Digital Sleep

Words by Ray Robinson

It’s always a pleasure when someone from within our extended Whitelabrecs community drops in with something unexpected for this blog. Writer and Ambient artist Ray Robinson returns, following his previous blog post ‘The Ambient Condition - Eno, Airports, and Industrial Malaise’ (see HERE). First, to introduce him, he has released an eRecord on Whitelabrecs under his solo alias Wodwo and then also a collaboration with Simon McCorry called ‘Every Creeping Thing’. Then last summer, he released an album as one half of JARR alongside Jon Attwood. By trade though, Ray is a writer and a rather good one at that...

Rather than retelling the story of Music for Airports, here Ray explores how the once-radical idea of music designed to tint a space rather than command it, has now become an emotional infrastructure for the streaming age. He examines how Ambient sound now soothes, manages and monetises our attention, asking us - are we listening? Or simply anaesthetising ourselves?

It’s a thoughtful, balanced piece which should be especially resonant for those of us who care deeply about how and why this music is made.

If you enjoy Ray’s writing, there’s a link at the bottom where you can read more as well as check out some of his music.

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DIGITAL SLEEP
Ray Robinson/Wodwo

I’m writing this while listening to Bloom, Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers’ generative music app. The bell-like sounds shimmer and fade as I type—random, delicate, endlessly self-renewing. Looped compositions free of instruments, melodies or audio files. No track to skip, no chorus to anticipate, only the sound-garden of slowly unfurling and overlapping tones. It feels less like listening to music than listening to time rearrange itself.

Across the world, others are doing the same: streaming, looping, drifting. From soothing drones and chimes to rain tapping on a digital roof, ambient sound has become our collective lullaby. What was once an esoteric 1970s experiment now hums through billions of streams. The algorithms work quietly in the dark, learning our restlessness, our calm. The phenomenon we call digital sleep is no longer just about playlists—it’s a cultural reflex, a way of managing attention, anxiety, and the body’s desire for stillness in an over-lit age.

In the hour before sleep, a low electronic murmur rises from bedrooms and offices everywhere. It leaks from laptops, from phones glowing beside pillows, from servers humming in warehouses outside Frankfurt, Dallas, Seoul. Students, freelancers, insomniacs, new parents—all press play on the same drift of pads and half-remembered piano. The sound is not something to listen to so much as to enter. The same device that jolts us awake with headlines now promises rest. The hand that scrolls is the hand that seeks stillness.

We’ve learned to outsource our quietude. Music that once rewarded our attention now functions as an anaesthetic for it. ‘Deep Focus,’ ‘Peaceful Retreat,’ ‘Ambient Relaxation’—titles without authors, moods without makers. Yet behind the algorithmic curtain, there are humans shaping the air.

THE LONG ARC

Ambient music began as an art of noticing things usually unnoticed: the whisper of curtains shifting in a breeze; hot water ticking through pipes; the soft compression of floorboards as someone moves through a neighbouring room.

In 1978, Eno released Music for Airports. The concept was simple, almost absurd: music designed to blend with its environment, to tint a space rather than dominate it. It was music to be ignored. A composition meant to occupy the same sonic register as footsteps on polished floors, muffled announcements over tannoy systems, the 100Hz hum of fluorescent lights. Eno imagined passengers seated in departure lounges, anxious and displaced, soothed by sound they barely registered.

The context was everything. An airport lounge. A gallery. A liminal zone between destinations, where people waited. These were public spaces, transitional and temporary. The music matched their character—unobtrusive, patient, slow to reveal itself.

But now the waiting happens elsewhere. In bedrooms lit only by charging cables. In offices humming with air conditioning, low-grade dread and ennui. The music has moved inward, following us through doors, into private hours. The art gallery became the commute; the airport lounge became the bed.

The shift is profound: from communal space to solitary ritual; from public art to personal anaesthetic; from music as intervention to music as infrastructure. What was once a compositional statement—radical in its passivity—has become a utility. We stream it while working, while sleeping, while trying not to think. Eno wanted to induce calm; we want to induce unconsciousness.

