Meditation New Age

Meditation New Age is the strand of new age music composed explicitly to support meditation, relaxation, healing and spiritual practice. It favours extremely slow or absent pulse, long sustained tones, gentle repetition and soft timbres drawn from synthesizers, piano, flute, harp, singing bowls and drones, minimising melody and event so the sound can recede behind breathing and attention. Emerging in the 1970s alongside the Western meditation boom, it was distributed through spiritual bookshops, yoga studios and specialist labels, and its leading composers treated sound itself as a therapeutic and contemplative technology.