(RNS) — Imagine you are walking into a spa, and you are likely to hear an immersive soundscape of soft harmonies, resonant tones and gentle textures submerging your senses.
You are experiencing New Age music, a genre designed to promote relaxation, mindfulness and internal healing. Nonmelodic compositions featuring soft piano notes, delicate harp scales, the shimmering chimes of crystal bowls and ambient synthesizers characterize the genre.
Often labeled as “spa music,” New Age has experienced a resurgence in recent years, gaining popularity alongside the rise of wellness culture and spirituality and a decline in organized religious participation, especially among younger generations. And while overcoming religious backlash was a challenge New Age artists and producers faced when the genre first gained traction about 50 years ago, today artificial intelligence poses a new threat.
“I feel like we live in a society where we are bombarded by stimuli all of the time, especially if you have social media,” said Ava Rian Buckler, a 25-year-old former professional astrologer who now does creative consulting in Indiana.
Rian Buckler was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, which makes her mind particularly restless, she said. Around 2018, she began feeling increasingly overwhelmed, so she decided to delete her social media accounts and came across New Age music online.
“Listening to healing vibrations, I felt like my attention was coming back to me,” she said. “I felt like my energy was coming back to me.”
(Photo by Antoni Shkraba/Pexels/Creative Commons)
Rian Buckler describes herself as deeply spiritual rather than religious, having grown up in a nondogmatic Christian household. She often listens to New Age music at a low volume while she sleeps because she said she believes that’s when her subconscious is most receptive to its therapeutic properties.
According to HowMusicCharts.com, some of the genre’s most notable artists, such as Brian Eno, Laraaji and Steven Halpern, have seen a renewed interest over the past 15 years. Dozens of YouTube channels created in the last several years dedicated to healing sound vibrations have gained millions of subscribers. And in the broader study and relaxation music category, LoFi Girl, a 24/7 livestream of lo-fi beats, has become one of YouTube’s most-viewed channels, amassing 14 million subscribers since posting its first “easy-listening” video five years ago.
“The thing that I’m really proud of is that we’ve managed to normalize (New Age) and make it part of what young people think of as music as opposed to being something that’s like sort of music with an asterisk,” said Douglas Mcgowan, a Grammy-nominated music producer and owner of Yoga Records, a Los Angeles-based label dedicated to preserving and promoting New Age music and other niche genres.
Yoga Records is known for its archival work and has played a key role in reintroducing classic New Age albums to modern audiences. Mcgowan said that since founding Yoga Records in 2008, he has seen it as his mission to highlight the potential for listeners to find meaning in New Age.
“To me, New Age is a type of secular, profound and spiritual experience,” Mcgowan said. “It’s a personal feeling of wonder. It’s the feeling that you get from a beautiful sunset rather than going to a church or a mosque.”
The genre traces its roots in the United States to the 1970s, when musicians began experimenting with sound as a tool for stress reduction. At the forefront of the movement was Halpern, who is regarded as the pioneer of the genre.
Musician Steven Halpern. (Photo courtesy Steven Halpern)
“I was the first person healed by my music,” said Halpern, who has released over 100 albums and has hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners on streaming platforms. A video published to his YouTube channel called “Steven Halpern Great Pyramid OMs Cymatics” has over 500,000 views. Halpern was also nominated for a Grammy Award for best New Age album in 2013.
“Healing comes from a balance of body, mind and spirit,” he said. “In the 1980s, the major music labels said, ‘We’re going to call it contemporary instrumental because New Age has a spiritual component to it that we don’t want to get involved with.’”
According to Halpern, healing music can synchronize brainwaves with the alpha state, a neurological pattern linked to relaxation and balance. He references research on the physiological effects of sound, including 1994 findings that suggested his music helped maintain healthy blood flow whereas harsh, stress-inducing sounds cause white blood cells to clump together, potentially leading to health effects.
In earlier days, Halpern said, New Age music faced backlash from religious groups. For example, in Pastor Bob Larson’s 1989 book “Straight Answers on the New Age,” Halpern was labeled a “ringleader of the demonic cult music that they call New Age music.”
Some of the many albums by Steven Halpern available on his website. (Screen grab)
“I said, ‘What?’” Halpern recalled. “I work with angels. I work with powers of light.”
Some religious groups opposed New Age music because of its association with meditation, which they viewed as contrary to Christianity. But Halpern considers his work a continuation of ancient healing traditions, which he connects to biblical references, the teachings of Edgar Cayce (a late self-proclaimed American clairvoyant), Sufi masters and the mathematical principles of Pythagoras. Halpern was inspired by historical uses of music in the temples of Egypt, Greece and China.
“I wanted to hear a contemporary version of what healing music would sound like in the 20th century, and there was nothing available,” Halpern said.
When music stores in California said they had no place for his work, Halpern, who is a classically trained jazz musician, found success at metaphysical bookstores, yoga centers and crystal shops. He soon was part of building a musical movement.
Fifty years later, as popular streaming services such as Spotify make music more accessible than ever, New Age musicians and producers now are contending with AI-generated music.
“The whole AI revolution really hit my part of the music field,” Halpern said. “It’s never going to hit Beyonce because you can’t fake her. But the arrangement of things? That’s a different story,” adding that New Age music is an easier target for fabrication because of its structural simplicity, repetition and lack of vocals.
“You see very clearly that New Age music is really sort of the first music that is falling to artificial intelligence,” Mcgowan said.
In recent years, Spotify has faced scrutiny for the proliferation of AI-generated beats, ambient tones and New Age music on its platform, which cuts company costs of paying artists.
“In my case, I saw my royalties (on Spotify) go down 70% in one month,” Halpern said. “It was shocking.” Halpern said that, across multiple platforms, Apple Music, Spotify and Pandora, this is the case.
This trend underscores growing concerns that the rise of AI-generated compositions could diminish the genre’s spiritual and wellness essence, which many listeners seek.
“Nobody has shown me any AI New Age music that has meant anything to me,” Mcgowan said. “I’m not saying it’s not possible — in fact, I’m saying it’s inevitable — but my focus on New Age music of the past has always been about creating an anchor in reality. Like, it’s about grounding us in a historical bedrock that is solid and real.”
Halpern also said because of costs, much potential research on the healing properties of New Age music has remained unexplored, which also remains true for AI-generated music.
Younger listeners like Rian Buckler are also approaching AI-generated music with caution.
“I want to support real humans who have been doing this for a long time, especially people like Steven Halpern,” she said, adding, however, that if an advanced AI model was specifically designed with healing frequencies and programmed with a deep understanding of the genre’s history and its effects on the brain, she could be open to listening to it.
“But as far as everyday use, I don’t think anybody’s doing that yet,” she said.