But now it’s become an art of erasure; it wipes the world clean, turning every open-plan office and sleepless bedroom into neutral air; and that air hums differently now—data-rich and monetised and endlessly refreshed.

What we call peace is the softest possible form of distraction.
Still, something in it works.

THE MACHINERY OF REST

We’ve learned to outsource our quietude. But what is the cost of this exchange?

Each stream generates fractional pence. A play here, a play there. Multiply this by millions and it becomes something else entirely: a river of attention converted into capital. Platforms measure engagement in hours listened, retention rates, user stickiness. Calm becomes a metric. Rest becomes performance data.

The labels that dominate ambient playlists are not artist collectives but content mills. Anonymous producers, hired to generate hours of soothing sound under generic monikers. The music is optimised for algorithmic favour—no sudden dynamics, no dissonance, nothing to provoke a skip. It must be smooth, frictionless, endlessly listenable without ever being listened to. The perfect product: consumed but not remembered.

Who profits? Spotify, Apple, YouTube. Aggregate platforms take the largest share, of course. On a much smaller scale, there are playlisters who use and monetise artists’ tracks, often without seeking permission. Meanwhile, the artists who pioneered the form—those who spent decades refining texture, space, restraint—earn almost nothing per stream. Their music sits alongside mass-produced filler, indistinguishable in the scroll. The algorithm does not care about lineage or craft. It cares about retention.

There is something quietly devastating about this. You could argue that the music that was designed to resist commodification has become the most perfectly commodified sound imaginable. It does not demand attention. It does not interrupt consumption. It is the background to productivity, the soundtrack to our managed fatigue. We listen while we work so we can work longer. We listen while we sleep so we can sleep faster, deeper.

This is not music for its own sake. It is music as service: as tool, as lubricant, as maintenance. And in this, it becomes indistinguishable from other forms of self-optimisation. Meditation apps, sleep trackers, productivity dashboards—all part of the same apparatus. We must even monitor our rest.

But there’s a stranger element to this. Some of us—myself included—have become complicit. We make this music. Small labels, bedroom producers, long- time enthusiasts. We care about the form. We spend hours shaping a drone, tuning a reverb tail, layering field recordings of rain on glass or wind through trees. We’re not chasing streams; we’re chasing something else. Some idea of beauty, perhaps. Some fidelity to the tradition Eno started.

And yet, our work enters the same system. It is uploaded, tagged, compressed. It is placed in playlists beside content-mill filler. It is consumed in the same way: half-heard, background, functional. Does this diminish it? Or does it simply mean that care persists even inside the machine?

The paradox is this: the music is both genuine and industrialised, both craft and product. We make it with intention, and it is received with distraction. The transaction is complete, but something human remains—like a signal beneath noise, barely audible, but there.

THE BODY’S KNOWLEDGE

What does ambient sound actually do to us? Neuroscience offers partial answers. Slow tempos and low frequencies can reduce cortisol, the hormone of stress. Repetitive patterns—drones, loops, ostinato—entrain brainwaves, encouraging alpha and theta states associated with relaxation and light sleep. The brain, always searching for novelty, finds none in ambient music. Deprived of stimulation, it quietens.

This is why white noise works. Why brown noise works. Why the sound of rain on a tin roof can send us under. The brain stops scanning for threats, stops processing language, stops trying to predict what comes next. It lets go.

But there’s a darker edge to this. Active listening—the kind that engages memory, emotion, expectation—is cognitively demanding. It requires presence. Passive listening, by contrast, is effortless. It asks nothing. And in this, ambient music becomes the perfect soundtrack for distraction.

We are not listening. We are being soothed into a state where listening is no longer necessary. This is its function: to create a sonic environment in which attention can be safely suspended. But suspended in service of what? Sleep, focus, productivity.

And this is where the science becomes troubling. Because what if we are training ourselves to no longer tolerate silence? To no longer tolerate the discomfort of an unoccupied mind?

Research on sleep suggests that our reliance on ambient sound may be altering our baseline need for auditory stimulus. We grow dependent not just on the sound itself, but on the ritual of pressing play. The act becomes inseparable from rest. Without it, the mind feels exposed. Vulnerable. Agitated. We have outsourced the capacity to self-soothe.

