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“Are you ready to listen with your whole body?” said the voice in my ear.
After a week of Las Vegas coverage CES 2025the sprawling tech show and harbinger of our future consumer electronicsI’m really ready. Ready to escape the sensory overload of casino floors and convention center halls that are crowded with people; ready to release the stress, tension and fatigue that I carry in my body and mind; ready to see if technology can get me out of my own head, even for a minute.
And so I rocked up to a New York-New York hotel to do “The Hum,” an immersive tech-powered sound bath that promised me respite from the intensity of CES. All week I’ve been looking for a tech that could potentially calm my stress levels and I’m hoping this is it.
I entered the arms of a giant foam “hostess” and sat in a zero gravity recliner chair where I wore eye mask and wrapped in a weighted blanket. At first through my headphones I could still hear Natasha Bedingfield’s voice echoing around the casino floor, but soon it was drowned out in a sonic journey that took me not to a place of absolute calm, but to one space for mental and physical reset.
How does The Hum feel
The idea, said Gen Cleary, CEO and founder of Sound Connectivethe company that designed and produced The Hum, is to create a bridge between music therapy, entertainment and ancestral practices such as singing, humming and drumming, which filled my ears. Simultaneously, they seem to be inside my body thanks to the 20 transducers inside my chair and the panels on my chest that allow soundwaves to run through me.
A voice prompts me to take a deep breath and hum as the bass line builds, and I feel like I’m being gently kicked in the back, or maybe mounted on a galloping horse. If I put it like that, I know it’s not overly relaxing, but I give it the same way you do a strong massage and it really induces relaxation.
The feeling of weightlessness, combined with the sound waves passing through my body and the music in my ears, released me from the casino and plunged me into an indoor-outdoor multisensory journey. I connected to the drumbeat mentally and physically, before it suddenly stopped after hitting a peak, where I felt like I was being swept away by a bubbling spring.
“Push energy into the body”
Cleary, who has worked for years as a creative director for Las Vegas DJs, says designing the soundscape is a lot of research combined with gut instinct to make sure it’s the perfect intensity that’s not too much for of people.
“All the content that we will provide,” he said, “must be well-curated to the point that we know that we are taking care of our people and that no one will leave there feeling to worry or feel bad.” Instead, it should feel like it’s “pushing the body’s energy.”
The Hum debuted at CES, but Cleary’s plan is to bring it and other sound installations and experiences to different spaces to make them accessible to everyone — a decision based on what he doesn’t want. many music spaces are as exclusive and isolated as the clubs in Las Vegas. . He talks to a few different airports – notoriously stressful settings for many people – where The Hum helps passengers relax before or after flights.
“If we present this opportunity for you to relax, reset immediately, just by connecting with this music, not only through your hearing, but with your whole body… what will happen?” he said.
Removed from the fog of burnout
The Hum experience lasts five minutes, and after doing it twice in a row, I can say that what happened to me was really, as Cleary described, a reset. It creates a breathing space so that I simply exist, suspended in time by a soundtrack that permeates my entire body and takes me on a circular journey that eventually brings me back to a stronger one. , peaceful version of myself. I came out feeling lifted from the fog of burning.
Like Cleary, I often find meditation and breathing exercises difficult to rely on – especially when I’m stressed and controlling my mind seems like a challenge in itself. As far as I can see, The Hum does the heavy lifting of relaxation for you. You can just exist and let technology carry the load.
There is an element of almost silent storytelling in The Hum, and over time Cleary wants to use the technology to create different kinds of experiences that can all take place in the same setting while speaking in alternative stories. It’s easy to tap into a lot of people, he says, because whether we know it or not, we’re already familiar with the concept of using music to soothe ourselves. And maybe we even know what it feels like, whether through a subwoofer in the club or an acoustic guitar, to control emotion through sound waves that vibrate our bodies.
“We were really struck by something that was already in everyone’s mind, or something that people practiced,” he said. “It’s the movement to encourage people to use music to help themselves in any way possible.”
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