Sonic Cradle sus­pends the body is a com­pletely dark cham­ber which encour­ages expe­ri­ences com­pa­ra­ble to mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion.  Users com­pose peace­ful sound­scapes in real-time using only their breathing.

Introduction and demo of the Sonic Cradle

Sonic Cradle is a relax­ing human-computer inter­ac­tion par­a­digm designed to foster med­i­ta­tive atten­tional pat­terns.  The cur­rent pro­to­type is a dark­ened cham­ber which sus­pends indi­vid­u­als in a com­fort­able ham­mock while they pro­gres­sively con­trol sound through their own res­pi­ra­tion.  15 co-design ses­sions resulted in sev­eral tweaks and improve­ments aimed at bal­anc­ing users’ per­ceived sense of control.

A mixed meth­ods inves­ti­ga­tion of the iter­ated pro­to­type with a pur­po­sive sample of 39 par­tic­i­pants demon­strated how Sonic Cradle can pleas­antly encour­age mind­ful expe­ri­ences by con­sis­tently induc­ing a calm mental clar­ity and loss of inten­tion.  Surprisingly, par­tic­i­pants also reported per­cep­tual illu­sions, feel­ings of float­ing, and emo­tional responses.  This project breaks new ground toward ful­fill­ing technology’s poten­tial to expe­ri­en­tially per­suade people to adopt and psy­cho­log­i­cally ben­e­fit from con­tem­pla­tive prac­tices like mind­ful­ness meditation.

Jay Vidyarthi pre­sent­ing the Sonic Cradle as part of his thesis defense.

Alex Kitson pre­sent­ing her paper on “Sonic Cradle: Investigating Meditative Aspects of an Interactive Technology” at the 2014 GRAND con­fer­ence in Ottawa

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» Listen to sound record­ings of the Sonic Cradle in use

» Watch a video demo of the Sonic Cradle artifact

» Learn more about the cross-disciplinary “immer­sion” frame­work which under­lies the Sonic Cradle con­cept

Recent extensions of the Sonic Cradle using Neurofeedback

Poster pre­sented at the 2^nd Mindfulness Conference in Rome, Italy 2016

While the orig­i­nal Sonic Cradle design proved effec­tive by help­ing users reach a state com­pa­ra­ble to mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion, par­tic­i­pants reported that the sound­scape occa­sion­ally dis­tracted them from breath­ing mind­fully. To address this, we are inte­grat­ing EEG data from the Interaxon Muse head-set to detect when users have achieved a state of focused atten­tion, and grad­u­ally reduce the sound­scape incon­spic­u­ously. Conversely, when EEG data reveals a state of dis­trac­tion, the sound­scape becomes more salient, increas­ing its abil­ity to cue users back to their breath with curios­ity as proved to be effec­tive in Vidyarthi & Riecke (2013). As detailed in Prpa et al. (2016), after 15 min ses­sions with the Sonic Cradle + Muse, par­tic­i­pants reported sig­nif­i­cantly lower anx­i­ety and arousal levels and increased pleas­ant­ness levels, which is promis­ing. We are cur­rently incor­po­rat­ing feed­back into next design iterations

 

Press Coverage

“…[the] idea that music might be a way into med­i­ta­tive states led to asking ques­tions about whether meld­ing music, breath­ing tech­nique and com­puter tech­nol­ogy could open the door to non-meditators.” CBC/Radio-Canada (French Version)

“Sonic Cradle… rep­re­sents … a sort of tonic to the stress which many people feel the ubiq­uity of tech­nol­ogy induces in soci­ety.” PSFK

“[Sonic Cradle] is a med­i­ta­tive biofeed­back system… which essen­tially enhances the med­i­ta­tive expe­ri­ence to such a degree that begin­ners claim to be able to have out-of-body expe­ri­ences.” Portfolio (Conde Nast)

“[Sonic Cradle] is a machine that uses breath­ing pat­terns to create immer­sive sound­scapes — and then feed them straight back into your brain to create an tex­tured, infi­nite loop of bliss.” Motherboard.TV (Vice) (2)

“An SFU grad stu­dent project that melds music, med­i­ta­tion and tech­nol­ogy landed a rare spot as an exhibit at TEDActive 2012 in Palm Springs” SFU.ca

“In his master’s research project, Jay Vidyarthi asks, para­dox­i­cally, ‘Can tech­nol­ogy be used to free us from the stress asso­ci­ated with infor­ma­tion over­load?’” SFU Graduate Studies Blog

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