The Healing Power of Music and Nature with Markus Pesonen, MA
Ever wonder how the right melody or the subtle sound of waves can transport you to a calmer, more centered state? In this episode of The Adaptive Mind, I sit down with Markus Pesonen, an award-winning composer and co-founder of Olo, a well-being app using immersive soundscapes for stress reduction. Markus shares his journey from touring the world as a musician—performing over 100 shows a year—to becoming a pioneer in sound therapy. Along the way, he’s collected and designed thousands of hours of nature recordings, weaving them into innovative audio experiences that can help us slow down, reconnect with ourselves, and discover new pathways for healing.
Tune in to discover:
- The science behind sound and neuroplasticity—and why frequencies matter
- How our brains respond to immersive 3D audio and the powerful link to memory
- Practical tips for using music and nature soundscapes in daily wellness routines
- Why tuning into your body’s cues is essential for finding the right habits and self-care strategies
- How Markus and his team recorded immersive natural soundscapes from around the globe—and how you can benefit from them
Whether you’re a seasoned meditator or just curious about stress relief beyond the usual methods, this conversation reveals how sound can open doors to deeper mental clarity and emotional balance. Dive into the world of sonic well-being—your ears (and your mind) will thank you!
Brady: Okay. I'm really excited for our discussion today. We're going to be talking about sound and music and how that plays into our mental health and our well being. Today we're talking with Markus Pesonen. He is an award winning composer who's pioneered innovative approaches to mental wellness through sound design. Most recently, he co founded olo, which is a well being app that uses sound to help users reduce anxiety and stress. With over two decades of experience as a musician and sound artist, Markus has produced over a dozen albums, composed for various art forms and is dedicated to integrating sound therapy into daily life to reshape global wellness. Markus, thanks so much for coming on.
Markus: Thanks Brady. Great to be here.
Brady: Yeah. So I guess to start, I'm really curious, how did you transition from the world of just creating music to using it as a therapeutic device?
Markus: I used to do 100 throws a year and travel all the time and that's really tough on the mind and the body. And I started this parallel path. I think I was always really fascinated by the question who am I really? What am I becoming? What's my potential? All of that and then you kind of come up, you realize, oh my, what I eat affects my mind. I looked into meditation, yoga, I really neuro, linguistic programming, early biohacking, went all out and all in this kind of different things. And then there was this moment where I had been five years on the road doing so many concerts, traveling so much and it just kind of surprised me that I just didn't feel like it anymore. And it freaked me out because my identity was wrapped around it. But at the same time I was so curious about I want to work with health and wellness. This is actually I've discovered so much from my personal journey. How could this fit together with sound music? I met my co founder Katerina 10 years ago who's a somatic therapist, mental health professional. And it was just the timing was there and we just both kind of reduced our normal professions to a minimum to pay the bills and just said let's start to dream the next chapter. What's the biggest problem? What could we build that is beyond us just as individuals?
Brady: Yeah. Amazing how kind of a mix of circumstances and also necessity and kind of needs can play into different opportunities like this. I'm curious, what is it about music and sound that is so valuable to the human mind that kind of has such a strong impact on us?
Markus: Yeah. I mean maybe even before answering that, I just want to frame it like the why olo? Why did we went to this, there was that personal spark, obviously from my own discovery. But then the really big question was like, this age old question, who am I? What's my purpose? Why am I here? How can I know myself? Because then everything like my health choices, my career choices, my relationship choices all kind of boils down into like, if I know myself, I'll know what I want and need and can and so on. So the first obstacle to not knowing yourself is if you're just so stressed out that you don't have space to even feel yourself or meet yourself or be with yourself. And sound is it's just so powerful and accessible at the same time. Most people, if you say there's some immersive sound, it's kind of quite easy to approach. It's a lot safer than let's take some psychedelics for example. Or it's a lot more accessible of let's book a therapist, talk therapy that will be maybe in, you know, some months of time and so on, or meditation that is let's learn a skill to be able to do this in order to access some kind of aspirational state. With sound and music, it's kind of like it bypasses our cognitive defenses and we start to feel something immediately. And the more people I talk to, I realize that this is actually the main obstacle to get into that zone of feeling yourself and starting, then reflect from that place of what's my body telling me? What's the language of my nervous system? Can I gain some wisdom from this? What's going on? What do I need to process to make sense of life? All of that.