This is not rest. This is management. We are managing our own consciousness, mediated by technology, quantified by data. How many hours streamed? How quickly did we fall asleep? The devices measure our drift, and in measuring it, shape it.

Perhaps this is the real cost. Not the economics, though those matter. Not the quality of the music, though that matters too. But the slow erosion of our ability to simply be still. To sit with silence. To inhabit our own restlessness without needing to smooth it away.

In an office somewhere, a woman slips on her headphones and drifts into a synthetic forest. At the desk next to her, a man drowns his own thoughts in virtual rain. Each believes they are alone, yet they form part of a vast simultaneous quiet—a chorus of retreat. The music carries our fatigue and our longing for pause. Between work and sleep lies the stream: endless, invisible, a river of calm through every restless room.

We reach for the screen to find what we’ve lost: a quiet corner of the day, a space to breathe. The same device that often fractures attention now offers refuge. Our solitude has become transactional: tap, play, drift. The logic is ritualistic. Some choose forest rustle, others a synthetic hum. Each soundscape is a temporary architecture—a room built to hold the mind. We are users of calm rather than participants in it. The music is measured not in depth of experience, but in the reduction of distraction.

And yet, even as we recognise the contradiction, we keep listening.

THE WORLD IN A ROOM

We are not alone in this. In Tokyo, a man streams forest ambience while commuting through underground corridors. In Berlin, a woman falls asleep to synthesised rainfall in a fifth-floor apartment overlooking concrete. In São Paulo, teenagers share playlists curated for late-night study sessions—long, beatless, almost featureless sound.

The drift is global. But is it uniform?

In South Korea, there is a tradition of listening to the sounds of nature—wind through bamboo, water over stone—as a meditative practice. These are not recordings but the sounds themselves, attended to with care. Similarly, in parts of rural India, the evening quiet is considered sacred. Silence is not something to fill but something to honour.

And yet even in these places, the ambient stream is gaining ground. The same playlists, the same algorithms. The homogenisation of rest.

Is this a Western export? A by-product of hyper-connectivity, of the particular anxieties produced by late capitalism? Perhaps. The sleeplessness of the knowledge worker, the insomniac freelancer, the over-scheduled student—these are conditions born of specific economic pressures. And the ambient stream is, in part, a response to those pressures.

But it would be reductive to see it only through that lens. Because the need for sonic comfort is not new. Every culture has its lullabies, its rituals of sound meant to ease the transition between waking and sleep. What has changed is not the need, but the delivery system. The lullaby is now algorithmic, its singer a server farm.

Still, something is lost in translation. The lullaby was local, intimate, sung by a voice you knew. The ambient stream is distant, anonymous, generated by forces you cannot see. One is an act of care; the other is an act of consumption.

They are not the same.

And this raises a question: if we accept that sound can shape consciousness, whose sound are we allowing in? What are we consenting to when we press play?

The comfort depends upon electricity and Wi-Fi, of course—the very same infrastructure that feeds our agitation. Still, within the circuitry there’s something human: because someone pressed record; someone cared enough to make a sound worth entering. The algorithm shapes the moment but can’t inhabit it. It can’t know the subtle exhale when the mind finally slows.

In this way, ambient music has become an emotional infrastructure—a soft scaffold for attention. Piano, drone, rain, wind: elements of a landscape engineered for the interior. It binds together hours of work and of thought, offering continuity rather than climax. The playlists are infinite—curated by people, but also optimised by code. The calm is manufactured, but in brief moments, genuinely felt. Functional, ubiquitous, quietly miraculous, the music gives us permission to stop.

The playlists, of course, know us. They track when we sleep, when we skip, when our attention wavers. They learn our moods as data. The paradox is total: the algorithm offers calm while demanding information about our unrest. We are listening to our own behaviour, translated into drones.

And yet, the human hand persists. Bedroom producers, small labels, long-time enthusiasts such as myself—we still make these sounds with care. We crave that irregularity, the imperfection that signals life. We have become hybrid listeners—seeking refuge in the machine, yearning for the trace of a pulse beneath it.

