Know Your Neighbor: Daniel Lauter, Educator/Sound Therapy Consultant/Musician, Chappaqua

Last Saturday night Daniel Lauter could be found playing saxophone for his quartet during the weekly jazz sessions at Chappaqua Station, the restaurant that opened last year at the Metro-North train station.

It was the third time Lauter has played at the venue, and he also performs with another quartet on Long Island, where he entertained on Sunday afternoon.

For someone who has been playing music since he was eight years old, Lauter enjoys performing. But there are different types of sounds that he not only finds pleasing but helpful for himself and others.

In a room on the top floor of his Chappaqua home, he has an assortment of crystal bowls in various sizes, each creating a different soft and soothing tone when tapped. Having worked in sound therapy for years, Lauter, 56, last year earned his certification as a sound practitioner.

He also uses a vast array of instruments, such as rainsticks and indigenous and tribal instruments that are created for specific healing or therapeutic purposes. Lauter innocently started recording these sounds and music about 30 years ago, before most people knew what he was doing. He has been helping students and adults since the 1980s.

“Stress is up there, and people are stressed out beyond belief,” Lauter said. “High school kids that I work with, they’re not sleeping, they’re on all these medications, they’re stressed out from parent pressure and peer pressure and academic pressure and then the teachers are stressed out, the administrators are stressed out, people in companies are stressed out.

“So by listening to specific sounds they have many therapeutic values, you can do a lot with stress reduction just by listening to certain types of sound,” he added.

Lauter said sound therapy differs from music therapy because the latter is evidence based, rather than anecdotal. He hopes to get his music therapy certification, but wants to prove that sound therapy is equally legitimate.

Despite staying busy as a weekend performer and also working as a mindfulness and meditation consultancy, Lauter’s fulltime job for the past 10 years is media studio director at the United Nations International School.

Lauter’s foray into education was at the suggestion of his parents, who both worked in academia. Born in New Hampshire and raised in the Finger Lakes region, Lauter attended music school at the music conservatory at SUNY Purchase.

He had begun playing guitar when he was eight years old, then added various woodwinds to his repertoire, including clarinet, bassoon and later the saxophone. At Purchase, he was a classical clarinetist, studying world music while doubling as a music education major.

During his time at Purchase, Lauter was getting an increasing number of gigs in the city and decided to leave school after about two years.

“I think it might have been a little bit of my rebellion against academics in the family,” Lauter said of his decision.

His father owned a house in Amagansett in eastern Long Island. He met his wife Donna, an artist, whose family had a small cottage on the same block.

They moved to southern California where Lauter played music, including recording with a singer who had a deal with Atlantic Records, while also helping his wife run a gallery. They lived in a small house on a mountain with no running water.

“We weren’t like hippies. It was odd,” said Lauter. “We never really fit the hippie mold but basically I don’t know what you would call us. Naturalists?”

The couple moved north to San Francisco where Lauter’s cousin lived and they stayed there for more than a decade. It is where Lauter earned his undergraduate degree at San Francisco State University, a wise move since with a son and later a daughter, he needed fulltime work with benefits.

By the late ‘90s, his parents and in-laws wanted them to move east. The family returned to Amagansett and Lauter soon got a job as a technology integration specialist at The Ross School in East Hampton. He left to go to a new school for a year before moving to Chappaqua at about the time he got his current job.

Lauter said as much as time allows he continues to explore music, sound therapy and mindfulness and meditation. It helps him stay relaxed and positive in a difficult world.

“There is clearly a lot of energy that is very angry, very hostile, very negative now,” he said. “I don’t know what adjectives you want to use. There’s all of this insanity and on the other side there’s this huge movement of kindness and compassion and empathy and altruism and you can see it in other species.”