Satya Hinduja, Founder of Alchemic Sonic Environment, on crafting immersive soundscapes for reflection.
Talk us through your background.
Growing up in our Vedic-infused joint family, I was surrounded by mantras, music, and my grandparents’ spiritual values, which deeply influenced our childhood. My musical journey began early when, at the age of six, I was chosen to sing a children’s song on All India Radio about life’s endless journey. By the age of eight, I performed in a theatrical play about Mahatma Gandhi. Performing live on stage became second nature and was the foundation of my musical development.
My vocal training and career continued to flourish until life took an unexpected turn. The Mumbai attacks and my arrival in Boston to study at Berklee College of Music coincided with the collective trauma of 9/11. This was a pivotal moment in my musical journey that would profoundly shape my artistic path and has since driven me to create experiences that offer transformation, comfort and healing for myself and the environment. I pursued film scoring at Berklee. After returning to India, I spent around six years in the Indian film industry as a score engineer, producer, and composer.
Despite my growth and development, I longed for a deeper sonic environment, which led me to composing for mixed-media installations and exploring electronic music while working as a Creative Director focusing on initiating the dialogue between arts and health for our family hospital. My passion for deepening my pursuit of electronic music and composing for mixed media installations brought me back to New York in 2012, where I immersed myself in a year-long electronic music production and DJ Master’s programme while performing across New York, Amsterdam, Mumbai, Delhi, and Goa.
As I explored deep house, ambient dubstep, and progressive house, my curiosity about the essence of sound deepened. A pivotal shift came when my Dubspot mentor, Raz Mesinai, introduced me to sound as a dynamic interplay of an action and a reaction, a process that involves both cause and effect, emphasising its interactive and dynamic qualities.
This exploration led me to meeting a neuroscientist who unveiled the transformative power of the 136.10 Hz frequency, reconnecting me to my Vedic roots and the profound concept of Nada Brahma – the ancient Vedic belief that sound is the essence of all creation. Composing with this frequency resulted in profound physiological changes to my mind and body, and it was at this moment that the Alchemic Sonic Environment (ASE) was born.
What’s the core idea behind ASE?
Alchemic Sonic Environment (ASE) is developing an integrative ecosystem working at the intersection of sound, music, health and technology. We research, develop and create multisensory deep listening experiences designed to invoke states of reflection, receptivity and exchange. The core idea of our transformative journeys is to foster deep connections with oneself and the ecosystem.
By integrating and blending timeless wisdom with emerging technologies, our aim is to enhance physical, mental and spiritual well-being. We achieve this by leveraging the therapeutic potential of sound to enhance brain health and longevity. In a world searching for unity, ASE is the culmination of my life’s work and a testament to the power of sound to heal, connect, and transform lives.
Talk us through the process of curating this.
My sonic journey, encompassing a diverse, acclaimed and creative group of artists, producers, sound designers, mix engineers, sound researchers, yoga and meditation teachers, neuroscientists and researchers has taught me the most important fundamental lesson in understanding the depth of the interconnectedness of sound, music, consciousness, and the universe. At the heart of this realisation is the core concept of “the spaces in between” – the silence and pauses that give all music its life.
The moment I had this realisation, I couldn’t help but explore the untapped potential that naturally lays within these fragmented systems – the combination of ancient Vedic wisdom, music, cognitive neuroscience, the emerging science of epigenetics, and the wonder of human artistic expression.
What types of spaces or environments do you typically choose for your installations, and how do these settings influence the experience?
Sound is energy in motion, it is all around us and travels through mediums of air, matter and liquid. It is the all-encompassing ingredient at the foundation of any space or environment, be it physical or digital. So, our first step in choosing and developing any site-specific Alchemic Sonic Environment is to explore “the spaces between”. One of the most important ingredients we search within the architecture of an environment is the perfect balance between silence and environmental sound.
Once we have explored and discovered this raw ingredient, we design and develop the deep listening journeys in relation to the place, time, context and culture. At the foundation of every successful ASE deep listening installation, experience or environment are our resonant partners and collaborators who understand the essence of this very intricately immaterial life form, and hence a lot of our decisions to collaborate and develop are based on the people, places and the environments that surround them.
How do you integrate other sensory elements – such as light, scent, or tactile materials – into the sound environment to deepen the experience?
Once an environment has been finalised, whether indoors or outdoors, ASE deepens immersion by integrating a range of sensory elements including light, scent, touch and taste to resonate with the sound work. Whilst most of our experiences are conducted using eye masks to naturally shift our beta brainwaves to alpha brainwave states, we use abstract hues of lights and colours that are meticulously composedat extremely slow speeds to create ethereal and alchemic environments that allow the visual element to just be a supportive blanket for the deep sonic immersion.
