gives us time to be alone with our thoughts. Perhaps you are winning an argument in your head, you’re worried about bills, or thinking casually about what you will do socially after the pandemic. Share your journey in the comments below.

The true goal of this piece is to take the listener on a journey, to allow them to make their own way throughout the piece, without being guided by vocals. Instead, the sound of the running shower sets the stage and the listener’s imagination can take the journey, make associations, and have cognitive reactions from there.

Listen here: