Hi, everyone. So if you you're a good sleeper. If you're a bad sleeper, if you like music,
if you need music recommendations. This is a chat that I think you're going to be interested
in. I think that's just about everyone. Okay, this video is a bit different. I'm
not normally in a studio with a crew and three camera angles, but Universal Music invited me
to L.A. to explore both sleep science and an eight hour piece of experimental music.
Obviously, I showed up. I'm here with Max Richter, who's a very accomplished composer.
I can say accomplished composer in a sentence, but it took two tries. Nice. Could you introduce
yourself? Yes. So I'm a composer. I work in classical music and concert music. I make
records. I do movie scores. And I've written an eight and a half hour piece called SLEEP.
So today we will be talking about sleep, both the project and the piece of music, but also
the science. That's why you're here. Let's be real. So, Max, it could you tell everyone what
SLEEP the piece the project is. So this is eight and a half hours of instrumental music, and it's
intended as a kind of environment or a landscape to accompany you through a night's sleep.
There is a possibility that I will not be able to
play any of your music in this video. Okay. Would you be able to perhaps hum some of this
sleep so people can get a sense of it without, well, receiving a copyright violation? I can't
really hum a string quintet on piano, but what I can say is that the music is it is a steady pulse.
Okay, we have the music. You'll hear more of it later on. But for now, here's a taste.
The music has kind of specific things in it which have been shown to support sleep and to
support some of the things that your brain does while you're sleep. It's a mixture between a
creative project and kind of a poetic one, and also something which has a utility dimension,
which is about supporting a sleeping mind.
I love this because I love the intersection between art and science. Your project,
SLEEP has been performed, or that's how it was originally encountered by people.
Could you tell me about that history? So sleep started out as a record. And then, you know,
we musicians, we started thinking, Well, maybe we can do this live. Okay. In 2015,
we performed a piece for the first time in an old power station in Berlin.
So we had 500 people in beds in this amazing big sort of concrete hall. And
we played the piece through the night starting at midnight and finishing at
8 a.m. bit after 8 a.m. in the morning. And it was an extraordinary experience
and made me think about live performance in a different way, think about music in
a different way, and the relationship between performers and audience, all of these things.
I had a question from one of my Patrons where they asked, Is this piece of music meant to be
paid attention to or is it meant to be ignored? Yeah. How would you respond to that? I mean,
for me, there's no single way to experience it. And I feel that
about creativity generally. Actually, you know, I don't really buy into this idea of,
you know, that you should relate to a piece of work in a particular way.
That, to me is is the opposite of what creativity is about. I'm very
happy for people to sleep through it, and that's great. Or, you know,
often at concerts, people will stay up all night and be listening. You know,
a lot of people will do both or people will do yoga or whatever it is they want to do.
For me, that's great. You know, I'm interested actually, in seeing how
people relate to these things and seeing how they kind of fit them into their lives.
Was there a way that you actually incorporated neuroscience into the piece? I did, but again,
it wasn't really like a 1 to 1 thing. It was more to do with taking on a general principle.
And actually, the most for me, the most telling thing was that, you know,
this idea of rhythmic entrainment whereby, you know, a piece of music which has repetitive
structures in it can affect our physiology and sort of bring that physiology into,
you might say in tune with the music sleep. The music does that in a very conscious way.
You know, it's trying to sort of get the listener into the same tempo as the music. Could a strand
or a variation be thought of as a sleep cycle or a sleep stage? I mean, we know that the mind
goes through these sorts of it's like a sort of process of different phases throughout sleep.
I'm sure you've heard about different sleep stages, like light sleep, deep sleep and REM.
We cycle through these on average every 90 minutes while sleeping, but cycle length can
differ from person to person. At the beginning I thought, well, yeah, you know, we know that
slow wave sleep, for example, you know, happens at certain times after you've
fallen asleep and you know all of this. And I thought, well, maybe I could do that.
You know, I could support that process. But actually, of course,
everyone falls asleep at different rates, so that's impossible. We also cycle through the
different stages. Exactly. Different amounts. Exactly. So so it's impossible. However,
what I did think is that, you know, the piece can do this very slow pulsation and
use a lot of low frequency energy which has been shown to support that state.
And that's a very useful informational stage,
isn't it's where we consolidate memory and we we learn things and it's the origin of the phrase,
you know, I'm going to sleep on that, right? That's exactly what it is. It's that thing,
you know, even though I, I couldn't sort of match that 1 to 1 in the composition,
all the properties of the music in the composition do kind of support that in a general way.
I'd love to talk about noise as a sleep aid. I don't know what your opinions are on on noise,
what I'm talking about white noise. Yeah, brown noise. Wonderful sounds. Yeah. These
types of things. They're very common for people to use sleep. Yeah. Your music is so different to
that. It's very rhythmic. Yeah. You know, I think people have to find the thing that works for them.
The thing about these sort of white noise type sounds is that they're about redundancy. You know,
they're about no new information, right? So they kind of block out all the different
that the world is built up of, you know, the things that might disturb your sleep,
you know, if you're in a quiet room and then there's a suddenly a sound,
if you've got white noise going all the time, then it's always the same.
I mean, that's why it works. So your brain sort of stops trying to decode it and analyze and goes,
Oh, it's just that in the frequencies that you've chosen with the pace of music. Would
you intending to mask out all this sound at all? It's not so much that it's a masking.
