Research
Sound, wellbeing and human response
Exploratory research, in progress, run in-house.
What we investigate
Stayfly investigates how sound environments, musical structure and contemplative practice relate to what a person experiences and to what can be measured. The company's own rooms, playback systems and production tools are what let a listening condition be defined, repeated and compared, so sound can be treated as something to vary and test rather than a word on a poster.
Sound is more than a named frequency. Spectral content, harmonic structure, level, modulation, rhythm, duration, how a sound sits in a room and the state a listener arrives in are all part of an exposure, and any of them can matter more than the number in the title of a track.
The questions are deliberately testable: which features of a sound exposure are associated with a change in neural or autonomic activity, whether such a change repeats, and how a measured response corresponds or fails to correspond with what a person reports feeling. Heart rate variability, respiration and validated self-report instruments are candidate measures for a formal protocol, not things we record today.
What we measure today
EEG is part of that work today, at the smallest honest scale. A Muse S Athena headband is worn during our own meditation practice, to learn what the instrument shows, where it is noisy, and which comparisons would be worth designing properly. Nobody else is measured, nobody is enrolled, and no physiological data is collected into the platform.
This is exploratory, non-clinical work in an experimental phase. We are learning our instruments and shaping questions worth testing. We do not diagnose conditions and we do not claim that a particular frequency treats or cures anything. Any study involving participants will require an approved protocol, informed consent, ethics oversight and biometric data governance.
Stayfly offers no medical services and gives no medical advice. Awakenest is one of the company's projects and is the setting this work is grounded in. The research belongs to the company, not to the festival, and taking part in anything at Awakenest enrols nobody in it.
Working with us
The same rooms and the same playback chain are what let a listening condition be set up, repeated and compared, which is the practical basis of this work.
We welcome contact from researchers in auditory neuroscience, psychophysiology, music cognition, human-computer interaction and public health, on protocol design, measurement validation and collaboration. Ethics approval and supervision for any participant study would sit with the institutions involved.
Enquiries and collaboration proposals go to the General contact: tech@stayflystudio.com
