The voice in the phone is a woman’s, which I like. I don’t need some man telling me what to do. Her tone is
gentle and optimistic. It sounds like she is smiling as she speaks. 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. Her “ands” are so subdued that they are nearly implied. Sometimes she
pauses for long stretches at a time, and that is wonderful, too.
The voice tells me to do things – to breathe in deeply, and breathe out slowly – but I have listened to the
exact same recording so many times now that it barely registers as instruction. It’s more like she’s
administering some kind of sound tranquilliser. The app is a “sleep and meditation” service called Calm,
and it costs £34.99 a year. It’s been downloaded more than 52 million times.
For several weeks, I tapped into Calm at night without thinking much about what I was doing. 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. But soon I began to wonder who was whispering into my brain every night. Ours is a strangely
intimate relationship. Hers is the last voice that I hear before I go to sleep. She speaks to me past the point
that I am even aware that I am hearing anything.
One night, as I prepared to start the recording, I noticed her name. Narrator: Tamara Levitt. Author:
Tamara Levitt. As I explored the app further, I discovered that she had written and recorded hundreds of
meditations. Her voice can guide a person through depression, loneliness, eating and commuting. There are
sessions specifically designed to speak into your ear as you’re walking down the street.
I googled her and clicked through photos of her smiling easily on a rocky beach, her hair tousled in the
wind. I read the awed user comments that unspooled beneath Calm’s YouTube page and percolated across
social media. Fans call Levitt’s voice “marvellous,” “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.”
A 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. Then I flew to Toronto to hear her in person.
Internet culture is often described as hyper-visual, but it has also cracked open new relationships to sound.
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. YouTube’s ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response, practitioners work their whispers
and breaths and mouth noises to evoke physical sensations. Even the sounds of jogging geese and crackling
ice are preserved for their #oddlysatisfying effects.
Mindfulness apps are exploring how voices could tinker with the inner workings of our minds. In addition
to Calm, there are also Headspace, iMindfulness, Aura, Breethe and Buddhify, each with its own central
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 voices. 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.
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. Calm helps redirect my worst phone habits towards
more constructive uses; most of its sessions begin with the instruction to close my eyes. But it’s also
extended my reliance on my phone deep into the night – even into my unconsciousness.