SoundSelf Press kit

More than guided meditation... less than a handful of psilocybes. SoundSelf is the collision of centuries-old mindfulness wisdom with the videogame trance. It's an exhilarating journey into altered states of consciousness powered by your own voice.

Use your voice to explore a hypnotic world of sounds and visuals that feel like they are coming directly from your body. Emergent music harmonizes with you, as you navigate through strobing tunnels-of-light, impossible shapes, and deep into a meditative trance.

Measured by scientists to produce transcendent states of consciousness, SoundSelf is an elegant symmetry of image, sound and body that takes advantage of loopholes in the way you perceive to facilitate a new experience of yourself and your world.

Dim the lights, turn up the volume, and let your voice guide you through an odyssey of color and sound that dissolves your mind in a bath of ecstatic sensation.

Robin Arnott had his first "peak" experience at Burning Man in 2011, and the world has not looked the same to him since. Nobody ever forgets their first experience of what some people call "the divine." For Robin, the series of mental dominoes to fall that temporarily unwound his personhood are remembered clearly as though in slow motion.

The central design of SoundSelf came to him, basically fully formed, just a few months later, as a digital adaptation of the particularities of Robin's own unwinding. When the Oculus Rift was announced in 2012, and DSP programmer / game designer Evan Balster joined the project, SoundSelf grew from a tiny passion project to an ambitious paradigm-challenging undertaking.

SoundSelf has been in development since early 2012, for longer than any other VR experience on the market. A successful Kickstarter campaign in March of 2013 raised $36,766 for accelerated early development and for the construction of a Deep-Playa installation at Burning Man, 2013.

• Can be played in a dark room with headphones, or in PC-VR
• Hypnotic audio with synesthetic DMT-style visualizations uniquely generated in response to your voice.
• Musical skill not required! SoundSelf works with any voice through any microphone, like the one on your webcam.
• Infinite replayability.
• Intrinsically meditative gameplay, even for players uninitiated in meditation.
• Have a psychedelic experience. No drugs required.

Can Virtual Reality be Psychedelic? Guided Meditation VR on Quantitative EEG, Altered States, and Mood

Jeff Tarrant, Ph.D., BCN & Fabiola Einhorn, Qualitative Research Designer