Sonootropics: Smarter Sounds for a Smarter Brain
Javi Otero
Javi Otero is an interdisciplinary artist, contemplative researcher, sonoceutical engineer, and biomimetic inventor, specialising in the salutogenic modulation of consciousness via non-linear technology. Inspired by the at once cyclic and ever-changing pulse of natural processes, Javi’s main line of inquiry explores how contemplative practices can inform the creation of new, scalable, and hopefully less invasive peak performance technologies. Wondering how to further harvest the transformative power of sound energy and resonance, he arrived at Fractal Entrainment, a novel neurotechnology based on complex, and ever-changing sonic signals conceived to encourage states of natural resonance. His innovative contribution to the field of biostimulation has been twice awarded with inclusion in the Trans Tech top 200 list.
Javi Otero explores Sonootropics, the use of sound to enhance
We all have our own inbuilt drum to listen to. I encourage you to do that because when we all do that, the world gets a lot better.
Summary
- Nature is governed by cycles and rhythms, with a pervasive tendency toward synchronization that can be harnessed through the frequencies of sound.
- Sound is a powerful tool to modulate arousal and attention, helping individuals reach specific states such as deep relaxation, focus, or heightened awareness.
- Cymatics reveals that sound can organize matter into patterns, showing how acoustic energy influences structure at both the cellular and energetic levels.
- Because human physiology is fractal, incorporating fractal patterns into sound design can trigger beneficial physiological responses similar to those found in nature.
- Future developments in sound research aim for precision sound medicine, where acoustic experiences are customized to an individual's unique physiological and psychological state.
Article
Sonootropics And The Search For A Smarter Brain
At Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm, Javi Otero Framed Sound Not As Background Noise But As A Precision Tool For Consciousness, Health, And Human Performance
On 18 May 2018, at **Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm** in **Stockholm, Sweden**, the interdisciplinary artist and researcher **Javi Otero** stepped onto the stage with a proposition that felt at once ancient and futuristic: sound was not merely something we heard, but something that could organize us.
His presentation, **“Sonootropics: Smarter Sounds for a Smarter Brain,”** drew together contemplative practice, physiology, fractal mathematics and emerging neurotechnology into a single claim. If nature runs on cycles, if the body is built on rhythm, and if attention itself rises and falls with breath, then sound may offer a remarkably direct way to shape human state.
This was not the language of music as entertainment. It was the language of sound as intervention, resonance as medicine, and synchrony as design principle.
Nature, Otero Argued, Was A Symphony Of Cycles
Otero began with a simple observation: nature moved in pulses. Day and night. Seasons. Generations. Breath. Heartbeat. Planetary motion. At every scale, life unfolded through repetition and variation.
“**Synchrony is pervasive in nature,**” he said. “**We love being in sync, and very tiny amounts of energy are all that is needed to drive a whole system towards unison.**”
That point landed at the heart of the talk. Modern life often described reality through entropy, decline and disorder, yet Otero insisted that nature also displayed a powerful opposing tendency. Systems fell into coordination. Rhythms aligned. Order emerged, sometimes from the lightest of nudges.
For Otero, this was where sound became especially interesting. Sound was itself cyclical, frequency unfolding over time. If so much of biology was rhythmic, then acoustic signals might do more than stimulate the ear. They might gently steer whole systems towards coherence.
Sound Could Modulate Attention, Arousal And Awareness
The talk moved from cosmology to cognition. Otero noted that humans did not inhabit a single stable mental state. We oscillated constantly between mind wandering and focus, agitation and calm, distraction and absorption.
Sound, he suggested, could help tune those shifts.
“**You can use sound for entering states of relaxation, focus, or meditation,**” he told the audience. “**You can even enter non-ordinary states of mind and states of heightened awareness.**”
The claim was broad, but not casually made. Otero situated it within a long human history of sonic practice: chanting, drumming, singing, breathwork, instrumental ritual, environmental listening. Sonootropics, despite the sleek terminology, did not invent the use of sound to alter consciousness. It updated it.
Whether someone listened inwardly to heartbeat and breath, generated sound through voice or instruments, or immersed themselves in carefully designed acoustic environments, the principle remained the same. Sound could become a means of regulating inner life.
“**Whether you listen to your internal sounds, make sounds yourself, or listen to the environment, you can use sound for transforming your inner state,**” he said.