THE SILENT EMERGENCY

There are those for whom ambient sound is not luxury but necessity. People living with tinnitus, for whom silence is not rest but a high-pitched scream. People with ADHD, for whom the right kind of sound can mean the difference between focus and collapse. People with PTSD, for whom certain frequencies or rhythms can interrupt the feedback loop of hyper-vigilance.

For these listeners, ambient music is not about optimisation. It is about survival. It is a tool, yes—but a tool in the way a walking stick is a tool. Something that allows movement through the world.

This is where the conversation shifts. Because if we critique the commodification of calm, we must also acknowledge that for some people, access to that calm—however mediated—is transformative. The teenager who can finally sleep through the night. The office worker who can hold focus long enough to meet a deadline. The new parent who finds, in a drone or a field recording, ten minutes of peace.

These are not trivial outcomes. They are lifelines.

And yet, the infrastructure that delivers them is the same infrastructure that harvests attention, monetises distraction, and perpetuates dependence. The system is cruel in its efficiency: it provides relief while ensuring you will need to return. The subscription renews. The stream never ends.

This is the paradox at the heart of digital sleep; it genuinely works. But it works within a framework designed to extract value from vulnerability. And so we are left with the question: can we separate the function from the apparatus?

Can we take what is helpful without becoming hostage to what is harmful?

I don’t know the answer. But I know that the people who depend on this music deserve better than a system that profits from their need.

THE SILENCE WE AVOID

What if the problem is not the music but what we are using it to avoid? Silence, true silence, is rare (and unpleasant: see: anechoic chamber). Even in the countryside, there is wind, birdsong, the distant hum of a motorway or aeroplane, perhaps. In cities, silence does not exist at all. But there is a difference between environmental sound and the sonic cocoon we build for ourselves.

When we stream ambient music, we are not just adding sound. We are choosing to occupy our attention so it cannot wander. We are building a barrier between ourselves and the interior. And perhaps that is the point.

Because the mind, left to itself, does not remain calm. It spirals. It fixates. It replays conversations, anticipates disasters, revisits failures. The unmediated mind is not a peaceful place. And so we reach for distraction—not the jarring distraction of social media, but the soft distraction of ambient sound. A kinder anaesthetic.

But what if that restlessness is not something to be managed but something to be attended to? What if the discomfort is information?

Philosophical and spiritual traditions have long held that silence is essential—not for what it gives, but for what it reveals. In silence, we encounter ourselves without mediation. This is difficult. It is often unpleasant. But it is also, in some fundamental way, necessary.

The ambient stream short-circuits this encounter. It gives us permission to remain comfortable. And in doing so, it keeps us at a distance from whatever it is we are avoiding. Grief, loneliness, boredom, fear. The things that surface when we stop filling the space.

I am not arguing for a return to some imagined past where people simply endured their restlessness without aid. That would be both naïve and cruel. But I am suggesting that there is a cost to never being alone with ourselves. A cost to always having something between us and the silence.

And that cost is cumulative. It accrues slowly, almost imperceptibly. Until one day we realise we cannot sleep without the stream. Cannot focus without the drone. Cannot simply be without something filling the air.

We have become dependent. Not on the music itself, but on the absence of silence.

Sometimes the world presses too close and our homes, our bedrooms, become a sanctuary. Long pieces—chimes, drones, faint field recordings—create what we call breathing space. The peace is mediated and mass-produced, but it is peace nonetheless. For some, these soundscapes are a background to study or to sleep; for others, they are essential—lifelines through anxiety, quiet companions when the world is just way too loud.

Each room separate, yet echoing.

Amid the endless playlists, human attention remains. Musicians still record long takes, layer silence, shape texture. Calm is not automatic; it must be made, consciously crafted. These sonic shelters are gestures of care—acknowledgements that we are fragile, distracted, in need of some kind of containment.

Ambient music, at its best, resists the speed of the world not by opposing it, but by absorbing it, softening it, and remaking it into a digital kind of tenderness. And the drift is now global; from Copenhagen to São Paulo, headphones hum with similar frequencies.

