This project explores intersections between minimalistic music and the neurobiology of sleep. The project draws its main inspiration from the piece SLEEP by post-minimalist composer Max Richter. SLEEP is an 8-hour and 30-minute-long composition premiered in 2015 in many cities around the world. Performances of SLEEP are a cross between a concert and an installation. Audiences are provided with beds to lie on and sleep during the performance. For SLEEP, Richter drew inspiration from our knowledge of the neurobiology of sleep. The main beat rate in the different pieces of the composition matches frequencies in the slow waves of brain activity during non-REM sleep. The majority of pitches are in the low register. Following a long tradition of lullabies, starting with Bach’s Goldberg variations, SLEEP is a tour-de-force in contemporary music, not the least for the performers—piano, electronics, soprano singer, and string ensemble. This project aims to look at the ways in which minimalistic music and neuroscience view and explain sleep, drawing from Richter’s SLEEP, as well as our contemporary neuroscientific understanding of what sleep is, how it is induced, and the more difficult question of why we sleep.
2026