The Colima Beach Club and Wellness Resort is a complete community spanning 190 acres within a rich natural environment that includes a remote, celebrated beach and a long-standing culture of cuisine, craft, and land stewardship. What sets the project apart is not any single amenity, but the depth and integration of its wellness and regenerative systems, conceived as a living, place-based ecosystem rather than a collection of features.
The project is designed as a showcase for regenerative living in its fullest sense. This includes ecological regeneration through organic farming, aquaculture, water stewardship, and circular resource systems, as well as cultural regeneration through the revival and continuation of Nahua knowledge, craft, ritual, and social practices. Wellness is treated as an emergent outcome of how land, culture, infrastructure, and daily life are designed to work together over time.
Design decisions draw simultaneously from Nahua Indigenous traditions and contemporary research across multiple disciplines, including neuroscience, somatics, environmental systems, and climate-responsive design. As part of this integrated approach, designers are paying close attention to leading researchers and applied scientific work, including the research of John R. Iversen’s SIMPHONY Project, which offers insight into how sound, participation, and temporal structure shape human development, regulation, and collective experience.
The SYMPHONY Project, directed by John R. Iversen at the University of California San Diego, is a longitudinal research program examining how sustained music training alters brain development, attention, executive function, emotional regulation, and sensory-motor integration, particularly in children. Its importance lies in understanding how temporal structure, prediction, and embodied listening shape neural systems over time.
Active Participation as a Design Principle
SYMPHONY’s findings are especially relevant to experience design, spatial design, and systems design, particularly where cognition, regulation, creativity, and learning are involved because predictable patterns help people feel oriented, engaged, at ease, and ready to focus. Research shows that predictable timing, sequence, pacing, and flow improve attention span, comfort, stability, and sense of well-being, while also strengthening reflexes and sensorimotor coordination.
Environments work better when timing and flow are designed alongside visual harmony and other sensory cues. This includes structured soundscapes in wellness spaces, coordinated light phasing and acoustic cues across zones, and spatial sequencing that aligns with expectation and progression from arrival through resolution.
In our designs, the goal is for coordinated patterns of sound, light, movement, and spatial flow to function as a cognitive organizing layer rather than separate decorative feature.
SYMPHONY’s findings also show that music’s benefits and regulatory effects are strongest when sound is paired with active, embodied participation. This includes playing instruments, singing, dancing, guided movement, meditation, exercise, sports training, and educational activities intentionally coordinated with sound. In practice, people rarely experience music as a standalone stimulus. They engage it through movement, whether dancing or simply tapping a foot, through singing or humming along, through breath regulation during yoga or meditation, through focused attention in sports or training, and through shared timing with others. In these contexts, sound functions as a framework that shapes action, helps focus, and leads to collective alignment.
Most of us have felt what the right music can do for a gathering. It settles people in, lifts energy, and brings everyone onto the same wavelength. Thoughtful use of sound can have that same organizing effect across many types of spaces and activities.
Our aim is that design the sound will help set pace, mark transitions, and support shifts between activity and rest. Spaces designed for wellness accommodate both individual engagement and shared coordination, with thoughtfully integrated sound helping to signal what experience the space is intended for without requiring formal expatiation. In other words, if you need a ‘quiet’ sign, you have not designed very well.
Wellness design involves the creation of coordinated multisensory zones where sound and music align with natural and man-made light, open air vistas coordinate with framed visual fields, material textures and color tone coordinate with nature including plants, water, smells, airflow and temperature control, and where art, architecture, and engineering converge. Wellness design works in dialogue with all these cues.
At the Colima project, micro-areas are now entering final design stage. In each case, sound and other sensory elements remain situational, contextual, and responsive, supporting the intended physical, cognitive, and social state.
Examples of micro-areas include:
• Organic farm and chinampas, where natural sounds of water, wind, and activity are supported by subtle temporal cues during work periods, encouraging steady pacing for planting, harvesting, and maintenance while preserving the integrity of the agricultural setting.
• Temazcales, (indigenous steam lodges) where heat, darkness, and botanical scent are paired with slow, cyclical sound patterns and vocal tones that support breath regulation, endurance, and ritual progression.
• Sand dune habitat and mangrove forest zones, where openness or enclosure, wind, and ambient sound inform restraint or complete absence of added audio, ensuring that any introduced elements remain minimal, directional, and movement-sensitive.
• Nature reserve trails, water canals, estuary, and lagoon, where kayaking and canoe routes rely primarily on spatial sequencing and distance rather than continuous sound, with occasional tonal markers used for orientation, flow, and collective awareness without intruding on wildlife.
• Wedding garden and ceremonial landscapes, where music, lighting temperature, and planting composition are coordinated to support arrival, gathering, and shared moments of attention.
• Artist colony and tradesmen workshops, where sound and light support focus, repetition, and craft processes, aligning with manual work patterns rather than competing with them.
• Sports training areas, campground, and adventure race center, where audio cues reinforce warm-up phases, exertion cycles, coordination drills, and recovery, integrated with lighting, markings, and spatial organization rather than broadcast sound.
• Parks, pool areas, and communal outdoor spaces, where sound and lighting shift by time of day, supporting play, rest, and social interaction without creating sensory fatigue.
• Somatic spa environments, both indoor and outdoor, where sound, light, temperature, and scent are tightly calibrated to support nervous system regulation, physical therapy, bodywork, and recovery.
• Yoga studios, meditation gardens, and wellness retreat spaces, where sound is used sparingly to support breath pacing, stillness, and sustained focus.
• Restaurants and Night Club where sound and lighting subtly shape tempo, conversation flow, and transitions between social energy and calm.
• Teaching gardens and learning environments, where timing, visual sequencing, and spatial layout reinforce attention, memory, and collective participation.
• Walking trails and circulation paths, where material changes, sightlines, and occasional acoustic elements encourage mindful movement and orientation rather than destination-driven transit.
Across all of these environments, sound is situational, contextual, and responsive, never uniform. Where natural sensory richness already exists, design interventions remain restrained and complementary. Where structure or guidance is beneficial, sound, light, and spatial cues work together to support the intended physical, cognitive, and social state.
Relevance to Education
SYMPHONY reframes music education from enrichment to neurodevelopmental infrastructure. Sustained music training correlates with improvements in working memory, cognitive flexibility, and sustained attention. Music functions as core cognitive training rather than an elective, supporting sequencing and prediction skills relevant to language and mathematics.
Group music-making strengthens social bonding, empathy, and cooperative timing. These practices support classroom cohesion, peer regulation, and reduced behavioral volatility, providing a foundation for designing learning environments as coordinated systems rather than information-only settings.
Relevance to Health and Therapeutics
SIMPHONY intersects directly with wellness, trauma-informed design, and preventive health. Music training influences autonomic regulation, stress responsiveness, and emotional modulation. Structured sound-based practices support anxiety reduction, trauma recovery, and mood stabilization and align with modern somatic and vagal regulation approaches.
Structured cultural practices such as music function as long-term health buffers. Music can serve as preventive mental health infrastructure, scalable community intervention, and complementary support within wellness retreats and integrative care environments.