Last month, we ran a story covering composer Norihiko Hibino's new app, Prescription for Serenity. A follow-up to Prescription for Sleep, it contains dozens of new compositions designed to help listeners rest and relax. This month, we had the pleasure of talking to Hibino-san about his work on the app, as well as the progress of Hibino Sound Therapy Lab as a whole.
Crunchyroll: Our readers probably know you best for your video game work, but you've been much more focused on "sound therapy" lately. What first made you interested in the healing aspects of music?
Norihiko Hibino: As I created music focused on violence and stimulation over the years, and was asked to create more and more of this type of music, I started to ask myself, "Is this really what music is supposed to do?" I thought music should make people happy, or encourage them.
Around that time, I had a friend with terminal breast cancer. I brought her some music to give her some sort of comfort but she died regardless. I felt powerless, but thanks to Jayson Napolitano at Scarlet Moon Productions, I got to know a harp therapist named Linda Hill-Phoenix and had a chance to see what she was doing for her patients receiving hospice care. She played to the patient’s state, including their breathing pattern, and created music along with them rather than forcing what she came up with on them, which we tend to do as musicians. That really changed my perspective towards music.
Crunchyroll: Tell us a little bit about the team working with you to make these albums.
Hibino: Our team is very small, so we can be quite flexible. Marc Cellucci, the founder of Mission One who developed Prescription for Serenity, is my long-time friend and has a very good team. As for the music creation part, thanks to my videogame work and my experience as a jazz saxophone player, I have many friends who are talented musicians and engineers. We get together in the studio and share our vision to create music for people who are in pain, suffering, or have sleep problems... as a Christian, I believe it’s not really through our own skill or desire that we’re able to help people with our music, but rather through the power of God. So we pray that our music will help people through their difficult times prior to recording.
Crunchyroll: "Prescription for Serenity" is not your first music app. Before this was "Prescription for Sleep," correct? About how much music would a listener have access to if they downloaded all your apps?
Hibino: Yes. Prescription for Sleep only had four songs, but we had an animated visualizer. After its release we realized people don't want to see the visuals when they are going to sleep... so we focused on more songs with a simpler visualizer. Currently we have 82 songs, and more will be added regularly. We have more than 300 songs in our sound library, with many more to come, and it’s all music created for therapeutic purposes.
Crunchyroll: What makes music "healing," in your opinion? What attributes does a song need to be part of one of your apps?
Hibino: First of all, I think music itself is just a tool, like a pen. The pen is a tool that is so powerful that the words you write with it can make people happy or even force them to hurt themselves. So just as with the pen, the important thing for the composer, performer, or engineer working on the music is intention. As I noted before, my faith is a strong influence on everything I do, so I personally believe that prayer is an important element in making music that is different and serves the purpose to heal. Regardless of their faith preference, though, everyone working on this music understands the intent of the music, and we pray that we’re able to take the focus off our ourselves and our own musicianship and instead become a tool to promote peace and comfort.
Feel free to check out this interesting study about prayer and its therapeutic effects.
Crunchyroll: What makes "Prescription for "Serenity" different from "Prescription for Sleep"?
Hibino: Prescription for Sleep is more focused on the physical aspect of music, such as tempo and flow, to induce sleep. In Prescription for Serenity, we focus on intention and prayer, as I mentioned before.
I especially want to draw attention to the harp music that we’ve featured. It’s all performed by harp therapist Linda Hill-Phoenix who practiced harp therapy for more than 20 years at San Diego Hospice & The Institute for Palliative Medicine. She put spiritual words or photos of her patients on the music stand and improvised without any written music, using only prayer to create the music for her patients.
Crunchyroll: How does the Hibino Sound Therapy Lab hope to continue exploring the healing aspects of music in the future?
Hibino: We have two ways to explore: one is the live approach (concerts), and the other is the virtual approach (our sound system).
The live approach includes our concert tour, Music in Heaven. We’ve held over 100 performances throughout Japan, from big music halls to hospitals and home-care settings. For big shows we use visuals along with the music following the journey from birth to Heaven, with expressions of how that person was loved throughout their life. We also have doctors on stage relaying their experiences with terminally ill patients, or psychiatrists sharing their stories about developing patients’ creativity. The main message of the show is “We were born to be loved,” and the shows really touch people’s hearts and oftentimes see members of the audiences crying.
For those who cannot make it to our concerts, we developed a sound system called Rinshu. It’s a sound system focused exclusively on peace and serenity. It’s made from hand-carved wood in the shape of a yacht, with the sails in particular generating vibrations (inaudible sound frequencies) that are transmitted to the listener’s body. We worked with a university in Japan to conduct a study on the effects of the Rinshu, and found sleep-inducing effects and increased comfort as well as decreased fear and anger. What was most remarkable was that the effect was seen even in deaf participants. This device can be found in nursing homes and hospitals in Japan. We also work with patients and family members to take requests and record songs using our unique therapeutic arrangement style, adding an element of interactivity. All of the music from the Prescription for Serenity app is currently included with the Rinshu library, with more to be added online.
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Thanks very much to Hibino-san for his time, and of course for his and his colleagues' work at the Lab.
Prescription for Serenity is available to download now from the iTunes store.
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Kara Dennison is responsible for multiple webcomics, blogs and runs interviews for (Re)Generation Who and PotterVerse, and is half the creative team behind the OEL light novel series Owl's Flower. She blogs at karadennison.com and tweets @RubyCosmos.
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