It is ironic that apps are using the smartphone to help allay problems that are often delivered through the phone itself - distraction, obsession, anxiety, stress. If a user dislikes the voice of a particular track, Buddhify counsels her to “use that difficulty as a focus for your meditation.” No thank you: I am permanently pair-bonded to Levitt’s voice. Headspace features a British ordained Buddhist monk with a degree in circus arts Breethe is built around a recovering “type-A businesswoman ” Buddhify’s meditations are recorded in one of 14 different voices. In addition to Calm, there is also Headspace, iMindfulness, Aura, Breethe and Buddhify, each with their own central voices. Even the sounds of jogging geese and crackling ice are preserved for their #oddlysatisfying effects.Īnd a crop of mindfulness apps are exploring how voices could tinker with the inner workings of our minds. practitioners work their whispers and breaths and mouth noises to evoke physical sensations. The rise of podcasts - designed to be listened to alone, in interstitial moments - has forged new aural pathways, and carved out its own aesthetic category: the “podcast voice,” that wry, stammering, cool-nerd cadence.
#CALM PLAY SOUNDS OUTSIDE THE APP CRACKED#
Internet culture is often described as hyper-visual, but it has also cracked open new relationships to sound. Then I flew to Toronto to hear her in person. Fans call Levitt’s voice “marvelous,” “hypnotic” and “somehow magic.” One user said that her voice “has helped heal my brain.” If Levitt recorded commercial voice-overs, another wrote, “I’d probably end up buying three insurance policies and a Snuggie before snapping out of it.”Ī couple of months ago, I wrote to Levitt and told her I wanted to learn more about how she spoke so intimately to millions of people at once. I read the awed user comments that unspooled beneath Calm’s YouTube page and percolated across social media. I Googled her and clicked through photos of her smiling easily on a rocky beach, her hair tousled in the wind. There are sessions specifically designed to speak into your ear as you’re walking down the street.
Her voice can guide a person through depression, loneliness, eating and commuting. As I explored the app further, I discovered that she had written and recorded hundreds of meditations. One night, as I prepared to start the recording, I noticed her name. She speaks to me past the point that I am even aware that I am hearing anything. Hers is the last voice that I hear before I go to sleep. Ours is a strangely intimate relationship. But soon I began to wonder who was whispering into my brain every night. The whole point of the recording was for me to focus on the voice - not on the meta implications of enlisting my smartphone to spark a parasocial relationship with a stranger whom I now require to fulfill a core human need. Sometimes she pauses for long stretches at a time, and that is wonderful, too.įor several weeks, I tapped into Calm at night without thinking much about what I was doing. Her “ands” are so subdued that they are nearly implied. Her words are crisp and clear, but they are softened, almost slurred around the edges, as if she is delicately easing me into each sentence and then releasing me back into silence. It sounds like she is smiling as she speaks. I don’t need some man telling me what to do.
The voice in the phone is a woman’s, which I like. My phone speaks to me for 20 minutes, and then it plays nature songs for a very long time. Now, every night, I crawl into bed and scroll aimlessly through my phone in the dark until I have exhausted all of its mindless distractions - email, Instagram, a virtual wooden-block puzzle. It would do this by, essentially, programming my phone to lull me into unconsciousness. Last year, during a stretch of anxious nights, I stumbled upon an app that offered to help me fall into a deep and restful sleep.
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