The New York Times International - 30.07.2019

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12 | T UESDAY, JULY 30, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

tech

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. It would do this by, essen-

tially, programming my phone to lull

me into unconsciousness. Now, every

night, I crawl into bed and scroll aim-

lessly through my phone in the dark

until I have exhausted all of its mind-

less distractions — email, Instagram, a

virtual wooden-block puzzle. Then I

open one last app. My phone speaks to

me for 20 minutes, and then it plays

nature songs for a very long time.

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 as if

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 wonder-

ful, 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 instruc-

tion. It’s more as if she’s administering

some kind of sound tranquilizer. The

app is a “sleep and meditation” service

called Calm, and it costs $69.99 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 smart-

phone to spark a parasocial relation-

ship with a stranger whom I now re-

quire to fulfill a core human need. But

soon I began to wonder who was whis-

pering 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. Narra-

tor: 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 specifi-

cally 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 “mar-

velous,” “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 inti-

mately to millions of people at once.

Then I flew to Toronto to hear her in

person.

INTERNET CULTURE IS OFTEN DESCRIBEDas

hyper-visual, but it has also cracked

open new relationships to sound. The

rise of podcasts — designed to be

listened to alone, in interstitial mo-

ments — has forged new aural path-

ways, and carved out its own aesthetic

category: the “podcast voice,” that

wry, stammering, cool-nerd cadence.

YouTube’s A.S.M.R. 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.

And a crop of mindfulness apps are

exploring how voices could tinker with

the inner workings of our minds. In

addition to Calm, there is also

Headspace, iMindfulness, Aura,

Breethe and Buddhify, each with their

own central voices. Headspace fea-

tures 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. 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 toward more con-

structive uses; most of its sessions

begin with the instruction to close my

eyes. But it’s also extended my reli-

ance on my phone deep into the night

— even into my unconsciousness.

The evening I fly up to Toronto, my

flight is delayed as we wait for thun-

derstorms to pass over New York. I’m

an anxious flyer, so as we’re moored on

the tarmac, I put on Levitt’s recording

on “Calming Flight Anxiety.” (“Since

our fears are rooted in the future, we

can return to a place of calm by recon-

necting with the present moment.”)

The next morning, I walk across down-

town Toronto toward Levitt’s recording

studio, The Orange Lounge. I tap into

Calm again. I’m an anxious inter-

viewer, so I listen to her “Mindful

Walking” track and reroute my atten-

tion toward my movement. (“Your heel

lifts,” she tells me. “The sole of your

foot peels off the ground. Then the ball

of your foot raises, and your toes fol-

low.”)

When I arrive, I find Levitt bathed in

jewel tones: The studio is covered in

red and gold tapestries, purple fringed

pillows, an orange swirled shag rug,

multiple lava lamps. Levitt has a big

smile and wonderful posture. She looks

like her photographs, but her voice is

not quite familiar. It sounds faster and

harsher than it does on the app, though

it is not at all fast and not at all harsh.

It is professional and projected, a little

sardonic and pretty Canadian. Her

accent is barely perceptible in the app.

Levitt has been recognized in per-

son, by her voice, only twice. She

sounds different because she is con-

versing in another realm. She is not

here to soothe me and tuck me in; she

is speaking to me as if I am an adult.

What sounds relaxing on the app

might sound a little woo-woo, even

infantilizing, in the open air. But the

sudden emotional distance between us

feels oddly destabilizing. Levitt worked

as a musician and a voice-over actress

before she became a mindfulness

instructor, and it, too, is an art. “It’s

much more difficult to do voice work

like this than it is to speak normally,”

she says. “It’s really hard to maintain a

very soft, kind-of-whispery voice.”

When Levitt records, she stands in

an expansive room in the studio, at the

center of two screens covered in pack-

ing blankets and angled in a slim V-

shape, her mouth four inches from the

microphone. She has arranged the

room so that her audio engineer,

Spencer Sunshine, cannot see her from

his editing bay. She wants to feel still

and unselfconscious. She wants to drift

into a partial meditative state.

