BASELINEa Groundstate project ← back to Baseline

The field guide

The practice, the craft, and how to read the numbers — offered the way everything here is offered: options with their provenance stated honestly, never prescriptions.

The honest posture. Baseline does not promise an outcome. We measure what a sound is — dark, quiet, dynamic, mono-safe, no startle, scoped to a named preset — and we refuse to certify what it does to anyone. The listener's own response is the only verdict that counts. You can't do it wrong.

The five-minute reset

Put on a set. Get comfortable. Try one small thing with your body for about five minutes. Then notice how you feel. That's it. The four below map loosely onto a set's arc — settle → rest → return — but there's no wrong order.

1 · Breathe — the straw breath (settle)

In through the nose, out slowly through pursed lips or an actual straw — the out-breath longer than the in. Try in for 4, out for 6. For kids: "smell the flower, blow out the candle," or bubble-blowing through a straw into water.

Why people use it: a long slow exhale is associated with a shift toward the body's rest branch. The most physiologically grounded of the four — and "associated with" is not "cures."

2 · Press — something to hold (rest)

A weighted lap pad, a firm hug, palms pressed together, hands pushing steadily against a wall. Slow and firm, never sudden.

Why people use it: deep-pressure input is a long-standing occupational-therapy strategy for feeling grounded. The controlled evidence is genuinely mixed — which is exactly why it's an option to try while watching the response, not a prescription.

3 · Move — a slow stretch (return)

A slow seated stretch, a gentle sway, or a little "heavy work" — carrying something with weight, wall push-ups — as a set lifts back toward alert.

Why people use it: gentle movement is a common way to shift arousal up or down; pair it with the return end of a set, when the goal is to come back gently.

4 · Stay — co-regulation (throughout)

If you're helping a child, your own calm is the strongest tool in the room. Breathe slowly yourself and let them borrow it. No fixing, no rushing, no talking them out of it.

Why people use it: children co-regulate with a steady adult before they can self-regulate — the firmest developmental grounding of the four. The regulated nervous system in the room is often doing the real work.

Recording a set that holds up

The one performance rule that matters most: nothing sudden. Everything enters and leaves gradually — that single discipline is what the safety floor measures. The essentials:

Room still. HVAC off if you can, notifications silenced; record 60 s of room tone first as your noise-floor reference.
48 kHz / 24-bit, peaks around −18 to −12 dBFS — headroom, not loudness. Everything is normalized to ~−23 LUFS afterward, so playing quiet and consistent helps.
One close, dry "analysis channel." Run the measurements on that; archive every channel for the spatial render.
Let every tail ring fully out — never cut a decay. Slate each take out loud.
Then measure it before it's shared: the same gate every library sound passes.

Reading the numbers

Every Baseline sound carries its measurements against a named preset (like texture-v1). None of these are clinical thresholds — they're design choices, written down and checkable.

Measure	What it tells you
Startle (max rise, LU)	How sharply loudness ever climbs in a few seconds. The floor most presets hold: no sudden swells.
Brightness (rolloff, Hz)	Where the sound's energy lives. Low = dark, soft-edged; the presets keep everything under 6 kHz.
Loudness (LUFS)	Overall level, kept in a quiet band so nothing needs turning down in a hurry.
Headroom (dBTP)	Distance from clipping — clean on any speaker.
Mono-safe	Whether it survives a single-speaker sum without thinning or cancelling.
Dynamics (LU range)	Whether gentle movement was preserved rather than flattened away.

"In range" means the file falls inside a preset someone wrote down — not that it's safe or right for any one person. Watch the listener, not the badge.

Go make something

Listen in the player · open the studio from the front page and bake a layer of your own · the sounds you make are measured the same way, and the library keeps growing because of them.

Baseline — equalizing access to calm. A Groundstate project.