Brady: Yeah. And so what are some of the, just at a high level, what are some of the processes and things that happen when that connection happens, when we're able to listen to sound and music and kind of let go of the anxiety, let go of the stress and really connect to ourselves.
Markus: Yeah, I think there's that everyday level where you see most people in cities walking around with headphones and people are already using sounds normalized to create their sense of space around themselves. It's like sound can change your perceived environment and a lot of people already use it like that. You're in a tube in a city, it's noisy and smelly and ugly and you want to rather be in your choice of creation of whatever you're listening to. So there's that everyday level. And then we just ask ourselves, what's beyond that? How can we Travel to hyper diversity places to record in 3D to make sure that it's as immersive as possible. Because our biology is wired for nature connection. There's something there. I think reducing stress and anxiety is like the first effect that people see. And we actually just passed a peer review in being able to show that with biofeedback. So inside 10 minutes we could see that anxiety drops 30% and heart, sorry, 60% and then heart rate variability increases 30%. So I think that's like the first thing and I look at it as a triangle. A foundation is nervous system. You regulate the nervous system affects your emotional stability and then your cognitive function. Because we all have the experience. You're stressed out, you're just not thinking straight and it's nobody's fault if you have brain fog or hard to make decisions or just reactive or tired and wired if your biology is kind of working against you. So that's why this bottom up approach, there's four times more pathways from the nervous systems or the brain than the other way around. So if you want to change, that's going to be the easiest path.
Brady: Yeah, that makes sense. And so going from that bottom and going a little bit further. Do you think sound can promote neuroplasticity or help someone that's trying to change behaviors?
Markus: Absolutely. I think it needs even more research. But I mean one anecdote may be interesting is that. Well, I was just one and a half years ago in the MAPS conference in Denver with 15,000 people around, psychedelics. I talked to a lot of therapists there and asked how big part the sound and music is in the process. And they said huge. And then what do you use? It was kind of some Spotify playlists. And I thought oh wow, they're a lot could be done here, but it's even you can even start to think about it's the experience that is the true medicine. Obviously the dose of whatever you take does something too and pushes you into another neuroplasticity state. But when people have had the sound journey experiences, for example, in our live events that are like deeper, you're lying down with the eye mask, you guided with a somatic awareness to really feel yourself. And then you have a 45 minute of immersion with speakers that makes it feel like you are in the jungle. The reports and feedback that we get from it is what brain plasticity sounds like. You open new pathways, you remember memories that you didn't even remember you had or things come up, emotional things come up, your imagination opens up to places that's neuroplasticity, new pathways are suddenly possible. So yeah, I would say that's a long winding answer to yes.
Brady: Yeah, yeah, no, I can totally see that. And I think a lot of people talk about how you smell something and you're taken back to a certain experience and just like you mention you can hear something and you can remember something. I think anytime I listen to music, I'm always thinking about the time when I first listened to that song and it just takes me back to that time. So sometimes even when I'm listening to a song in the car with my 4 year old, I'll say, oh, this is my high school song, or this is my middle school song, or this is a certain time. And I think probably having that same experience with nature sounds can certainly. I would understand how that would take you to a different place.
Markus: That's it. There's just something about it that it bypasses those cognitive filters that we have. And often the stronger the experience, it is the kind of deeper memory imprint it leaves on us. It's kind of like the stronger the experience, the bigger the ripple effect.
Brady: Do you mean stronger the original experience or stronger the immersion into the sound and music?
Markus: The original experience, it can be with your favorite song or there was like you listened to it and there was a feeling in your heart when that happened. And then it just kind of, the stronger the experience, the feeling that you had in that moment, the more significant memory, like a core memory with the Pixar inside out terms, the stronger core memory comes out of it.
Brady: Yeah, yeah. And can you talk about kind of the difference between listening to a song kind of, as we've been alluding to, listen to a song that can have a calming or a positive impact on you and listening to maybe a soundscape or nature sounds, kind of the difference between the benefits between those things or even just the experiences.
