Great question! We do intend to allow users to play personal music in the future, however we do not yet have a definitive timeline as to when this will be available as it is still in the R&D phase. Though new sessions are being released weekly so there will always be a steady stream of new awesome sessions to experience!
In fact you can sample the audio-only versions of the available content right now by downloading the OPUS Connect App.
For context, music from iTunes or Spotify uses traditional 2-channel “stereo” audio, whereas our SoundBed Sessions are 5.2 channel mixes that are designed specifically for the human body. Our patented multi-sensory immersive sound technology enables each of the 5 zones of SoundBed to resonate the body independently from one another, greatly enhancing it’s effectiveness as a vibroacoustic tool.
SoundBed sessions are custom composed for SoundBed provide the best and most immersive experience, leveraging a wide range of frequencies. There are many diverse audio journeys you can experience that will integrate different frequencies, isometric tones, nature sounds and cinematic soundscapes all targeted at different parts of the body, designed to engender specific brainwave states.
SoundBed can play nearly the full range of audible frequencies, with the felt vibration range being primarily between 20-200 hertz. Through your headphones, you’ll experience dynamic spatial sound that incorporates a wide range of modalities, music and forms of expert guidance such as meditation and breath-work. Simply playing normal 2-channel music through SoundBed right now would be very “muddy” feeling, ultimately leading to a less than ideal experience. We are working towards refining this solution as we are also eager to have this ability.
One of our current initiatives is speaking directly with our favorite artists about licensing their stereo audio and “Remixing” it for the SoundBed experience. This requires some work to adapt the music, but is yielding great results. We have some iterations of that content already on the SoundBed ready for you when you purchase it. Our plan is to engage with artists and build out a robust series of SoundBed remixes with all of yours (and our) favorite artists.
Because we deeply care about the quality and efficacy of the experience we won’t be releasing the ability to play other sources of music and other methods of direct or indirect audio streaming until we are able to release SoundBed session authoring tools so that artists can adapt their content for use with SoundBed as well as signal processing tools on SoundBed that could potentially automatically adapt streamed content in real-time. Not to mention our desire to create live streamed experiences and a great many other exciting future developments.
Trust us, we’ve thought a lot about the best way to make this the best possible experience and we are very excited to continue to solve for these solutions! If you have any specific requests for types of content you’d like to see on SoundBed and that our community might like feel free to let us know!