The
Sanctuary
Earth
THE SANCTUARY EARTH FOUNDATION
Neuro-Acoustic
Sound Sculpture
for the public Realm
A civic infrastructure designed to restore nervous system regulation in urban environments grounded in neuroscience, spatial audio technology, and biophilic design.
“If we acknowledge that sound is vibration, and we know that vibration touches every part of our physical being, then we understand that sound is heard not only through our ears but in every cell of our bodies.”
WHAT
The Sanctuary is an urban space dedicated to the experience and healing qualities of sound. Designed as a H2O molecule and intended for public parks in our overstimulated Capital Cities. By dedicating a place to something as fundamental as sound, we allow people to experience its impact on their physical, mental, and emotional state of being. We can either hear sound or listen to it attentively. Therefore, through The Sanctuary, we aim to launch a phenomenological study on the experience, perception, and (scientifically) measurable impact of sound. We are investigating the connection between sound frequencies and health.
With our senses we interpret the world around us. Research shows that in today's world, our nervous system is frequently overstimulated, leaving us disconnected from the ability to truly relax. Our audiovisual sensors are often targeted for commercial advertising. Leading to overstimulation and, in many cases, a conscious decision to block out these stimuli from our direct experience. This is unfortunate because our sensorial connection is directly linked to our physical experience and, therefore our well-being.
WHY
Contemporary cities are overstimulating by design. Noise, visual clutter, and constant information flow are not incidental features of urban life, they are its baseline condition. The physiological cost is measurable: chronic stress, attentional fragmentation, and autonomic dys-regulation are now among the defining health challenges of urbanization. With more than two-thirds of the global population projected to live in cities by 2050 (UN 2018), this is no longer a personal problem. It is a public one.
Yet cities continue to build infrastructure for transit, commerce, and housing while ignoring the perceptual and emotional toll of daily urban life. The available alternatives are insufficient: parks offer respite but no acoustic control; museums provide contemplation but charge for entry; religious buildings offer restorative architecture within doctrinal frameworks. There is no purpose-built, non-commercial, inclusive civic space designed explicitly for nervous system recovery.
The Sanctuary proposes to fill this gap. Drawing on a tradition that runs from R. Murray Schafer's acoustic ecology and Max Neuhaus's permanent urban sound installations to James Turrell's perceptual architecture and the curated compositions of Lasse Mosegard within the spatial audio landscape of 4DSOUND and grounded in the sciences of neuro-acoustics, HRV biofeedback, and attention restoration theory, it introduces what we term neuro-acoustic transition infrastructure: a civic category of space that treats the perceptual dimension of urban life as a public concern, not a private luxury.
HOW
Every aspect of The Sanctuary its sound, form, and material presence is curated toward a single purpose: creating the conditions for inner peace. We are fascinated by the capacity of design to serve society at this depth, offering people access to an immaterial experience they can activate themselves, at any time and in any place.
Throughout history, spaces of collective reflection have been essential to urban life. Religious buildings once held this function at the centre of society; traditional third places like the brown café carried it into the everyday. As these spaces transform or disappear, the city is left without architecture designed for the restoration of the inner life.
The Sanctuary proposes to fill this absence. It is a place that invites people to remember what it means to be human to feel, briefly but fully, that they are part of something larger than themselves. We believe deeply in the power of shared experience: that when people encounter the immaterial together, in the same space and at the same moment, something essential is restored not only in the individual, but between us.
WHERE
Space to Decharge and Recharge
The Sanctuary, a refuge for all inhabitants of big cities to escape from the overwhelming emergence of sound and visual stimulation. Located in Public Parks, Corporate offices, Airports, Health & Rehabilitation Centres and Prisons. it will serve as a haven where individuals can reconnect, with the quiet space within themselves, finding solace, safety and relaxation for the paradigma shifts we are experiencing.
