This Throbbing High-Tech Sound Bath Cleansed Me of Stress After CES 2025

“Are you ready to listen with your entire 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 indeed ready. Ready to escape the sensory overload of casino floors and convention center halls thronged with people; ready to let go of the stress, tension and fatigue I was carrying in my body and mind; ready to see if technology could transport me out of my own head, even for a minute.

And so I rocked up 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’d been on the hunt for tech that could potentially calm my stress levels and I was hoping this could be it.

I stepped inside the arms of a giant foam “hostess” and settled into a zero gravity recliner chair where I donned an eye mask and was draped in a weighted blanket. Initially through my headphones I could still hear Natasha Bedingfield’s voice echoing around the casino floor, but it was soon drowned out by the sonic journey that transported me not to a place of calm exactly, but into a space of mental and physical reset.

What it feels like in The Hum

The idea, says Gen Cleary, CEO and founder of Sound Connective, the company that designed and made The Hum, is to create a bridge between music therapy, entertainment and ancestral practices like chanting, humming and drumming, all of which filled my ears. Simultaneously, they seemed to be inside my body thanks to the 20 transducers both within my chair and in panels on my chest that allowed the soundwaves to run through me. 

A voice nudged me to breathe deeply 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 like that, I know it doesn’t sound overly relaxing, but I surrendered to it in the same way you do a firm massage and it genuinely did induce 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 cast me into an inside-out multisensory journey. I was connected to the drumbeat both mentally and physically, before it suddenly ceased after hitting a peak, at which point I felt like I was adrift in a bubbling spring.

“Pushing energy into the body”

Cleary, who worked for years as a creative director for Las Vegas DJs, says that designing the soundscape was a lot of research combined with gut instinct to ensure it was the perfect intensity without being too much for people.

“All the content we’re going to provide,” she said, “has to be fine-tuned to the point that we know that we’re taking care of our people and that nobody’s going to get out of there feeling anxious or feeling bad.” Instead, it’s supposed to feel like it’s “pushing energy into the body.” 

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 her dislike of how exclusive and segregated many music spaces like the Las Vegas clubs have become. She’s in conversation with a few different airports – notoriously stressful settings for many people – where The Hum will help passengers relax before or after journeys.

“If we present this opportunity for you to relax, reset in no time, just by connecting this music, not just through your hearing, but through your entire body… then what happens?” she said.

Lifted out of the fog of burnout

The Hum experience lasts for 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. It created a breathing space for me to simply exist, suspended in time to a soundtrack that infiltrated my entire body and carried me on a circular journey that eventually led me back to a more grounded, peaceful version of myself. I emerged feeling like I’d been lifted out of the fog of burnout.

Like Cleary, I often find meditating and breathing exercises difficult to lean into – especially when I’m stressed and taming my mind feels like a challenge unto itself. As I see it, The Hum does the heavy lifting of relaxation for you. You can just exist and let the technology carry the load.

There’s an element of almost voiceless storytelling to The Hum, and over time Cleary wants to use the technology to create different types of experiences that can all take place in the same setting while telling alternative tales. It’s easy to tap into for many people, she says, because whether we realize it or not, we’re already familiar with the concept of using music to self-soothe. 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 is kind of already implanted in everyone’s mind, or something of practice that people do,” she said. “It’s the movement to encourage people to use music to help themselves in any possible way.”