"To Become Born" is a collaborative music piece by Ram Dass & AWARÉ that uses immersive binaural sound design and cinematic storytelling to explore themes of birth, struggle, and rebirth. Rather than imposing a single narrative, the creators intentionally left the music open to personal interpretation—each listener and viewer brings their own meaning to the symbolism of transformation and renewal portrayed in the video.
What Does "To Become Born" Communicate Through Sound and Image?
"To Become Born" operates on the principle that music carries meaning through emotional and sensory channels rather than literal language. The piece features vocals composed of non-linguistic sounds—words made up on the spot that belong to no "real" spoken language. This approach removes the barrier of rational understanding and invites listeners into a direct, embodied experience. The song was composed by Ram Dass Khalsa, Bogdan Djukic, and Matías Da Via, with the immersive mix specifically engineered by McKay Garner for headphone listening, creating an intimate binaural experience where sound moves around the listener's head in three-dimensional space.
The binaural mixing choice is not incidental—it fundamentally shapes how the listener receives the piece. When music is designed for headphones with stereo panning and spatial cues, it creates a sense of presence and enclosure. Listeners report feeling as if sounds are moving inside their own consciousness. This technical choice aligns with the piece's thematic content: the experience of being born, of transformation, of moving through different states of being. The music itself becomes a container for that transition.
How Does the Video Interpret Birth, Struggle, and Renewal?
Director Mariana Ros was given creative freedom to interpret the music through her own lens, resulting in a narrative about birth, life struggles, and rebirth "like a phoenix." The visual journey follows an actress (Elyss Castro) through symbolic transformations that parallel the emotional arc of the music. Rather than illustrating the song in a straightforward way, the video creates a parallel dialogue between sound and image—both telling a story of emergence and renewal.
The production design, lighting, and cinematography work together to build this narrative of transformation. The visual language of the video uses costume, location, and staging to suggest movement through different states: the rawness of birth, the trials of existence, and the transcendent renewal that comes after struggle. This aligns with many spiritual traditions' understanding of rebirth not as a literal one-time event, but as a continual process of dying to one's old self and being reborn into deeper awareness.
Why Did Ram Dass Emphasize Collaborative Interpretation?
A key principle behind "To Become Born" is Ram Dass's statement that "music can carry many meanings depending on the context. I have my story about the music, but every person should have their own story." This reflects a mature approach to creative work in spiritual contexts. Rather than authoritatively declaring what the piece "means," the creator acknowledges that meaning-making is inherently personal and contextual.
This stance has roots in contemplative traditions where the student's direct experience is valued over the teacher's interpretation. The music becomes a kind of mirror—the listener projects their own understanding of birth, struggle, and renewal onto the piece based on their life experience. Someone grieving loss might hear the "rebirth" as returning to life after death. Someone in creative crisis might hear it as the emergence of new ideas. Someone on a spiritual path might hear it as the dissolution of ego and the birth of higher consciousness.
By intentionally not fixing the meaning, Ram Dass honors the listener's agency and recognizes that spiritual or transformative experiences are not one-size-fits-all. The music serves as a catalyst rather than a prescription.
What Is the Significance of Creating Through Collaboration?
The music video was created through collaboration across multiple disciplines—composition, production, direction, cinematography, and design—and this collaborative spirit was intentional. Ram Dass brought this ethos into the visual creation by working with director Mariana Ros, cinematographer Renata Arzac, production company Kids with Guns, and numerous designers and crew members. This multiplicity of voices and visions is reflected in the final product.
Collaboration in creative work mirrors the interconnectedness that many spiritual traditions emphasize. In Hindu philosophy, which deeply informed Ram Dass's teaching, the concept of "Indra's Net" suggests that all beings and phenomena are interconnected, reflecting one another infinitely. A collaborative creative process embodies this principle—each contributor's unique perspective becomes woven into the whole, and the whole becomes richer because of the diversity of voices.
How Does Binaural Sound Design Enhance the Experience of Transformation?
The emphasis on headphone listening and binaural mixing is crucial to the intended experience. Traditional stereo sound (like a speaker system) places sounds in a left-right field in front of the listener. Binaural sound, when properly recorded or mixed, can create the illusion that sounds originate from specific points in 3D space around the listener's head—above, below, behind, inside.
For a piece called "To Become Born," this immersive quality serves the content. Birth is an experience of emergence, of moving from one state to another, of being surrounded and contained. A binaural soundscape can evoke these sensations—the listener feels less like an outside observer and more like someone inside the experience. The non-linguistic vocals, with their organic and somewhat otherworldly quality, move through this intimate space, creating an unsettling and compelling sensory environment.
This is why the YouTube description emphasizes listening on headphones: the piece was designed with that perceptual context in mind. Listening through speakers would collapse the 3D spatial information, losing much of the intended effect. This detail reveals how seriously the creators took the match between form (how it sounds) and content (what it communicates about emergence and transformation).
What Role Does Non-Linguistic Vocalization Play?
Matías Da Via's vocals, created from sounds rather than words from any "real" language, bypass the interpretive centers of the brain that process linguistic meaning. This is a deliberate artistic choice with roots in various traditions. In kirtan and devotional singing, meaningless syllables and mantras are used to access states beyond conceptual thinking. In contemporary sound art, non-linguistic vocalization can evoke emotional or archetypal resonance without the specificity that words impose.
By removing language, the piece invites listeners to meet it at a pre-rational or trans-rational level. You cannot "understand" the lyrics intellectually because there is nothing to understand in that way. Instead, you feel them. This aligns perfectly with the theme of transformation and birth—experiences that are fundamentally embodied and emotional rather than cognitive.
Where to Go From Here
If "To Become Born" resonates with you, consider exploring it on multiple listens—first with focused attention on the music itself, then with attention to the visual narrative, and finally in quiet reflection without the video. Notice how your interpretation shifts. Investigate other examples of binaural or immersive music to understand how spatial sound design shapes experience. Explore Ram Dass's broader teaching on the nature of consciousness and renewal. Consider how different life experiences—loss, creativity, spiritual practice, grief, joy—reshape what "rebirth" means to you personally. The work invites ongoing dialogue between creator and listener, form and experience, sound and consciousness.
