Summary
- Apple Music Therapy offers enhanced popular songs with sound waves to aid focus, relaxation, and sleep.
- Focus songs are enjoyable, and Relax provides nice ambient mixes.
- Lack of Dolby Atmos content and HomePod issues limit the experience, while some Sleep songs may be off-putting for users.
Apple Music can now do much more than just entertain. Apple Music Therapy combines popular hits and special sound waves to help you better focus, relax, or sleep. Let’s see if it’s worth your time.
What Is Apple Music Therapy?
You’re probably aware that there are a number of ways to play ambient music like brown noise, or something like a rainstorm, to help you drown out distractions. There is a wide variety of apps you can choose from. You can also listen to built-in background sounds on your iPhone. The Mac even has the same background sound features.
Apple Music Therapy takes those background sounds to a new level by adding them to popular music from the streaming service. The songs are by artists Imagine Dragons, Katy Perry, Kacey Musgraves, Ludovico Einaudi, AURORA, Jhené Aiko, Chelsea Cutler, and Jeremy Zucker. The tunes feature instrumental, extended, and reimagined versions of some popular songs you’ll definitely know.
The tracks can be accessed anywhere you listen to Apple Music and are available in specific playlists.
There are three major categories of songs—Sleep, Focus, and Relax. Each category of songs has been enhanced with auditory beats or colored noise that help encourage a specific brain response.
Focus uses gamma auditory beats to help get into a focus mindset, while white noise masks distracting sounds. Songs in Relax use and blend theta beats. Finally, Sleep songs are infused with delta beats or pink noise. That works like white noise but instead uses natural sounds like rainfall and ocean waves.
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While not part of Apple Music Therapy, Apple has also unveiled another way to sit back and relax throughout the day with the Apple Music Chill Radio Station. That provides a flow of chill songs that span different genres along with mindful moments to remind you to take a breath and find calm.
The station is hosted by DJs like Brian Eno, Stephan Moccio, and Zane Lowe who will take you through stories of calm and wellbeing.
What Apple Music Does Well
I was a bit skeptical about what to expect when starting with all the Apple Music Therapy songs. But after a few days of exploring each playlist, I came away mostly pleased with the available songs. You can’t hear the sound waves infused into the music, but I enjoyed the new take on a number of popular songs.
The Focus category was my favorite to enjoy. To say it crossed genres is a bit of an understatement. I could enjoy everything from Imagine Dragons to the sounds of an owl or other birds. It was quick and easy to find something I wanted to listen to and dive right in. Relax also provided a nice mix of ambient noise and instrumentals.
Especially with some of the classical artists and more off-beat songs, it was great to be able to step out of my comfort zone and find other music to add to my rotation that’s not part of Music Therapy.
I felt that both of those categories definitely did help me focus and relax when I needed it.
What It Doesn’t Do Well
While the songs in all the categories were lossless audio, I was a bit disappointed to see that there was no Dolby Atmos content. I think that would definitely have improved the experience and made the unique soundscapes even better, especially when using Apple’s AirPods lineup or a HomePod.
And to no surprise, when using a HomePod, trying to play one of the Music Therapy playlists was an operation in frustration. If I wanted to play one of the playlists on my HomePod, I just had to start it on my iPhone and transfer it over.
The Sleep category, at least for me, was also a dud. I depend on an ambient noise app called Dark Noise to help me sleep at night. It provides a huge number of sounds that easily help me drift off and wake up well-rested in the morning.
Some of the songs were nice and more traditional, like Camping in the Rain. But then, there’s a 20-part instrumental take on Katy Perry’s “Double Rainbow” that spans more than an hour. I could only listen for a few minutes to decide it wasn’t helping me sleep at all. Other artists, like Kacey Musgraves, get the same treatment in this category, but it just didn’t work for me and was off-putting. Not exactly something that can help you get to sleep.
After a few days using Apple Music Therapy, I came away somewhat impressed with the unique new feature. While it might not be for everyone, especially if the artists aren’t your favorite, it provides a great way for anyone to tune out the outside world and its many distractions help you better plan and enjoy your day, or night. Hopefully, Apple will continue to improve the number of available songs.
The world is so full of distractions that it’s easy to get caught up in doomscrolling or finding the next TikTok trend. If you’re a Mac user, there are a number of ways you can cut through everything and just focus on work without distractions.
