Ia Mgvdliashvili's Contact Details

Ia Mgvdliashvili's Company Details

The Works Research Institute

Budapest, Budapest, Hungary • 6 Employees
Research

The Works Research Institute conducts scientific research on the potentially beneficial effects of sound on the human body and consciousness. We intend to develop a new paradigm for applications using sound as medicine by gathering a deeper and more precise understanding of the effects of sound on our physiological and psychological states. To this end, we have designed and built a new instrument for experiential research – our flagship product, the Sphere. A spherical loudspeaker for a person to sit within, it offers an optimized environment for high-fidelity spatial projection of sound and measuring human response to sound at various levels – such as the brain activity and vital functions. The listener is seated on a floating chair in the centre of the Sphere, in silence and complete darkness. By deprivation of the visual sense, we become more sensitive to sound through hearing and mechanoreception – the sense of vibration through our body – and its effects on the proprioceptive sense – relating to position and balance of the body and movement of one's body parts – and the interoceptive sense – sensations in one's inner organs. In the Sphere, soundwaves are projected on the user within the audible frequency range (16 Hz-20 kHz) as well as extending above and below – sound that cannot be heard but can be felt. By means of a process involving stimuli and feedback response, the Sphere observes how the sound field influences the focus and state of the listener and tunes more precisely to the listener to induce a state of balance, a process called entrainment. The phenomenon of entrainment emerges once the biorhythms of the human body – such as breath, heartbeat, and brain activity – and the frequencies present within the soundwaves synchronize, so they become phase-coherent. This process induces resonance, a magnification of audible energy in space and felt around and inside the body, triggering response from specific parts of the body.