Sound Baths Are Everywhere. Here Is What the Research on Singing Bowls Says

On 21 October, Northeastern Global News published a first-hand account of a sound bath that NU London, Northeastern’s London campus, held for Mental Health Week: a group of about eight, mostly students, lying still for roughly 30 minutes while a facilitator played Tibetan singing bowls and an ocean drum. They came out describing a calmer, clearer head.

The piece also asked the harder question, and its answer is that the science is still at an early stage. Elizabeth Bucar, a Northeastern professor of philosophy and religion and the author of Beyond Wellness, sets out the explanations on offer: that sound may shift brainwave states, stimulate the vagus nerve or alter the body’s internal rhythms. They are theories still waiting to be tested, not findings.

So what does the research show? Most of what gets said about singing bowls traces back to a handful of studies.

The 2016 study everyone cites

In September 2016, researchers led by Tamara Goldsby of the University of California, San Diego, published an observational study in the Journal of Evidence-Based Complementary & Alternative Medicine. 62 adults aged 21 to 77, at three sites in Encinitas and Carlsbad, filled in mood and anxiety questionnaires before and after a singing bowl meditation of about 60 minutes, played on Tibetan and crystal bowls.

Afterwards they reported significantly less tension, anger, fatigue and depressed mood, and higher spiritual well-being. People who had never tried a bowl meditation reported a bigger drop in tension than those who had, and the 20-to-39 age group changed most, from a mean tension score of 1.6 to 0.2.

The authors name the catch themselves: it was non-randomized, with no control group. It shows how people felt after an hour of lying quietly with the bowls, not that the bowls rather than the rest caused the change.

What came after

• 2023, Chile. A randomized controlled trial at the Austral University of Chile took 50 adults with high anxiety and assigned them to one singing bowl session, one session of progressive muscle relaxation, or a waiting list. Both sessions lowered self-reported anxiety against the waiting list, and the effect was more evident with the bowls, whose group also showed higher heart rate variability, a physical marker of relaxation. One session, 50 people.
• 2025, a review of 19 studies. Researchers from Beijing University of Chinese Medicine and Western Sydney University reviewed 19 clinical studies from eight countries, published between 2008 and 2024, nine of them randomized trials. Their conclusion is carefully worded: singing bowls may have potential to ease anxiety and depression and to improve sleep and cognitive function, across groups from older adults to people with Parkinson’s disease or cancer.
• 2026, the Netherlands. A qualitative study published in June followed 41 individual bowl sessions with 25 nursing home residents aged 59 to 97, many living with dementia. Responses were mostly positive, including from residents with little speech; some fell asleep, others settled into a visible calm.

What it means if you book a sound bath

The research backs up what most people feel in the room: a session can be deeply relaxing in the short term, and in one randomized trial it did at least as well as an established relaxation technique. It has not been shown to treat anxiety or depression on its own, the studies are small and mostly look at a single session, and people respond differently: the Northeastern report notes that some feel sick or get headaches rather than calm. A sound bath is a complement to care, not a replacement for it.

If you want to try one in Los Angeles, MyLAyoga lists sound baths on its events page, and Sound Bird Center in Mar Vista is a studio built around them.