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Composer, pianist, and mental-health advocate RIOPY continues to fuse the worlds of music and mindfulness with TUNE YOUR MIND [by RIOPY]. The flagship wellness initiative will launch with an initial 21-day guided meditation challenge designed to help those who are curious about starting a meditation practice find their footing with simple daily practices designed by the chart-topping musician whose music - with nearly 1 billion streams, a RIAA-certified gold track, and a collaboration with Lana Del Rey on her latest album - is already a mainstay on countless meditation playlists. 

“Even the best instruments need to be tuned,” says RIOPY, whose music has been used as a tool for meditation and wellness by everyone from Peloton users to the UK’s Mental Health Foundation. “I see the body as an instrument: We are the original embodiment of music. With this program, my hope is that people can take a moment to ‘tune’ themselves; to bring their mind and body into closer harmony, and in this way move themselves a bit closer to feeling calm and at peace.”

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TUNE YOUR MIND [by RIOPY] formally launches on September 20 with “Meditation 66 (Daily Meditations)”, an introduction to meditation for those who are curious about meditation but unsure of where or how to start. The 21-day challenge features daily two-to-three–minute practices from RIOPY and concludes on October 10 — World Mental Health Day — with two longform practices: “Flow State 22” and “Meditation 66 (Full Experience),” respectively 22 and 66 minutes long. These longform meditations will be released along with the daily 21 tracks as an album on Friday, 11 October. 

Each daily track features a spoken introduction and prompt for contemplation (topics include Clarity, Bliss, Compassion, Empathy, and Nirvana), followed by short compositions that serve as functional soundscapes to anchor meditators in the daily practice. The compositions combine RIOPY’s signature minimalist style with binaural beat therapy — an emerging, science-backed form of therapy that works with the fact that the left and right ear each receive a slightly different frequency as sound with the brain processing both as a single tone. (One 2017 study published in Frontiers in Neuroscience showed that listening to binaural beats can help engage the theta state in the brain — the same state activated during deep meditation.) RIOPY has also furthered this concept by working with an encephalogram (a machine that has been specifically used to study music’s effect on our minds by measuring electrical activity in the brain) to compose each track. 

Despite the scientific links to these practices, RIOPY stresses that “these are not complex tracks. To meditate is to reduce noise, to get rid of the data. You enter another mode of peace, which is what I love about meditating. To me, that is real freedom.”

For RIOPY, this is also an initiative rooted in personal experience with both meditation and mental health: Growing up in a cult in rural France where music was banned, a chance encounter with a piano offered him a sanctuary. Music also became his escape and, combined with a daily meditation practice, a tool for recovery from his difficult childhood, along with his anxiety, depression, and OCD. He has used these same audio tools in his own daily meditation, each one rigorous enough to give beginners the foothold they need to start a daily meditation practice, but also spacious enough that they can be adapted to suit individual needs.