Markus: Yeah, I think there's several dimensions to it. One is how it was recorded. A lot of traditional music is produced to work best in a car and noisy environment where it's very compressed into this kind of sausage. And with immersive nature sounds and music weave together into a sound journey, the dynamic range is just a lot more. The spectrum of nature sounds is a lot more. Sometimes we think that certain melody or rhythm has the biggest effect on us, but it's actually those frequencies and the fluctuation with the frequencies that have a big effect on us. That's why EDM is so powerful because you turn out the filters and it happens those effects because those actually they do something. And the sound of wind, the sound of birds, the sound of waves, they have those frequency fluctuations. And we just wired for that over millions of years. So it has, it's kind of hard coded into our biology. Then on the other side there is the aspect of familiarity and novelty. If that song that you heard first time when there was a significant event, that's a familiar, you go to that and it touches that same neural pathway. Right. But if we're able to say, serve the balance between something's familiar to you, certain nature sounds, maybe that you heard before. But there's something new and exciting that's kind of where certain intrigue happens. And I believe that the plasticity actually happens in the areas of enough novelty. So not only just your favorite song, and obviously that's a moving target because whatever was novel before, it's now getting more familiar. So it's like it's changing.
Brady: Sure. Yeah. Very interesting. And you mentioned frequencies. So I know there's kind of this thing where certain frequencies can be good for maybe reducing stress or I know I've heard of 432Hz as being some kind of special frequency. Can you talk a little bit more about that? And kind of any kind of substance to certain frequencies being valuable for different things.
Markus: So when I talked about frequencies earlier, I talked more about frequency range. And if you hear a sound of a wind, there's thousands of frequencies weaved together to make that sound of the wind. So this discussion about specific number of frequency, there's no real hard evidence on that like sound seems to be this area where it's quite easy to sell make believe. And I'm not debunking it completely. I think the way that we tune our instruments has an effect. But to say that a certain frequency will do that. It's a very bold claim that doesn't have scientific basis yet. But I think that's also interesting to see how long time certain topics have been kind of coming and going and there's always something ASMR. Binaural beats, you know, 4D sound, 5D, 8D, just name it. There's always like a new marketing lingo of this is some magic. A lot of it is if you know about how sound music works, a lot of it doesn't have a big basis. But it also shows how unknown sound and music and how it really works is for the general public that there isn't like a lot of great information out there, to be honest.
Brady: Yeah. So do you feel like, do you have something in your mind that you think could be the next thing? If there was more research about this particular thing, do you think that there's a. Do you have any kind of theories about what could be particularly impactful for people?
Markus: Yeah, I do. I have a lot and I cannot talk all about it, but I think in general, if I would say the spatialization of sound is something like really obvious. When we used to live close to nature, our hearing is our eyes behind our back and they're answering one question all the time to us. It's like, am I safe?
Brady: Yeah.
Markus: Around me. What's happening here? And when we are living in a wall of noise in cities, our distance that we can hear is actually less because that wall of noise creates almost like a sonic. Claustrophobic. Claustrophobia. You cannot hear far, so you're all the time. There's a light stress stage. There's all the time signal. You're not completely safe. The earth is a bit rumbling and you cannot really orient yourself in this chaos where there is in your out in the nature, you can hear the distance and the direction of the sounds and it helps you to orient. And for some reason we see a lot of people with difficulties to concentrate or ADHD or things like that, that there's something really significant happening when the audio is spatial and three dimensional and it helps the brain to orient in space. So I think space is an unexplored area of sound.
Brady: Yeah. I mean, as you talk about that, it also takes me back to kind of the first time that I experienced a 3D audio when I was a kid. And I listened on my headphones to this 3D haircut experience and it was amazing. I couldn't believe it. And I showed it to everybody, I brought it to my family and I was like, close your eyes. Yeah, it was amazing. And so I can totally see how even now when I listen to nature sounds or things where I can hear things going back and forth, one, I'm taking back to that moment. But also it's just kind of. It takes me out of this one dimensional, kind of confined space like you're talking about this claustrophobic space.
Markus: So I believe our memories are also spatial or connected to the space around us. If you're in a cafe in an event Wherever you are, you will more likely remember the conversation compared to if it's in a zoom call. Because in a zoom call, it's really hard to hang the memory on any object around. They kind of all blur together. During COVID we kind of like we had a lot of these calls and it's kind of which one was. It starts to kind of be hard because. But if we would meet in a cafe, I would always remember, hey, we had that conversation in that cafe. And I can like spatially locate the memory there, if that makes sense.
Brady: Yeah, no, I mean, I can think of several pieces of evidence in my life that would support that. One is that just reading books on a physical book compared to a Kindle. I mean, I can. You probably have the experience where you can remember the specific spot on the page where you read something and you go black and flip through it and you only look on the bottom right because you know it's there. But when you go to a Kindle, it could be anywhere or it's just completely different experience. So yeah, I mean, I can very much attest to that. And I'm also quite good with names and I've noticed that of course I'm getting older, but also with zoom meetings like you mentioned, it's just so much harder to remember people's names when it's just in a slack chat or zoom or whatever. But when you see them, you shake their hand and you're in physical space, then it's a completely different experience.
