Sound Mind
Bringing mental wellbeing to music festivals — through the power of music itself.
Live from Good Vibrations 2026: the first-ever public performance of a MITA Guided Listening session. This is the moment of arrival at a place of calm and a feeling of being grounded, helping people move away from a place of overstimulation or a busy mind.
Listen to the full performance on MixCloud
Recorded live at Good Vibrations 2026.
Experience “Overstimulated to Grounded”
Most festival wellbeing programmes reset the body — yoga, wild swimming, spa tents, forest workshops. There is a gap for sessions that are specifically designed to reset the mind.
That's the gap Music is the Answer fills — and it's a gap that plays to the one thing every festival-goer is already there for: music. No mat, no class, no forty-five minutes carved out of a packed schedule. Just a few minutes of the right sound and a voice that knows what it's doing — easy to slot into a wellbeing tent's existing programme, not a reason to reshape it.
Your programme resets the body. This resets the mind — through the exact medium your audience came for.
The Gap
Sound Mind isn't a DJ set and it isn't a talk — it's a structured live experience, built from five distinct elements that each do a different job:
Arrival & the why — the room settles in, and Rob shares the personal story behind MITA: a bipolar diagnosis, long COVID taking away the exercise that used to keep him well, and discovering that music could do the same job.
The live Guided Listening Experience — the core of the session. An original piece of music and a live voice guide the room through an actual state shift — at Good Vibrations, Overstimulated to Grounded.
The Science, Simply — a short, plain-language explanation of what just happened in the room: the ISO principle, entrainment, and why the nervous system can't tell a crowded festival from a genuine threat.
The Listening Panel — two contrasting tracks played side by side, making the shift audible rather than just felt.
Close & takeaway — the room reflects on where they've landed, and leaves with a way to rebuild this for themselves at home.
The Performance
0:00 — Landing music — Trevor Hall & East Forrest “A Reminder”, welcome
5:00 — Rob's story — why MITA exists
8:00 — Live Guided Listening Experience begins — Overstimulated to Grounded (Bespoke production x Rob’s live Words).
16:00 — Arrival moment — the room lands, grounded
17:00 — The Science, Simply put
19:00 — Listening Panel, track 1 — Squarepusher, "Come On My Selector" (overstimulated)
20:30 — Listening Panel, track 2 — Ólafur Arnalds, "Near Light" (grounded)
22:00 — Wrap, book mention, takeaway~
28:00 — Closing track — The Twelves, "Nightvision" (reintegration)
Run of Show
This run of show is shown for Overstimulated to Grounded — the state performed at Good Vibrations. Other state shifts are available on request, each with its own live Guided Listening Experience and Science segment — for example Flat to Energised, Stuck to Driven, Heavy to Lighter, or Distracted to Focussed. The Listening Panel adapts to match: different contrasting tracks are chosen for each state, so the demonstration always fits the shift being performed. Longer duration sets are available with extension to the listening panel, Q&A, fireside chats etc…
“At one point, it gave me goosebumps…”
Why I do this
Before the music starts, the why. Rob's own story — a bipolar diagnosis, long COVID taking away the exercise that used to keep him well, and discovering that music could do the same job.
The Squarepusher Moment
A short burst of intentional discomfort — dense, glitchy, built to mirror overstimulation itself — followed by the crowd's own reaction to it. A glimpse of the Listening Panel in action: the moment a room hears its own busy-mindedness played back, before the shift toward calm begins.
From Pages to the Stage
Music Is the Answer started as a book about one simple idea: that if we listen to music intentionally, it can genuinely change how we feel — not as a vague mood boost, but as a real, physiological shift in state. Overstimulated to grounded. Flat to energised. Stuck to driven.
Guided Listening sessions were built to put that idea into practice — bespoke music and voice, engineered around the actual neuroscience of how sound moves us from one state to another. Good Vibrations was the first time that idea left the page and the studio and stood in front of a live room.
It worked. Not in theory — in the room, in real time, with people who'd walked in mid-festival, overstimulated and unsure what they were signing up for, and walked out changed enough that one of them said it gave them goosebumps.
That's the translation: the book gives you the method. The live show proves it in front of you.
Sound Mind is a live, hosted Guided Listening session — built for wellbeing tents, chill-out spaces, and any festival programme that's ready to do for the mind what the rest of the lineup already does for the body. Available as a headline showcase slot or a repeating drop-in format.