“Are you ready to listen with your whole body?” said the voice in my ear.
After a week in Las Vegas covering CES 2025the sprawling technology show and harbinger of our future in consumer electronicsI was actually ready. Ready to escape the sensory overload of casinos and crowded convention halls; ready to let go of the stress, tension and fatigue I carried in my body and mind; ready to see if technology could take me out of my head, even for a minute.
So I headed to the New York-New York Hotel to do “The Hum,” an immersive, tech-powered sound bath that promised a respite from the intensity of CES. All week I was looking for a technology that could calm my stress levels and I was hoping that this might be it.
I walked into the arms of a giant foam “hostess” and settled into a zero-gravity recliner where I donned a eye mask and was draped in a weighted blanket. At first, through my headphones, I could still hear Natasha Bedingfield’s voice echoing throughout the casino, but it was quickly drowned out by the sonic journey that transported me not exactly to a place of calm, but to a mental and physical reset space.
What it looks like in The Hum
The idea, explains Gen Cleary, CEO and founder of Sound connectivitythe company that designed and built The Hum, aims to create a bridge between music therapy, entertainment and ancestral practices like singing, humming and drumming, all of which filled my ears. Simultaneously, they seemed to be inside my body thanks to the 20 transducers located both in my chair and in the panels on my chest that allowed the sound waves to pass through me.
A voice made me take a deep breath and hum as the bass line built, and I felt like I was being lightly kicked in the back, or maybe being carried face down on a galloping horse. When I say it like that, I know it doesn’t sound too relaxing, but I surrendered to it in the same way you do a firm massage and it truly induced relaxation.
The feeling of weightlessness, combined with the sound waves passing through my body and the music in my ears, transported me out of the casino and immersed me in an inner multisensory journey. I was connected to the drumbeat both mentally and physically, before it suddenly stopped after reaching a peak, at which point I felt like I was adrift in a bubbling spring.
“Push energy through the body”
Cleary, who worked for years as a creative director for Las Vegas DJs, says designing the soundscape required a lot of research combined with instinct to ensure the perfect intensity without being too much for people.
“All the content that we’re going to provide,” she said, “needs to be polished so that we know that we’re taking care of our people and that no one is going to walk out of there feeling anxious or feeling anxious.” Instead, it’s supposed to feel like it’s “pushing energy through the body.”
The Hum debuted at CES, but Cleary’s plan is to bring it and other installations and sound experiences to different spaces to make them accessible to everyone — a decision based on his aversion to exclusivity and the segregation of many musical spaces like Las Vegas clubs. . She’s in conversation with a few different airports – notoriously stressful environments for many people – where The Hum will help passengers relax before or after travel.
“If we give you this opportunity to relax, to reset in no time, just by connecting this music, not just through your hearing, but through your whole body… then what happens? » she said.
Out of the fog of burnout
The Hum experiment lasts five minutes, and after doing it twice in a row, I would say that what happened to me was indeed, as Cleary described it, a reset. It created breathing space for me to simply exist, suspended in time to the sound of a soundtrack that infiltrated my entire body and carried me on a circular journey that ultimately brought me back to a more grounded and more peaceful about myself. I came away feeling like I had emerged from the fog of burnout.
Like Cleary, I often find it difficult to rely on meditation and breathing exercises, especially when I’m stressed and taming my mind seems like a challenge in itself. In my opinion, The Hum does the heavy lifting of relaxation for you. You can just exist and let technology take over.
There’s an element of almost voiceless storytelling to The Hum, and over time, Cleary wants to use technology to create different types of experiences that can all take place in the same setting while telling alternate stories. It’s easy for many people to tap into, she says, because, whether we realize it or not, we already know the concept of using music to soothe ourselves. And we may even know what it feels like, whether through a club subwoofer or an acoustic guitar, to be emotionally regulated by sound waves vibrating through our bodies.
“We’re really touching on something that’s already implanted in everyone’s mind, or something practical that people practice,” she said. “It’s a movement that encourages people to use music to help themselves in any way they can.”
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