Visible from the booth is a paisley-

printed easel fitted with an iPad (for

her script) and an iPod (for keeping

time), and a footstool crowded with

beverages: a bottle of water, a large

white teapot steeped with Breathe

Easy tea and a can of Dole apple juice,

which helps to quiet mouth smacks.

Occasionally Levitt’s hand will emerge

from behind the screen, remove a glass

and retract. But mostly she is a voice

behind a curtain, an extremely chill

Wizard of Oz.

Today, Levitt is rerecording the

opening line of a new sleep meditation,

which is called “Gently Back to Sleep.”

The Calm founders rarely comment on

Levitt’s content, but one of them, the

digital entrepreneur Michael Acton

Smith, has requested that she soften

the first line. It is, “Hi, this is Tamara.”

Levitt’s voice has undergone a kind of

pleasant erosion in the four and a half

years she’s been recording for Calm,

every remaining edge sanded down.

Recently I noticed that the session I

listen to every night had been swapped

with a new, silkier recording. Levitt

used to present her meditations “more

announcer-like,” she says. Now she’s “a

little bit more relaxed.” She’s more

intimate.

Levitt disappears behind the screen.

Sunshine puts on some spacey music.

Levitt tries the line — “Hi, This is

Tamara” — and her Calm voice crack-

les pleasantly in the editing bay. Then

she coughs, and slices back in with her

real voice: “See, it becomes sexy if it’s

too soft. Let me try it again.”

After recording the line five or six

times, Spencer plays the clips back to

her, instantly stitching each option into

the full recording, and Levitt chooses

the one she likes best. She not only

writes and records the meditations, but

oversees the editing, too. Later she will

deliver precise instructions for how

long each pause ought to be between

each line — eight seconds, or 16, or one

minute and 50 seconds. As I listen to

her, dictating the editing of the medita-

tion from behind the screen, it strikes

me that she is among the most valu-

able content creators on earth. Imag-

ine if much of Netflix content was

conceived, written, performed and

edited by the same person.

FOR ALL THE TALK OF THE PODCAST REVOLU-

TION,its forms are basically recogniz-

able. Vox’s “The Weeds” is a youthful,

progressive spin on panels like “The

McLaughlin Group.” “The Joe Rogan

Experience” draws from the sprawling

programs of A.M. radio, one part

“Imus in the Morning,” one part “Coast

to Coast AM.” And comedy podcasts

are a rollicking extension of late-night

talk shows.

But mindfulness apps represent

something that feels totally remote.

Listening to them can seem, at first,

like padding around a science-fiction

film, absorbing ambient noises while

forging companionship with a kind of

audio gynoid. In addition to Levitt’s

meditation recordings, Calm offers a

whole range of relaxation-adjacent

audio experiences: audio tracks

adapted from Bob Ross’s “The Joy of

Painting,” recordings by ASMR YouTu-

bers like The French Whisperer, the

sounds of distant owls and strong

winds recorded in the wilds of North-

ern California, and bedtime stories for

grown-ups narrated by people like

Matthew McConaughey, who is a natu-

ral. “Let your mind drift with me for

just a minute,” McConaughey begins.

“Let’s ask the question: How often do

we ponder the depth of the present

moment?”

There is a choose-your-own-relax-

ation feeling to Calm. Most meditation

content is evergreen, so the app can

invest in customization, drawing the

listener into the process. A user can

choose her session’s theme, length

(options range from about a minute to

about an hour) and signature nature

sound. “I’m the guy who picks ‘Rain on

Leaves,’” LeBron James, a Calm evan-

gelist, has said. I’m partial to “Forest

Ambiance.”

I treasure some of Levitt’s lines like

dialogue in a movie I’ve seen a thou-

sand times. My favorite is this: “Be-

come aware of the mattress or floor

beneath you, offering you support.” It

makes me feel as if my Beautyrest is

my friend.

Maybe that sounds nuts. It’s true

that the meta-conversation around

these apps can be oddly stressful.