Cymatics Made The Invisible Claim Visible
The most arresting section of the presentation came when Otero turned to **cymatics**, the study of how sound creates visible patterns in matter.
“**Sound can organize matter and create structure,**” he said. “**It is not only heat, gravity, or evolution that can create patterns, but also sound.**”
To make the point tangible, he referred to experiments involving microscopic water droplets, roughly cell-sized, exposed to the same acoustic energy. Some formed intricate vibratory patterns while others did not, their response shaped by differences in mass. The demonstration served as more than a visual curiosity. It offered a model, however preliminary, for imagining how acoustic energy might act on living systems at energetic and cellular levels.
In Otero’s framing, cymatics challenged the instinct to treat sound as ephemeral. It suggested that vibration could be structural, not merely sensory. Sound could shape, sort and order.
That idea, once dismissed as poetic metaphor, took on a different force when rendered in pattern and motion before the eye.
Fractals Offered The Mathematics Behind The Medicine
From visible pattern, Otero moved to invisible architecture. His deeper fascination, he said, lay with **fractals**, the self-similar forms found throughout nature and physiology.
“**Nature is the oldest R and D lab there is. It basically contains all the answers if you look properly,**” he said.
Fractals mattered because they described complexity more faithfully than the blunt geometry of circles and squares. A forest, a coastline, a bronchial tree, a branching vascular system, even the variability between heartbeats, all displayed irregular order. They were structured, but never mechanically uniform.
For Otero, this was central to understanding sound design. If the body was fractal, then perhaps the most beneficial sounds would not be rigidly repetitive, but dynamically patterned in ways that mirrored nature’s own logic.
This was the conceptual foundation of the work that had brought him recognition, including twice being named in the **Trans Tech Top 200**. His research into **Fractal Entrainment**, a neurotechnology based on complex and ever-changing sonic signals, sought to encourage states of what he called natural resonance.
The implication was profound. Instead of imposing blunt stimulation on the brain, future sound technologies might work by speaking in the body’s native accent.
Health, Otero Suggested, Lived In Regular Irregularity
One of the subtler but more compelling themes of the talk concerned health itself. Otero pointed to **heart rate variability** as an example of nature’s preference for “regularly irregular” rhythms. A perfectly mechanical heartbeat, once thought ideal, no longer represented vitality in the same way. Healthy systems varied. They adapted. They breathed.
This mattered because modern environments were often stripped of such complexity. Built spaces, artificial noise and overstimulating urban soundscapes could flatten the sensory world, distancing people from the patterned richness that physiology may expect.
Otero also invoked studies of **Jackson Pollock’s** drip paintings, noting that these abstract works appeared to generate physiological responses in viewers similar to those produced by natural fractals. Even human-made pattern, if it echoed the right structural logic, could resonate with the nervous system.
Taken together, the argument pointed toward a “sweet spot” in design: enough order to guide the mind, enough variation to feel alive.
Precision Sound Medicine Was The Horizon
Perhaps the most forward-looking moment of the presentation came when Otero asked whether sound could become truly personalized.
Rather than building one track for everyone and hoping it worked, he imagined a future of **precision sound medicine**, where acoustic experiences would be shaped around a person’s physiology, psychology and present condition.
In that future, sound would not simply be relaxing or energizing in general terms. It would be tailored. A sonic intervention for stress would differ from one for focus, recovery, meditation or heightened awareness. The promise was less about passive listening than about calibrated resonance.
This vision sat squarely within Otero’s broader identity as a contemplative researcher and sonoceutical engineer, someone attempting to make peak performance technologies less invasive by learning from the pulse of living systems rather than overpowering them.
The Closing Note Was Simpler Than The Theory
For all its technical ambition, the talk ended on a deliberately human note. Otero reminded the audience that no technology, however elegant, could replace the need for inner attention.
He urged people to listen for what he called their own “inbuilt drum”, a phrase that cut through the jargon and returned the discussion to self-awareness.
The line lingered because it carried the moral centre of the talk. Sound, in Otero’s telling, was not just a tool for optimisation. It was a route back to attunement, to noticing the rhythms already present within the body and around it.
At **Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm**, amid the usual futurist hunger for enhancement, that may have been the most resonant idea of all.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm