This high-tech pulsating sound bath cleansed me of post-CES 2025 stress

“Are you ready to listen with all your body?” said the voice in my ear.

A week later in Las Vegas coverage Consumer Electronics Show 2025a sprawling and portentous technological display The future of our consumer electronicsI was already ready. Ready to escape the sensory overload of casino floors and convention center halls crowded with people; Ready to release the tension, stress and fatigue I was carrying in my body and mind; Ready to see if technology It can get me out of my head, even for a minute.

So I headed to the New York-New York hotel for “The Hum,” an immersive, tech-powered sound bath that promised me relief from the intensity of CES. All week I’ve been searching for technology that could potentially calm my stress levels, and I was hoping this would be the case.

I stepped into the arms of a giant foam “stewardess” and settled into the zero-gravity chair where I bounced Eye mask It was wrapped in a Weighted blanket. At first I could still hear Natasha Bedingfield’s voice echoing through my headphones throughout the casino floor, but soon I was immersed in a sonic journey that transported me not to a place of complete tranquility, but to a space of mind-body reset.

What it feels like to be at The Hum

The idea, says General Cleary, CEO and founder Audio connectorThe company, which designed and manufactures The Hum, aims to create a bridge between music therapy, entertainment, and ancestral practices like chanting, humming, and drumming, all of which filled my ears. At the same time, it seemed to be inside my body thanks to the 20 transducers inside my chair and in the plates on my chest that allowed the sound waves to pass through me.

A sound made me take a deep breath and hum as the bass line crescendoed, and I felt like I was being gently kicked in the back, or perhaps being carried on the back of a galloping horse. When I put it like that, I know it doesn’t sound very relaxing, but I gave into it the same way you would a vigorous massage and it actually resulted in relaxation.

The feeling of weightlessness, combined with the sound waves running through my body and the music in my ears, took me out of the casino and threw me on a multi-sensory journey from the inside out. I was connected to the drumming, both mentally and physically, before it suddenly stopped after reaching a climax, at which point I felt like I was adrift in an explosive spring.

“Push energy into the body”

Designing the soundscape was a lot of research combined with intuition to make sure it was the perfect intensity without being too much for people, says Cleary, who worked for years as a creative director for Las Vegas DJs.

“All the content that we’re going to provide, it has to be so finely tuned 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,” she said. Bad.” Instead, it should feel like you are “pushing energy into the body.”

The Hum debuted at CES, but Cleary’s plan is to bring it and other sound installations and experiments into different spaces to make them accessible to everyone — a decision based on her dislike of how exclusive and segregated many music spaces like Las Vegas clubs are. . She strikes up the conversation at a few different airports — very stressful places for many people — where The Hum helps passengers relax before or after flights.

“If we gave you this opportunity to relax, to reset yourself in a short time, just by delivering this music, not just through your hearing, but through your entire body…what would happen?” she said.

She pulled him out of the fog of exhaustion

The humming experience lasts for about five minutes, and after doing it twice in a row, I would say that what happened to me was indeed, as Cleary described, a reset. He created a breathing space for me to simply live, suspended in time to a soundtrack that seeped into my entire body and carried me on a circular journey that ultimately led me to a more grounded and peaceful version of myself. I walked away feeling like I had been lifted out of the fog of exhaustion.

Like Cleary, I often find it difficult to practice meditation and breathing exercises — especially when I’m stressed and feel like taming my mind is a challenge in itself. As I see it, The Hum does the heavy lifting for relaxation. You can just exist and let technology take the load.

There is an element of almost silent storytelling in The Hum, and over time, Cleary wants to use technology to create different types of experiences that can all take place in the same place while telling alternative tales. She says it’s easy for a lot of people to benefit from it, because whether we realize it or not, we’re already familiar with the concept of using music to self-soothe. And we probably also know what it feels like, whether through a club amp or an acoustic guitar, when we are emotionally regulated by sound waves vibrating through our bodies.

“We’re really touching on something that’s already been planted in everyone’s mind, or something from the practice that people do,” she said. “It’s a movement to encourage people to use music to help themselves in any way they can.”