Embedded in them is a strange conflu-

ence of nonjudgmental acceptance and

the pursuit of peak performance of that

nonjudgmental acceptance. Calm calls

itself “the Nike of the mind,” and re-

wards users with a meditation “streak”

every time they complete a session.

Buddhify has a series where you medi-

tate on various features of your smart-

phone’s interface — “Now, resting your

eyes on the big round pause button in

the middle... ” — that is too absurd to

complete. Even the word “Buddhify”

freaks me out. For some students of

Buddhism, and critics of capitalism,

these applications represent a perver-

sion of a social good in the service of a

cult of the self. They call it “McMind-

fulness.”

If you’re looking for an app to be

your Buddha, Calm will disappoint you.

But I am not religious, and I am also

not spiritual-but-not-

religious. I am a

person who down-

loaded a game to my

phone that adver-

tises itself in the app

store as “Addictive

best block puzzle,”

and I need help.

We are often said

to be living in an

“attention economy,” where advertisers

and content creators and technologies

are competing to gobble up the scarce

resource of human attention. Most of

the media pumped out is bent on grab-

bing that attention and not letting it go.

Calm wants your attention, too, but it

wants you to pay attention to thinking

about attention — and the ways you

waste it on self-hatred, and stress, and

the endless scroll of social media.

Much of internet culture works by

fitting a second skin over our experi-

ence, feeding us roiling commentaries

and meta-narratives and boundless

information. Calm strips away all the

layers of meaning until all that’s left is

the sensation of your toes lifting off the

ground.

After the recording session, I meet

up with Levitt for dinner at Toronto’s

SoHo House, where she is a member.

It’s loud. We are almost shouting

across the table. I ask her how it feels

to have a one-sided intimate relation-

ship with millions of people. She tells

me that it is unreal. It’s overwhelming,

and it’s a huge responsibility. She is

gaining access to such depths of emo-

tion with such a vast group of people.

In supporting so many beginners, the

smallest sounds can make a difference.

Even the pauses must be timed stra-

tegically. If she leaves people in silence

for too long, they may feel unsupport-

ed. They’ll wonder, “Where did she

go?”

As we talk, I begin to worry that I

am learning too much about her — that

she took her first intensive meditation

course in treatment for an eating dis-

order, that she has used it to help deal

with her relationship with her father,

that she still deals with anxiety, that

she does not believe she has reached

enlightenment, that for two years she

regularly worked 12-hour days on

Calm. I worry that this knowledge

might distract me from my pure rela-

tionship with her voice. But when I put

on the recording late that night in my

hotel room, her story falls away, and I

fall asleep.

The voice that suits the web

Getting acquainted

with the stranger who

soothes me to sleep

BY AMANDA HESS

Tamara Levitt, who records for the app Calm. “It’s really hard to maintain a very soft, kind-of-whispery voice,” she said.

ARDEN WRAY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The speaker

is talking

intimately

to millions

of people

at once.

I have a confession to share about

shame and experimentation in a win-

dowless room. The good news is it’s

not about sex; the bad news is it’s

about noise music.

It began last winter, when my musi-

cally intimidating friend Corey invited

me to rock out. I agreed before remem-

bering how bored and embarrassed I

was of my guitar playing. So I decided

to make new sounds instead. I started

modifying old keyboards, rewiring

them so they would distort and glitch

— but I couldn’t really play keyboards

either. If I was to maintain my dignity

while jamming with Corey, I needed to

get more abstract — so abstract that

musical talent, or its absence, wouldn’t

be a factor.

I began searching for old electronic

children’s toys. By manipulating their

voltages and then running them into

an amplifier, I succeeded in making

them sound more ominous and de-

monic than intended. Corey was im-

pressed (“Bro, that sounds sick!”). I

was relieved.