I see the pieces in a way forming part of the environment that you're in,
the frequencies that SLEEP works with are very specifically chosen,
so it has a lot of sonics in it and it has a lot of low frequency repeated material.
And then actually what happens in the piece is that
those high frequencies towards the end start to be introduced. So the spectrum opens up. So it's like
there's a kind of sunrise in the music and then that naturally wakes us because low frequencies,
you know, they can be really loud and they still don't wake you. It's the high frequency
stuff that does what do you think the role of art is in exploring science?
Well, I see art and science as is really very, very closely related as a species. We love to
try things, we love to explore, we love to figure out new stuff. And creative work is
all about discovering things which haven't happened, you know, which you haven't,
you know. Before I wrote SLEEP, I hadn't written SLEEP. I didn't know what it was.
I made a voyage into a space which I didn't know, and I sort of looked around and tried
to populate that space with musical objects, which made sense to me.
That's a very fundamental kind of a human process, you know, moving out into a space
and you don't know what it is. I mean, this is what science has always done.
In my research. I've actually found that people use YouTube videos, TikTok videos, music, these
types of media late at night to soothe anxiety, to distract their minds. Yeah. To
provide them comfort in some way. Can you say a relationship with your piece of music? Have people
provided any feedback for how they used to? Oh, absolutely. Well, maybe I'll rewind a little bit.
One of the origin points of SLEEP was, I guess, very personal in a way. Around 2013,
2014, we started to get 4G Internet in our pockets. So we had the whole of the
Internet at high speed available. So social media, all of this stuff,
which obviously is very exciting in a way, very useful, but also a significant
psychological load because you then have to cure rate all of that information.
That's a big deal for your attention span. So big deal for attention spans,
big deal for all kinds of things. So I thought, well, how about creative work, which would allow
you to have essentially a mini holiday, like a big pause button. How about that as a way to
just kind of switch off and disconnect? So I have done a poll of my YouTube audience,
and the majority of them watch my videos, which are educational scientific videos in bed.
Right. Which I thought was fascinating. That's interesting. And a lot of people
have this behavior to help them fall asleep to wind down. It's part of their nighttime
routine. Yeah. Is there a way that your SLEEP project can fit into this? Well,
that's I'm it's interesting that people use the videos. It's almost like it's
fascinate. It's a continuation of the bedtime story in a way, right?
Yeah. It's just a new medium. It's a different kind of bedtime story, as I say.
Like, yeah, inspirational. Yeah. And I should also add that the majority of people will be watching
this interview while they. Right. Okay. Okay. Bedtime, everyone. People certainly use SLEEP.
You know, they played it at night. You know, they play it when they're getting ready for bed.
And not only sleep, of course, I mean, people use music, all kinds of music for this. And
I think there's a fair bit of research out there which shows that, you know, music can
really support the kinds of things that we need to happen in our body to get us to a place where we
can sleep. I'm very glad that you mentioned this because actually there is some new research which
my research is part of that separates different types of media that people use in the evening.
And you can categorize them because most scientists think love to classify things
into active media and passive media. Right? And active media is things like TikTok, social media,
some video games, things that are really stimulating the brain and your body and
aren't really supporting you to wind down for sleep. Whereas passive media are things that
you can still do on all of your devices that are more calming to the body that helps wind down.
So things like music, podcasts, even reading a good old fashioned book, things like that,
I'm just really happy that your work fits into this passive media category. Makes my
brain happy. Okay, good. But I think it's also a good segue way to talk about how you have
almost repurposed your original composition into your app. So yeah, so there is an app
and this really develops on the idea of the piece as a tool, as a, as a kind of utility object.
You know, I like that about music in that, you know, we've got music for getting married,
we've got music for dancing, there's war music, there's all kinds of different utility musics
and in all kinds of world cultures, actually. So why not a piece of music for sleep? So there's
now an app which enlarges on that, and it allows people to set a duration, you know, if they want
to 8 hours, they want to have a nap or half an hour or, you know, whatever it might be.
And then the various algorithms in the in the app, which will create a structure which makes
sense for that duration, I spend a lot of my time giving the people sleep tips. What's one
final sleep tip that you have for them? I feel very hugely privileged to be a great sleeper,
but and the couple of times I've had difficulty sleeping,
I made up a little a little game, a sort of mental game for myself.
I love this. And what I said is I'm lying here in a cozy bed and the lights are out.
And actually it doesn't matter if I don't sleep because I'm getting like
90% of the rest I need just lying here. This is a fantastic tip because actually
self-compassion is a concept that is studied a lot in research and strengthening people.
Self-compassion actually improves the quality of their sleep and their health
overall because we just don't give ourselves a break and everyone needs to give themselves
a break. And to the point of your music, slow down and take a moment to reset. You're
absolutely right. If you are still curious, Max's music is very thoughtful and rhythmic,
and you have a YouTube channel where people can find this.
I do, yes. Yeah. Which is just Max's name. It's my thing. And where can people find
the SLEEP app if they interest the SLEEP app is on the App store and you can use it
with I think with Spotify and with Apple Music. It's been fantastic speaking with
you. Great. Thanks. A pleasure. Thank you very much. And see you next time.
I've never said that as an outro on my YouTube channel, but maybe just see you next time is it.