It's a screen-free audio player for children, who can use physical cards with NFC technology to listen to audiobooks, music, sound effects and more from the likes of Roald Dahl, Julia Donaldson and Paul McCartney.

LifeScore has partnered with Yoto to create musical soundscape cards called Dream Cards, which have been composed specifically to help Yoto’s young listeners sleep soundly. This aim is backed by theories that hearing relaxing music before bed is beneficial to heart rate, and that hearing relaxing music during the day may lead to processing it in dreams and experiencing positive emotions while doing so.

Yoto quotes this 2004 study, which posits that young ‘subjects who received background music at naptime everyday and bedtime each night for 3 consecutive weeks had significant improvement in global sleep quality over time’. We explored some of the science in this area in our Red Talk on functional music and wellness, which you can read about, here.

Yoto has launched LifeScore Dream Cards into a booming sleep-tech industry and it also provides a sincere helping hand to mitigate the development of anxiety disorders in young adults, an increasingly serious problem in our society.

Three LifeScore Dream Cards will launch in Yoto’s Card Store on February 18. Each card will contain an hour-long immersive soundscape: Dreams of the Forest, Dreams of the Ocean and Dreams of Space. The collection was created using music composed by LifeScore Co-Founder Philip Sheppard and recorded in various sessions at Abbey Road, including in our Abbey Road Red incubation session, which you can read more about, here.

These recordings were then reinterpreted by Philip and the LifeScore team using their Cellular Composition™ technology, which uses artificial intelligence to evolve new pieces of music from the source material. In the case of the Dream Cards, these musical “cells” were blended with high-fidelity field recordings to create immersive atmospheres that feel conducive to sleep.

This project is very close to Philip’s heart as a composer as well as a music tech founder. His original idea for an adaptive music platform, which we then incubated at Abbey Road Red as LifeScore, was conceived while out on long walks in Yellowstone National Park and imagining the music he was listening to adapting to his movements and pace.

From the beginning, he set out to innovate adaptive audio with the brilliant LifeScore team by creating their Cellular Composition™ system, through which high quality recorded audio performed by musicians can be turned into adaptive audio; a first for the music industry.

Adaptive music is nothing without the most brilliant foundations and this is the foundation for LifeScore and Yoto, introducing Yoto’s listeners to high quality themed sounds and music. The teams at Yoto and LifeScore feel there could be many possibilities for adaptive music in the kids’ audio space and are excited to explore this potential together.

At Red we are excited and proud of this partnership and can’t wait to see where it may lead.