Markus: Yeah, it's somehow a lot easier to orient in the world of atoms than in the world of bits.
Brady: Yeah. Okay, cool. So for someone who is like, okay, I'm in on the sound, on the music, on all of this, how would you kind of recommend to a person to get started with using sound to kind of supplement or augment their well being and their mental health?
Markus: I would just, no matter where you are, just close your eyes for a moment and just listen what's actually around me and just take a moment to notice all the sounds that you're hearing, what's happening around you. And then after that you get asked feel into your body, how is this actually making me feel this sound? And you might be surprised the definition that you're able to reach by just taking a moment to notice what's going on there. I think second, spending time in nature can never be recommended enough. There's just something about it and you can approach it in the same Way of just, noticing more. And I think that's a great way to do something more of an active meditation where you build your sense of presence. You don't need always perfect silence or counting your breaths or sitting on still. I think we're sitting still enough with our knowledge work, and I think it's actually really good to use your body sometimes. I think that concentration meditation was built to a really physical lifestyle thousands of years ago. And I think we need an update on what's the counterbalance for knowledge work right now. Obviously, we have built an app and live events for experiencing something like that. And we put a lot of care on the quality of the sound and the quality of the experience, because our realization was that the more immersive the experience is, the bigger the therapeutic potential with that. And obviously, as a composer, I looked at all the apps. I was like, oh, this static rain. Sounds like people are not getting it. There's this voice actors reading scripts, like there should be. It can be more, you know. So that's how we got into the whole field.
Brady: Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. And from what I've seen, and I couldn't tell this just from listening to the app. I mean, I could feel the quality of it. But you actually traveled to a lot of different places to do these recordings. Maybe you can talk about that just very briefly.
Markus: Oh, yeah, it's. We've recorded over a thousand hours of sound around the world in different locations. And I got to experience some huge range of. Experience some really chilling moments too. You never know, cannot control the weather. You're out in the wild. There's something really exciting about being out there in the jungle with a microphone first time, and how things happen. Or you're at the beach and the waves are crashing or there's a kind of a discovery in that. I really felt like a discoverer going out there, wanting to listen to the world, wanting to listen to nature most of all, but also cities and just really trying to notice what's out there. How does the world sound like? How does it make me feel? And how can I then create something useful for anyone to have? Because some of those places, I don't know if people want to go there, they're quite hard to get to and stuff like that. So experiencing it through sound can be a lot safer and pleasurable way too.
Brady: Yeah. Cool. Okay. So we've talked about a lot of really interesting things. Is there anything that we didn't cover that maybe you want to touch on or anything that you wanted to come back to that you think might be helpful for people.
Markus: Maybe as a, just a general direction. I'm really excited about the self directedness of people's health and wellness and their choices. I just, by 27, more than half of Americans will be working for self as a freelancer or entrepreneur. So the whole responsibility of our health and wellness is moving from the institution to the individual. And I think we're all in this discovery. There's so much recommendations. People's wellness stack can be like insane and if you just execute all of that, you might not have time to do anything else. So for everybody to take a moment to discover what feels right for them. And I think that's why I feel like listening to your body, to your nervous system, to yourself is like the foundation so that we could make better choices of what's right for us. Because health and wellness is not one size fits all world. We do need to. And I know you're big on building habits, so I think it's like the first question of what is the habit that I should build? What is actually gonna benefit me? And sometimes we need to experiment, but we need to be true to, how do we know if it's good? It cannot be a top down mental decision of, this was said in this podcast and I'm just gonna do it no matter what, until my body screams no.
Brady: Yeah, okay. Awesome.
Markus: Yeah, like that. Like trusting your senses in discernment and calibrating your embodied wisdom, your sense of being able to listen to the body, I think that's like, for me, the foundation.
Brady: Yeah, amazing. Yeah. Step number one, figure it out.
Markus: Yeah.
Brady: Okay, cool. Amazing. Thank you so much, Markus. As I said, this I think has been really interesting and really insightful and I think a lot of people will find this really helpful as well. So I'll make sure that there are links to Olo in the show notes, so please check that out. As Markus mentioned, a lot of amazing tracks in there and amazing locations to listen from. So thank you again for coming on, Markus. And yeah, it was a pleasure.
Markus: Thank you, Brady. It was fun.