Back The Sleep Concert, to experience how music helps us sleep, comes to the UPF Poblenou campus

The Sleep Concert, to experience how music helps us sleep, comes to the UPF Poblenou campus

The Sleep Concert, which will take place on the night of Thursday 4 to Friday 5 July, aims to raise public awareness of music’s potential to help us sleep better. The activity is part of the European research project Lullabyte to investigate the effects of music on sleep.

01.07.2024

Imatge inicial

Some forty people will be sleeping while music plays uninterruptedly during the so-called Sleep Concert, which will take place in a space on the Poblenou campus of Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) on the night of Thursday 4 to Friday 5 July. One of the aims is to raise public awareness of the importance of sleep, the potential of music to help us sleep better, and the possibility of an alternative to drugs for people suffering from insomnia. This ground-breaking experimental concert in Barcelona is part of the European research project involving UPF, Lullabyte, which is investigating the effects of music on sleep.

All the music that will be played throughout the night, from 10 pm until 6 am, is designed to aid with sleep. During the first two hours, live electronic music will be played, performed by Natasha Barrett (of the duo Dream Divers), composed specifically for the occasion. The piece will be heard via the new 3D audio system of Sala Aranyó on Poblenou campus -the space provided for the activity-, thanks to which a 360-degree surround music effect is generated.

Then, the participants will listen to six hours of live music, thanks to an improvised instrumental performance by the quartet whose members are Miriam Akkermann (flute), Haize Lizarazu (piano and zither), Ángel Faraldo (live electronic music) and Àlex Reviriego (double bass).

The Sleep Concert is part of the activity programme of the Lullabyte Summer School. Hence, some of the participants are doctoral students from different backgrounds of this project, coordinated by a European consortium of 10 universities and research centres, led by Freie Universität Berlin and which involves the UPF Music Technology Group. Among the rest of the participants, all volunteers, there are also locals of various profiles.

While this experimental activity is novel in Barcelona, in international terms, there are several precedents. In fact, the University of Dresden, a member of the Lullabyte Consortium, already hosted the research project’s first Sleep Concert on 1 June 2023. Especially well-known are shows of this kind by the British composer of German origin Max Richter, who during the last decade has starred in sleep concerts in cities around the world such as New York, Los Angeles, Berlin and Zurich, among others.

The Lullabyte research project

This interdisciplinary European research project, whose name is a fusion of ‘Lullaby’ and computer ‘byte’, aims to shed light on a question that has been little researched to date: how music can facilitate the transition from wakefulness to sleep and how it can improve sleep quality and depth. Based on the results of the research, which began in 2023 and is set to run until 2026, it will be possible to design personalized music for sleep with the support of AI-based machine learning tools and generate products (such as interactive headphones or sleep music applications) that will adapt to the needs of each user.