We nearly missed our plane home from Bermuda because I was out on the beach trying to record the sound of the waves. (It was our first vacation in five years, and I don’t get to the ocean much.) Back home, I tucked myself into bed, pressed Play, and heard…a lot of wind and static. Wait, there it was: beneath all the “noise,” a faint echo of the soothing, rhythmic murmur that had lulled me to a stress-free sleep every night.
Granted, being on vacation had something to do with the sleep quality, too. But there’s a reason so many of us have rainstorms and babbling brooks on our playlists and fountains on our patios. In Blue Mind, an elegant study of water’s effects on our minds and bodies, Wallace J. Nichols cites study after study about the health effects of water sounds. In one, cancer patients watched a nature video that included 15 minutes of the sound of ocean waves, waterfalls, and splashing creeks. Their stress hormones dropped 20 to 30 percent.
So, why?
Erik Miller-Klein is an associate partner and acoustical consultant at SSA Acoustics, which provides acoustical engineering design support for buildings and has worked with Boeing to reduce factory noise. He says “most water features create broadband sound, which means the sound has equal amounts of energy at most audible frequencies.”
In other words, those ocean waves are washing over our ears, drowning them with so much information that our brains don’t even try to pick out individual tones within the whoosh. The ear is sending thousands of impulses to the brain, but they’re spread evenly across the spectrum of frequencies. So unless you’re standing under a crashing waterfall, that fullness of broadband sound comes across as a soothing, single sound, not a symphony of distinct tones and pitches.
The brain relaxes.
Water sounds also block or soften less attractive noises, hushing the grate and shrill of modern life. As a result, we’re less easily distracted. We’ve found, in Miller-Klein’s phrase, “an acoustic oasis.”
It’s a lot like where we started, sloshing about in amniotic fluid. Or, if you’re science minded, staggering out of the primal sea to lose our gills and find our land legs. Millennia later, the sound of water still has a way of enveloping us. After all, our bodies are 60 percent water, and our planet is 70 percent water. We are of water. When we listen to its rhythms, we don’t need to be in hypervigilant, active-listening mode. We can let it wash over us.
What about white noise—isn’t it more soothing? Nope. “White noise is just an electronic approximation of broadband,” Miller-Klein says. “You can manipulate white noise to sound like water and vice versa. Water is just a more natural version of white noise, with a little more variation across the spectrum.”
There are only a few times water ceases to soothe us: when it’s slowed to an annoying leaky-faucet drip, and the ear can pick out the individual percussive noises, or when it’s too loud, a roaring cataract a few inches away.
Otherwise? It’s bliss.