But even hacking keyboards and old

toys comes with limitations, circum-

scribed by the chips inside their circuit

boards. You can make interesting

sounds — especially if you incorporate

effects pedals — but you’re still build-

ing off the electronic guts you’ve inher-

ited. I wanted to increase my options

and start playing with sounds made in

the real world. Perhaps a more disci-

plined musician would have picked up

his guitar again. Instead, I discovered

piezo contact microphones, these light,

flat metal discs with a thin ceramic

layer on top. They don’t pick up sound

vibrations in the air; they’re not for

singing into. Instead, they attach di-

rectly onto objects, converting surface

vibrations into electric current (and

vice versa; smoke alarms use piezo

discs as speakers). Musicians install

piezo mics in cigar-box guitars for

amplification; you’ll also find pressure-

sensitive piezo elements in underwater

microphones.

They look unassuming, but once

they’re plugged into an amplifier, piezo

discs become psychedelic microscopes

for your ears, completely changing

your sense of sonic scale. I taped one

to the bottom of a water bottle on a hot

afternoon and ran the signal through a

reverb pedal; the ice cubes banging

around sounded like gongs from dis-

tant planets. Rubbing a piezo mic

against a felt cowboy hat sent me

down a sound-dappled path of contem-

plation, musing on the subtleties of

surface texture and how difficult it

would be to play croquet on a felt

cowboy hat if you were, say, 10 mole-

cules tall. My dumb guitar never led

me to such insights.

Best of all, piezo mics are cheap —

probably one of the most affordable

technologies for completely transform-

ing your appreciation of our world. You

can spend hundreds of dollars on a

high-quality contact mic specially

designed for the subtle timbres of an

orchestral string instrument if that’s

what you want. If what you want,

however, is to drink some beers, plug

in some pedals and freak out some

friends by turning an old Garfield

paperback into a wailing orgy of disso-

nance, you can be up and running for

just a few dollars (excluding the cost of

the beers).

A common use of piezo mics among

experimental musicians is in “noise

boxes,” ungainly contraptions in which

household objects are mounted around

and amplified by piezo mics. I’ve built

a few of these, including an old cookie

tin I outfitted with various springs and

filled with Ping-Pong balls. When I

shake the tin and turn the volume up,

it sounds as if the springs and the

Ping-Pong balls are role-playing the

end of the world. People build noise

boxes with combs, wires, silverware,

rubber bands, fidget spinners, sandpa-

per, old saw blades — tiny orchestras

of singing objects, monumentalized by

the mics placed inside. Indeed, my

hobby has made trash nights newly

enticing, as I wander the neighborhood

looking for garbage that might sound

interesting. My wife loves my hobby

and never teases me about it.

Earlier this summer, I visited a

different windowless room for a per-

formance by one of the grandmasters

of piezo-mic mayhem: Justice Yeld-

ham, an Australian noise artist known

for attaching contact mics to large

pieces of broken glass. Yeldham uses

glass like a wind instrument, smoosh-

ing his face against the pane as he

blows, hums, bites and otherwise

imitates the world’s least subtle peep-

ing Tom. The signal runs through a

small metropolis of effects pedals that

amplify and expand the resonances

and sputterings of his mouth against

the glass. One moment you hear John

Coltrane playing a volcano, the next

you hear a string section being

squeezed through a toothpaste tube.

It’s a high-stakes, smeary embouchure

that can end with Yeldham’s face cov-

ered with blood. (He ended the per-

formance I saw by suddenly breaking

his instrument over his head, some-

thing Yo-Yo Ma has yet to do.) This

may sound like a gimmick — G.G. Allin

for grad students — but Yeldham

coaxes a truly amazing variety of

sounds from his shard.

Realizing that Yeldham was playing

the broken glass — that he was bring-

ing talent and discipline to bear on

what would usually be considered

detritus — helped me understand what

it is about piezo mics that excites me

so much. They don’t just change how I

hear things. They change how I see

things: Every object is a potential

musical instrument. Every object is

worth engaging with, however briefly,

however loudly, as you seek its poten-

tial to wow your friend in a windowless

room.

Piezo mics, a tiny portal to hidden sonic realms

FROM THE MAGAZINE

BY DAVID REES

GEOFF MCFETRIDGE

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