SOFIE BIRCH AND THE COLLABORATIVE DRIFT

In Copenhagen, composer and synthesist Sofie Birch hosts Ambient Abracadabra, a monthly radio show on NTS. It’s a sound collage featuring listeners’ unreleased sound creations alongside excerpts from podcasts on natural medicine, spiritual work, and mysteries. People send her their recordings—improvisations, field recordings, unfinished sketches—and she weaves them into the broadcast. The result is intimate and sprawling, polished and raw. It sounds like a collective exhale.

This is ambient music as exchange. The sound is not optimised for engagement but shaped by care. There is no profit motive, no extraction. It is simply people making sound for one another, sustaining a shared space.

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Birch’s work suggests a different model. Not music as product, but music as conversation. A network of care, dispersed and decentralised, held together by nothing more than the willingness to contribute. Participation matters as much as authorship. The stream is alive because people tend to it.

And this, perhaps, is what has been lost in the industrial model. The sense that we are making something together. That our listening is not passive consumption but a form of presence.

In Ambient Abracadabra, imperfection is not just tolerated—it is essential. The rough edges, the unfinished gestures, the amateur recordings: these are what make it human. Polish would erase the trace of effort, the sense of care. And it is that trace, fragile and barely audible, that transforms sound into something more than background.

Other projects have emerged with similar intentions. Wave Farm, a New York-based arts organisation, runs the Framework program—a radio show constructed from contributions submitted by listeners and members of the field-recording community. Lines, an online forum for experimental musicians, hosts communal listening sessions and exchanges. NTS Radio itself features dozens of shows curated by enthusiasts, not algorithms.

These are small operations, precarious and underfunded. But they persist. They represent a different way of organising attention: not around metrics, but around community. Not around extraction, but around exchange.

This is not to romanticise them. These projects are fragile. They rely on unpaid labour, on the goodwill of contributors who receive little in return. They exist in the margins, unseen by the vast majority of people who stream ambient sound.

But they matter. They matter because they prove that another model is possible. That music can circulate without being monetised. That rest can be shared without being sold.

And they matter because they remind us that behind every sound, there is a person. Someone who cared enough to press record. Someone who shaped the air with intention. The algorithm delivers it, but it cannot make it. That still requires us.

Because there is democracy in this drift. Anyone with a microphone can contribute. Imperfection is allowed, presence valued over polish (and, some would say, the less polished the better). The music carries human fragility yet disperses it across the network, transforming solitude into connection. In this, ambient listening becomes both private and communal, solitary and shared.

Machines deliver it, but humans sustain it.

THE RETURN TO BLOOM

Eno’s Bloom has looped again, quietly remaking itself, and as its tones hang in the air, I think of the servers still pulsing somewhere far away, of millions of playlists turning rain into signal, drone into data, silence into a very lucrative calm. Every listener alone, and yet every listener connected—a silent chorus breathing in time.

But there is something else. Something I have only recently begun to notice.

When I first started making ambient music back in 2018, I thought I was creating sound to be absorbed. Background, texture, atmosphere. I wanted it to dissolve into the room. But over time, I’ve realised I was also creating it for myself. Not as product, but as practice. The act of shaping sound became a way of paying attention. To time, to space, to the small shifts in tone and texture that most people ignore.

This is what the industrial model cannot replicate. The music may sound the same, but the intention behind it is absent. Content-mill producers are optimising for algorithmic favour; I am listening for something I cannot name. This difference matters, even if no one else hears it.

And perhaps this is true for all of us who make this music outside the commercial apparatus. We are not producing content; we are practicing attention. And in that practice, there is resistance. Not loud, not confrontational, but quiet. Persistent. A refusal to let the form be entirely subsumed.

The people who stream my work probably do not know this. They are falling asleep, or trying to focus, or seeking calm, or looking for something to play in the background while they work. And that’s fine. The music serves them in whatever way they need it to. But for me, the making of it is an act of care. And care, however small, persists even when it is not recognised.

This is what Birch understands. What the communal radio streams understand. The music is a gesture, not a product. It says: someone was here. Someone shaped this sound with intention. And even if you do not notice, even if it dissolves into background, that intention remains. A signal beneath the noise.