We curate various organic and chemical-free aromatherapy oils, floral arrangements and natural elements designed meticulously for the environment to allow for natural memory and emotion regulation and regeneration: mostly earthy and herbal, we curate scents for bass and high notes – and we try to programme a drift in waves during the experiences. We love using tactile elements such as vibrational chairs and beds and at times we have built vibrational floors to allow sound to be felt as much as heard, allowing the transformative power of sound to be felt much more viscerally and profoundly.
In the future, we are seeking to collaborate with various visual and kinaesthetic artists to explore abstract and minimalistic sensory environments that can be inspired by various eras of time from Bauhaus to Art Deco, modern to contemporary all focusing on the merging of the organic and scientific. Together, these layers transform ASE into a living, multi-sensory experience that engages the body, mind, and spirit.
Are there specific cultural influences that shape your work?
Inspired by the tradition of Nada Yoga, the yoga of deep listening, them ASE method integrates ancient sonic therapies with neuro-acoustic research, emerging technologies, innovative recording techniques and contemporary and minimalistic art and design to shape our environments. Our multilayered approach begins with primal frequencies found in nature aligning with our inherent circadian rhythms, establishing a connection to the natural world.
Building upon this foundation, we explore the harmonic series, a phenomenon found throughout nature, to deepen the listener’s connection to their environment, creating a sense of inner balance through the profound experience of natural resonances and ratios. Tempo also plays a significant role – with BPM carefully curated to positively influence the listener’s heart rate and encourage a state of relaxed awareness. Research has shown that spatial listening supports brain regeneration, particularly in the hippocampus, the centre for memory and learning.
Inspired by the latest psychoacoustic research, spatial audio techniques are central to the ASE process creating an immersive experience that promotes measurable cognitive benefits. Additionally, the natural tendency of our brain waves to entrain with repeated sounds is utilised, allowing listeners to enter various states, from deep relaxation to heightened focus. By integrating these elements with innovative recording and mixing techniques, we have crafted a truly immersive sonic experience, an endeavour we were honoured to develop alongside the late legendary engineer John Kurlander, and Dolby Atmos Mixing Engineer Emre Ramazanoglu.
ASE’s sonic architecture facilitates brain-body health through a heightened connection that unifies the listener, their inner world, and the world around them.
What do you hope participants feel or learn after the experience?
My deepest hope for each participant is that they emerge from the experience with a profound sense of curiosity and connection to their innermost essence, and the world around them. By embarking on an alchemic sonic journey, I wish for them to rediscover the transformative power of sound and embrace the beauty of listening deeply.
Through this experience, I aspire to ignite their curiosity, expand their perceptions, inspire a renewed appreciation for harmony and resonance and introduce the freedom and empowerment that exists within this profound and primal medium of sound that continuously surrounds and is there for us all to enjoy – if we listen deeply enough. My goal, our goal is to create a practice and a process that allows everyone to experience and harness the transformational potential that sound embodies. As a meditative method, sound has the potential to shape the future of brainbody health, unlocking new ways to protect, build, and reimagine human potential and planetary well-being.
With accessibility and transparency at our core, we strive to cultivate diverse, synergistic environments that foster deep interconnection – both among individuals and within the planet’s all encompassing ecosystem. Quantum Sound is at the forefront of pioneering the science of audible and inaudible frequencies, releasing stored energy and invoking emergent states of healing. As integral conveners and collaborators in this field, we are actively researching how these sonic properties can be developed into targeted artistic experiences and evidence based interventions that may support some of the world’s most prevalent health conditions. We believe that in a world of growing noise and chaos, a new era is emerging – one that embraces silence and deep listening as a force for resonance and healing.
Where do you see sound-based art going in the future?
I truly believe that sound-based art is only at the precipice of its golden era because of the advent of emerging social, spatial audio and vibroacoustic technologies. Never before have we been so connected and yet so disconnected. With the amount of information overload, global political and environmental challenges, platforms feeding us unending choices of data and content to choose from, more and more people will seek personalised environments of resonance and healing.
This is where sound-based art developed with the precision of quantum sound integrating insights from cognitive neuroscience, epigenetics, and ancient wisdom, can have the potential to become a fundamental catalyst for advancing the future of human consciousness and collective cultural and systemic evolution.
This is The Design Issue – tell us more about your core design principles.
My core sound design principles are rooted in a practice of patience, surrender, deep awareness, precision, unwavering truth, and an open heart, deeply listening not just to sound, but for the moment- to-moment potential in all that exists.
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