ART
The Sanctuary is, at its foundation, a work of art. Its power to restore, connect, and educate flows from this primary condition — not from clinical protocol or urban policy, but from the capacity of aesthetic experience to do what argument cannot. The convergence of Sonic Spheres' compositions, 4DSOUND's spatial audio field, biophilic architecture, and sacred geometric form creates a multidisciplinary artwork in which beauty and function are inseparable.
When sound, form, light, and material converge in a single experience, the boundaries between the senses begin to dissolve, sound is felt, form is heard, light becomes texture. The Sanctuary is designed for this convergence. By addressing all the senses simultaneously, it creates the conditions for a wider, slower, and more whole mode of perception than the fragmented attention of daily urban life allows. This is what art, at its most immersive, can unlock, not by instructing the visitor in what to feel, but by opening the door to perception itself.
The experience of inner harmony it offers, a momentary coherence between nervous system, attention, and environment, is simultaneously an experience of outer harmony: the recognition, felt in the body rather than understood by the mind, that one is part of a larger order. In this sense The Sanctuary operates as a connector: between people sharing a space, between disciplines that rarely meet, and between the individual and the city that surrounds them.
It is also, quietly, an educational instrument. Every visitor who leaves calmer, more coherent, and more curious about why carries something forward. The Sanctuary does not teach through content. It teaches through experience which is the oldest and most durable form of knowledge there is.
WATER
Water as Foundation Water is not a metaphor in The Sanctuary, it is its organising principle. The entire structure is derived from the geometry of the H₂O molecule: its 104.5° bond angle defines the floor plan, its three-atom structure gives form to the dome and its two entry spheres.
The science is unambiguous. The human body is 99.1% water molecules, we are, at the most fundamental level, water given temporary form. Water is the medium through which sound travels most efficiently, nearly five times faster than through air, meaning that acoustic vibration does not merely reach us, it moves through us. The Schumann Resonance frequencies generated by The Sanctuary's subwoofer grid - 7.83 Hz - are the same frequencies at which the Earth's water-bearing atmosphere naturally resonates.
Water is also the universal symbol of transition and renewal, present at the threshold of every contemplative tradition. The fountain features at The Sanctuary's entry points mark the crossing from one state to another, from the noise of the city to the stillness within.
We are water. We are shaped by sound. The Sanctuary is where these two facts meet.
Producer, Composer, Musician and DJ Lasse Mosegard will create 3, morning, afternoon and evening immersive sonic experiences through a unique blend of neuro soundscapes.
The intelligence of the frequencies chosen are known to reprogram and balance at molecular level.
Quantum Physics: everything is made of vibrating energy including human bodies. They are rhythm-based: heartbeat, breath, pulsation, digestive system, circadian rhythms show that. Even human cells have their own rhythms and vibrations. It is important that all systems stay in tune and interact with each other with ease.
Technology enables the production of sound holograms: highly vivid, spatial appearances of sound that enrich, augment or transform reality as we perceive it. Similar to visual holograms, it enables the listener to experience spatial depth and dimensionality in all directions, and from any perspective within the sound field. It provides a future standard for high-definition fully-interactive spatial experiences of sound.
Sound holograms deliver a richer, more complete message to the listener.
It allows us to access a deeper awareness of how we perceive space - steering our attention not only to the sounds we detect, but also to the inner workings of our own perception. Listening becomes a process of unification between ourselves and space as a whole.
TEAM: Monica van der Meulen | Lasse Mosegard - SonicSpheres | Monique Mulder - Mattmo | Carl Hayden Smith - Museum of Consciousness
Poul Holleman & Salvador Breed - 4DSound | Beer Ischa - Pham | Roberto Meyer -MVSA | Annemieke Kievit-Nol | Job Dura - Dura Vermeer | Erik Swaagstra - Team Teal
Supported by : Drs. Eric Laarakker - Annalemma Water | Ted den Ouden Bengs Water | Dragonflywatersolutions | Loliet Enneking | Mark van der Heijden - Conscious 500 | Dirk Lips - Libéma / Efteling .
Patrons : Prof. Casper van Eijck & Frederique van der Vorm