LISTENING AS PRESENCE

We have outsourced our quiet, yet claimed it anew. The device that once demanded our eyes now cradles our ears. Ambient music has become the bridge between desire and delivery, between human care and machine repetition. It is the place where we pause within the endlessness—a temporary home built from data and longing.

But what if we approached it differently? Not as background, but as foreground. Not as something to ignore, but as something to attend to.

This is the original intention of ambient music. Eno wanted sound that could be ignored or engaged with. Music that rewarded both inattention and deep listening. The problem is, we have forgotten the second part. We use ambient sound only as anaesthetic, never as encounter.

But when you listen closely—really listen—the music reveals itself. The subtle shifts in texture. The way a drone slowly modulates over minutes. The almost imperceptible movement of delay and reverb, creating depth and space. These are not incidental details. They are the music itself.

And in attending to them, something shifts. The music stops being background and becomes presence. Time slows. The restless mind, always searching for novelty, finds something quieter: patience. Attention without urgency.

This is not the same as productivity. It is not focus in service of output. It is simply being with sound. And in that being, there is rest—not the managed, transactional rest of the stream, but something older. Something closer to stillness.

I am not suggesting we all become active listeners. That is unrealistic, and for many people, unnecessary. But I am suggesting that occasionally—just occasionally—we might try. We might close our eyes, set aside the task, and simply listen. Not to optimise sleep or focus, but to be present with sound.

Because this, too, is a form of care. Care for the music, yes. But also care for ourselves. A recognition that we are more than users. More than metrics. That our attention, however fragmented, is still ours.

THE HYBRID LISTENER

Beneath the hum, perhaps, the machine dreams. Not consciously, but through us. Its dream is our drift.

And we are part of it now. Hybrid listeners, caught between two modes. We stream for function, but we hunger for something more. We know the music is mediated, monetised, industrialised—and yet, in brief moments, we still feel its pull. The beauty of a sustained chord. The way rain sounds through headphones. The soft collapse into sleep.

We are complicit, but we are not passive. We shape the system even as it shapes us. We make playlists, share recommendations, seek out the human trace beneath the algorithm. We are drawn to imperfection, to the lo-fi sound of saturation or a tape’s hiss or wow and flutter, to anything that signals presence.

This is what keeps the form alive. Not the metrics, but the stubborn persistence of human care. The bedroom producer layering drones at 3am. The field recordist standing in the rain with a microphone. The listener who notices, just for a moment, the way a note decays.

We are tired. We are distracted. We are overstimulated and under-rested. And so we reach for the stream, for the soft hum that promises calm. But we are also listening. We are still here. Still paying attention, even when we pretend not to.

And that, perhaps, is enough. Not to resist the machine, but to remain human within it. To let the algorithm deliver the sound, but to shape how we receive it. To use the tools without becoming the tool.

CODA

Click: I close the Bloom app. The echo lingers, a trace of quiet remains—part algorithm, part human, part hope.

But calm is never pure, is it? Never solitary. Never contained. It’s mediated. Shared. Felt.

And sometimes, that’s enough.

The screen dims. The room is silent now—not the constructed silence of ambient sound, but actual silence. The hum of the fridge. A car passing outside. My own breath.

I could press play again. Start another stream, another drift. But I don’t.

Not yet.

For now, I sit with the quiet. It is uncomfortable. My mind reaches for distraction, for something to fill the space. But I let it reach. I let the restlessness surface.

And after a while—minutes, maybe longer—something shifts. The agitation softens. The monkey mind, deprived of input, begins to settle. Not into calm, exactly. But into presence.

This, I think, is what we are avoiding. Not silence itself, but what silence makes us feel. The discomfort of being alone with ourselves. The noise inside when the noise outside stops.

Ambient music can hold us through that. It can be a bridge, a scaffold, a temporary shelter. But it cannot replace the work of simply being still.

And so I sit. The quiet presses close. I let it.

Outside, somewhere, millions of streams are still playing. The servers hum. The playlists turn. The drift continues. But here, in this room, for this moment, I am not streaming.

I am listening to silence. And silence, I am learning, is not empty.

It is full.

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If you’ve enjoyed reading Ray’s article, you can explore more of his work HERE. And you can also check out Ray’s own Ambient work as Wodwo HERE.