“Are you ready to listen with your whole body?” said the voice in my ear.
After a week in Las Vegas coverage CES 2025the sprawling tech show and harbinger of our future for consumer electronicsI was really ready. Ready to escape the sensory overload of casino floors and crowded convention center halls; ready to let go of the stress, tension and fatigue I carried in my body and mind; ready to see if technology he could get me out of my head, if only for a minute.
And so I headed to the New York-New York Hotel to take in The Hum, an immersive sound bath with technology that promised me a respite from the intensity of CES. All week I've been looking for technology that could potentially calm my stress levels and I was hoping this might be it.
I stepped into the arms of a giant foam “hostess” and settled into a zero-gravity chair where I put on eye mask and was enveloped in a weighted blanket. At first I could still hear Natasha Bedingfield's voice echoing across the casino floor through the headphones, but it was soon drowned out by a sonic journey that transported me not exactly to a place of calm, but to a space of mental and physical reset.
How it feels in The Hum
The idea, says General Cleary, CEO and founder of Connecting soundthe company that designed and made The Hum is supposed to create a bridge between music therapy, entertainment and ancestral practices like singing, humming and drumming, all of which filled my ears. At the same time, they seemed to be inside my body thanks to the 20 transducers in both my chair and my chest panels that allowed sound waves to pass through me.
A voice urged me to take deep breaths and hum as the bass line built, and I felt like I was being gently kicked in the back, or perhaps being carried prone on a galloping horse. When I put it that way, I know it doesn't sound overly relaxing, but I gave into it the same way you would a firm massage and it really did induce relaxation.
The feeling of weightlessness, combined with the sound waves coursing through my body and the music in my ears, took me out of the casino and into a multi-sensory inside-out journey. I was connected to the beating of the drums both mentally and physically, before it suddenly stopped after the peak hit, at which point I felt like I was stepping into a bubbling spring.
“Pushing energy into the body”
Cleary, who worked as a creative director for Las Vegas DJs for years, says designing the soundscape was a lot of research combined with gut instinct to make sure it was the perfect intensity without being too much for people.
“All the content that we're going to provide,” she said, “has to be fine-tuned to the point where we know that we're taking care of our people and that nobody's going to walk out of there feeling upset or feeling. bad”. Instead, it should feel like it's “pushing energy into the body.”
Hum debuted at CES, but Cleary's plan is to bring other sound installations and experiences to different spaces to make them accessible to everyone—a decision based on her distaste for how exclusive and segregated many music spaces like Las Vegas clubs have become. . . She's in talks with several different airports—familiarly stressful settings for many people—where The Hum will help travelers relax before or after their travels.
“If we present you with this opportunity to relax, to reset for a short period of time, just by connecting to this music, not just through your hearing, but through your whole body… then what happens?” she said.
Raised from the mist of combustion
The Hum experience lasts for five minutes, and after doing it twice in a row, I would say that what happened to me was really, as Cleary described, a reset. It created breathing space for me to simply exist, suspended in time to the soundtrack that infiltrated my entire body and took me on a circuitous journey that ultimately led me back to a more grounded, calmer version of myself. I emerged feeling as if I had been pulled out of the fog of exhaustion.
Like Cleary, I often find it hard to commit to meditation and breathing exercises—especially when I'm stressed and taming my mind is a challenge in itself. The way I see it, The Hum does the heavy lifting of relaxation for you. You can simply exist and let technology carry the load.
There's an element of almost silent storytelling in The Hum, and over time, Cleary wants to use technology to create different kinds of experiences that can take place in the same setting while telling alternate stories. It's easy for many people to use, she says, because whether we realize it or not, we're already familiar with the concept of using music to calm ourselves. 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 tapping into something that's already ingrained in everyone's mind, or something out of practice that people do,” she said. “It's a movement to encourage people to use music to help themselves in any way possible.
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