Notes from the House

Music for mornings, for three different kinds of morning

If mornings were a matter of optimising them, most people would have solved this by about 2019.

So: three kinds of morning, and what is worth putting on in each.

The slow one

You're up before you needed to be. Nobody else is. There's genuinely nothing being asked of you for the next forty minutes and the temptation is to fill it, because unstructured time feels like it should be spent.

This is the morning to leave alone. Put the track on low and do the ordinary things at ordinary speed. Kettle, window, sitting down for longer than it takes to drink something.

Two hours is far more than you need. That's the point. Nothing counts down, nothing ends, and you aren't being asked to get value out of the time.

The one you are already behind on

You woke late, or you woke on time and lost twenty minutes to your phone, and now the whole thing has a running clock in it.

The instinct here is to go faster and to put nothing on, because music feels like a luxury for a morning with slack in it. That instinct isn't wrong exactly, but it's worth knowing what it costs. You will carry the pace into the first hour of the day and it will still be there at eleven.

What helps isn't slowing down. You can't slow down, the clock is real. What helps is having one thing in the room that isn't accelerating. Put it on while you do everything at exactly the speed you've to do it. The sound is the only part that refuses to hurry, and that's enough to keep the whole morning from tipping into a sprint.

The one you are dreading

Something is in the day that you don't want. A conversation, a scan, a room you've to walk into. It isn't a busy morning. It's a heavy one, and the hours before it are the hard part.

Long is better here. Put it on early and leave it running through getting ready, through breakfast if you're eating, through the part where you check the time again. Something continuous underneath the morning means the silence never comes back and gives you somewhere to put the thinking.

The dread isn't going to be handled by a playlist and we aren't going to pretend otherwise. What sound does is give the room a floor while you wait, so the waiting isn't happening in a house that has gone quiet around you.

What kind of sound, and why not a song

Anything with words is a problem in the morning, because language recruits you. A lyric asks you to follow it, and the whole point here is to have something present that doesn't ask.

That's the case we make properly in ambient drone music, and it applies to mornings harder than most hours, because your attention hasn't warmed up yet and it will attach itself to whatever is loudest in the room.

In shorter shapes

Some mornings the useful bit is nine minutes, not two hours.

The app carries the same sound at the length a real morning has, which is usually not two hours, plus a short check-in if you want to start the day having noticed how it's going rather than discovering it at noon.

If the morning is loud because the night before it was, music for deep sleep is the more useful page.

SOVA Within · sound for coming back to yourself