The world's finest sound backgrounds for meditation, yoga, relaxation and sleep don't come easy.
A Superior Nature Audio Experience Starts with Life Environments
The ultimate sounds of nature can be found, not surprisingly, in live nature itself! When you’re in a woods, by a stream or sitting on a beach, nature puts on a performance that’s difficult to beat! Not only are nature’s sounds dynamic (both proportionately loud and soft), they also come from every direction. This is what makes nature’s experience so special yet almost impossible to replicate. Nature’s experience delivers the sounds of life and living on planet Earth, a place unique in the universe.
But why do we enjoy nature’s immersive experience so much? Scientists believe we are genetically linked to it in many ways. Research has shown that nature inhibits the impacts of stressors as it resets our brain in ways medicine cannot begin to accomplish. Research proves that nature’s experience delivers countless health and wellness benefits. If you want a happy and healthy life, nature is an essential part of your wellness.
Companies like Calm and Headspace among countless others provide literally thousands of nature recordings. But what makes Life Environments audio different from the nature sound offerings of others? As it turns out, a great deal.
Realness Matters
When it comes to nature’s ambiance, your brain knows the difference between real life and recorded life. Your brain has expectations of real nature being lifelike with clear and dynamic sounds from every direction. When it encounters something different, it reacts differently to that experience – and not always in healthy or beneficial ways.
Your brain is quick to respond to real nature in healthy and refreshing days. However, when encountering recorded nature (stereo), its response is quite different. You brain responds to recorded nature much as it does to a record as opposed to live nature. Different areas of the brain are stimulated, and the wellness benefits of live nature delivers gives way to something lesser.
Ultimately, live nature is always best. Our challenge was to create an experience as close to live nature as possible to stimulate the brain to respond similarly to when you arein live nature. As it also turns out, that’s a very big ask.
Creating “Lifelike” Nature Audio is Tough
Capturing and reproducing nature’s experience is hard. Unlike traditional recording that simply records nature without any particular aural standard, capturing nature in lifelike ways the brain sees as live nature is an entirely different process.
Live nature produces crystal clear sound from every direction. Not only is it clear, it is affected by atmospheric conditions like humidity, wind and temperature. We record discreet nature sounds from the spatial locations where they emanate. Birds in trees and gulls in the air are heard above you with Life Environments audio. The bear running up to eat our recordists is heard behind you! (Just kidding – well, sort of.) That sound traveling from right to left is heard whooshing by you. We have captured the detailed airflow rushing over feathers of flying geese!
Where traditional nature audio recording is done with a mono (single direction) or stereo (two directions) microphones, Life Environments recording technology captures sound in all directions in order to reproduce a lifelike experience.
Life Environments recording technology captures nature almost exactly as it sounds live in 3D space. The difference between live nature and our recordings are indiscernible to the human ear. The same cannot be accomplished with traditional recording technology.
Life Environments audio places you in the center of beautiful nature spaces, not on the periphery listening to it like mono or stereo recordings do. This adds to each’s lifelike experience; something simply not possible with traditional mono or stereo recording methods.
Upping the ante is the fact that this 3D magic is accomplished with simple stereo headphones or earbuds. No other special equipment is required.
Cleaning Up Humanity
Raw nature is acoustically “dirty.” Pristine experiences in nature are rare today. With over 96,000 scheduled flights daily over America, vehicular traffic and a host of other human-generated sounds that travel up to 40 miles over land, finding a truly quiet spot is almost impossible in the United States. We have captured motorcycle and semi-truck traffic from over 30 miles away in one Kentucky recording session. Sound pollution is indeed a big deal.
Life Environments audio experiences are “cleaned.” When we clean audio, we carefully remove extraneous sounds that are not part of tne natural environment. This is accomplished with highly specialized acoustic spectral technology and skilled individuals. As you might expect, this tedious process is expensive and requires a great deal of time to get right. However, every experience we create undergoes our cleaning process before entering production.
Keeping It Real
With all of the processing required to deliver lifelike experiences, ensuring each remains authentic requires demanding quality checkstnroughout the process. After each production step is completed, the audio integrity is checked against the original experience to ensure less than 1% acoustic deviation.
Another important difference to note is that Life Environments aural products are never looped. Looping occurs when a short slice of an audio recording, usually under 30 seconds but sometimes longer, are copied and pasted end to end to create a longer audio or video. This repetition is an easy way to create long audio and videos, but your brain responds adversely to them. Remember: your brain knows when it’s real and when it’s not. Sadly, looping is a common tactic found in most nature audio on meditation and sleep platforms today.
The biggest problem with non-looped audio is that you have to physically go to remote locations and record for hours to acquire suitable material. It’s potentially dangerous in terms of physical access (often driving thousands of miles), wildlife and personal safety in remote locations. Our acquisition teams require specialized training, vehicles, technology, equipment, licensing and deep knowledge across numerous domains of expertise. It’s not uncommon for our recordings to require climbing and rope work to access optimal recording locations. It’s certainly not a job for amateurs and, needless to say, is quite expensive.
Preparing For Listening
Once an experience has been produced, our next challenge is to prepare it for listening. This is the final production phase. The platforms where we distribute our sound compress (torture) sound files; this destroys sound quality. Your headphones and earbuds also change sound quality. In short, getting the same sound quality from raw production to ypur ears is a challenging and time-consuming process.
“Perfecting” audio is a process that simulates Internet compression and headphone differences to adjust your final experience to its live capture quality as closely as possible. This ensures you are hearing an experience as close to live nature as possible.
The only exception to audio quality management is with our YouTube experiences, which are distributed in low-resolution mode for copyright and audio theft purposes.
Testing
Now it’s time for testing. Does our experience perform cognitively and experientially as we expect live nature to perform? We conduct experiential testing to determine whether or not each experience is close enough to the live experience in terms of acoustic and cognitive performance. If the two are not matched withon one percent, the experience is pulled from distribution and placed back into production until it achieves the required levels of performance. Most eventually make it back to distribution, but some fail and are discarded.
From Our Studio to Your Ears
Once our production is complete, the proof is in your experience. Our experiences are designed to be listened to with non-noise canceling headphones or earbuds. We calibrate our sound to common Audio-Technica ATHM-50X headphones. These headphones are used in recording studios worldwide and known for their “flat” audio replication that does not color sound. These headphones can be purchased for as little as $150 in the United States. While you can use any non-noise canceling headphones, the ATHM-50X delivers superior acoustic precision for the cost.
In the end, your aural experience should delight you as it inhibits stress and refreshes your mind naturally. While live nature is always your best choice, Life Environments lifelike audio is the next best thing. Mother Nature performs the cognitive magic. We simply put her in your pocket.
The Competition
In a 2023 blind study conducted by Life Environments, our audio was compared to that of Calm and Headspace. On a scale from 0 to 100, with 100 being the aural quality of live nature, we observed the following results:
Life Environments Surroundia™ Audio: 97.4% Acoustic accuracy.
Calm Audio: 14.6% Acoustic accuracy.
Headspace: 11.6% Acoustic accuracy.
Sites like Calm and Headspace offer thousands of nature recordings, but none comparing in quality and effectiveness of Life Environments Surroundia™ audio.
So, does this mean Calm and Headspace are bad? Not at all. However, they provide a vastly different approach to mental health and wellness when compared to the Life Environments strategy of replicating your brain’s response to lifelike nature when, where and how you want.
So, There You have It!
Now you understand a bit more of what is behind the Life Environments audio experience and what sets it apart as the world’s finest aural backgrounds.
