“Are you ready to listen with your whole body?” said the voice in my ear.
After a week in Las Vegas covering CES 2025, the sprawling tech show and harbinger of our consumer electronics future, I was really ready. Ready to escape the sensory overload of casino floors and crowded convention center halls; ready to release the stress, tension and fatigue I was carrying in my body and mind; ready to see if technology can get me out of my head, even for a minute.
And so I went to the 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 was looking for technology that could calm my stress levels and I was hoping this might be it.
I crawled into the arms of a giant foam “lady” and settled into a zero-gravity reclining chair, where I put on an eye mask and covered myself with a weighted blanket. Initially through my headphones I could still hear Natasha Bedingfield’s voice echoing across the casino floor, but it was soon drowned out by the sonic journey that transported me not exactly to a place of calm, but to a space of mental and physical restoration.
How it feels in The Hum
The idea, says Gen Cleary, CEO and founder of Sound Connective, the company that designed and created The Hum, is 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 both inside my chair and on the chest panels that allowed sound waves to pass through me.
A voice prompted me to take a deep breath and hum as the bass line built, and I felt like I was being gently patted on the back, or maybe held prone on a galloping horse. When I put it that way, I know it doesn’t sound very relaxing, but I gave in to it the same way you would a vigorous 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, transported me from the casino and threw me on a multi-sensory journey inside and out. I was attached to the beat of the drum both mentally and physically, before it suddenly stopped after hitting a peak, at which point I felt like I was plunging into a bubbling spring.
“Putting energy into the body”
Cleary, who has worked for years as creative director for Las Vegas DJs, 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 of the content that we’re going to offer,” she said, “has to be fine-tuned to the point 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 bad. ” Instead, it’s supposed to feel like it’s “pushing energy into the body.”
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 her dislike of how exclusive and segregated many music spaces have become like the clubs of Las Vegas. . It is in talks with several different airports – highly stressful environments for many people – where The Hum will help passengers relax before or after travel.
“If we give you this opportunity to relax, reset in no time, just by connecting to this music, not just through your hearing, but through your whole body… then what happens?” she said.
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Raised from the burning mist
The Hum experience 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. She created a breathing space for me to simply exist, suspended in time to a soundtrack that permeated my entire body and took me on a circular journey that eventually led me back to a more grounded and peaceful version of myself. . I came out feeling like I’d been pulled out of the burning fog.
Like Cleary, I often find meditation and breathing exercises difficult to rely on—especially when I’m stressed and quieting my mind feels like a challenge to myself. The way I see it, 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 technology to create different kinds of experiences that can all take place in the same setting while telling alternative tales. 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 relax. And we can 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 in everybody’s mind, or something practical that people do,” she said. “It’s the movement to encourage people to use music to help themselves in any way possible.”
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