How Satya Hinduja plays with different sounds to create meaningful, transformative and healing music

Born into a family that loved music, Satya HindujaThe initiation of began at a very young age. It was the only thing, she said, that attracted him. Cousins ​​often remembered playing jingles on the television by ear, and soon she began to take classical and semi-classical music lessons.

Invited to sing on All India Radio (AIR) from a young age, her natural musical talent guided her every step of the way. Often traveling to London and Switzerland to visit her uncles, she was exposed to world music. When MTV was launched in India (she was 13), it further broadened her musical vision.

Industrialist Ashok Hinduja’s daughter says that while her early years of schooling provided her with very little musical training, she found a tutor, Bismarck, who would guide her musical energies in the right direction.

“He taught me the guitar while his daughter taught me the piano. Before finding it, I was going to different music teachers and I was disappointed. Meeting Bismarck brought about a complete change in the life experience. He told me about Berklee College of Music, and I knew then, before I finished grade 10, that I had to go, ”she recalls.

In between, she says multiple personal and environmental trauma caused her music to stop. But she persevered – because she knew her life was empty without music.

Exposed to trauma and music

The day she entered Berklee was also September 11. “I was suddenly exposed to global trauma. It was one of the bigger ones because one of the flights had taken off from the Boston airport, ”she said.

Satya says it was chaos and chaos because classes didn’t go the way they should have for the first three months. Leaving a safety net at home and moving to a faraway land, then being sucked into trauma like 9/11 was heartbreaking.

But over time Satya began to play many classical guitars and compose with the instrument. She admits it was a huge culture shock, going from an “intimate experience with music” to a plethora of possibilities – music technology, jazz music theory, traditional music theory, songwriting and music therapy.

“As an independent thinker following my trajectory, when I entered Berklee I was in the category of students starting at the grassroots level. There were students younger than me who wrote symphony orchestras while I was still learning to write a note because India is so different from the United States when it comes to school. Americans learn a lot about music during their formative years, ”she says.

Soon, she will engage in songwriting, switch to film music, and merge electronic music with different world music and film soundtracks.

Explore different realms

Satya returned to India and started working in the film industry with music directors Salim-Suleiman for six and a half years.

But as a musician constantly evolving with music, she wanted to explore more. She has collaborated with mixed media artists and entered the enjoyable arts space. She also tried her hand at DJing, making her trip “a story of energy rather than music as a subject “.

In this process, she was invited to speak at Ink Talks in 2013, before which she obtained a Masters in Electronic Music Production in Dubspot (NY).

“My talk focused on the impact of different sound frequencies on us. I played the sound of a siren against the sound of the ocean. I started talking about how naturally when we are in a city like Bombay noise pollution impacts our brains on a very subconscious level that we don’t even know because we are used to the cacophony of noise. noises compared to when we move in a completely natural environment. ,” she says.

She met a neuroscientist from San Francisco at the conference that would change her life and music forever.

Satya explains, “He was talking about his journey in meditation music and trying to find his life path. He decided to go to the Himalayas to test the brain waves of meditating monks. I was intrigued and asked him how we could work together.

“He offered me a frequency of 136.10 sound cycles per second, for the heart chakra, and it was the birth of alchemical sound environments,” she adds.

Satya used the frequency as a fundamental drone in Indian classical music and composed around it. The effect was life changing.

“I wasted time and space for three hours. I lost consciousness of cognitive mind, thinking mind, monkey mind as I was still, looking out the window, even though I didn’t know I was being caught in a deep meditative state for the first time in my life. It was pretty exciting, scary, revealing and everything in between. “

Before that, a question that persisted during Satya’s research revealed the Hindu metaphysical concept of Nada Brahma (the primitive sound of being). She then began to incorporate the symbolism of ancient wisdom and yoga sutras into her minimalist and experimental music. She discovered the interconnectivity between neuro-linguistic programming, kinesiology, quantum theory and Vedic philosophy.

Deep listening experience

Alchemical sound environment [ASE], put simply, is a multi-sensory deep listening experience designed to invoke states of reflection, receptivity, and exchange.

“I decided to put it in a different genre so that people can access it. If you start telling people it’s a healing sound; there may be objections because it is not yet proven. So I decided on the name of the current compositions, Alchemic Electronica. I quickly merged electro with Buddhist chants, western instruments and tuned it in depth to also match the frequency range of the planet so people could engage in it, ”says- she.

Alchemical sound environments, says Satya, have a broader vision. She took it to Oxford, a summit in Dubai, and first introduced people to the experience, then built an ecosystem to normalize it.

After COVID hit, we started to find resonating similarities with mental health projects. In May of this year, we led a special three-hour segment, “Spotlight India”, from the Hinduja Foundation at the Global Never Alone Summit 2021 which kicked off a global conversation on mental health.

Through “Spotlight India”, the Hinduja Foundation wanted to offer the Indian public (and beyond) positive coping strategies to help them move from trauma and stigma to inspiration and action.

“We aim to build the alchemical sound environments in the field of early childhood development, its impact on the brain and body, and how we can merge new healing techniques with wisdom, ancient practices and emerging technologies.” , she explains.

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