somar

What inspired Somar

We kept hitting the same wall with every wellness tool we tried. The check-ins felt performative, the breathing exercises felt generic, and nothing ever responded to what was actually happening in our bodies. We weren't in crisis. We were just never quite recovered.

That frustration is what inspired Somar. The name comes from two words: soma, meaning body, and sonar, mapping what lies beneath the surface.

We wanted to build something that skipped self-report entirely and read the body directly. When we discovered that the pitch and stability of your hum is controlled by the same nerves that regulate stress, we had our input.

Who it's for

We built Somar for the person who already tracks their sleep, their HRV, their every metric, and still can't explain why they feel off. The self-aware, high-functioning person who wants real data about their body, not another app asking them to rate their mood on a scale of one to ten. The person who isn't in crisis, but is never quite recovered either.

How it works

You hum for ten seconds. Somar analyzes the pitch and stability of your voice and maps it to one of four nervous system states. From that reading, it builds a personalized sound environment designed to actively regulate your body toward calm.

The sound isn't background noise. When two slightly different tones play, one in each ear, your brain perceives a third tone that is the difference between them. That perceived tone nudges your brainwave activity toward a specific state. A 10hz difference guides the brain toward alpha waves, the kind of calm present awareness you feel when you're relaxed but still awake. Your brain follows the beat without you having to do anything.

Every sound environment Somar builds is layered with frequencies chosen specifically for your nervous system state, not a generic calm playlist.

Our process

Building it in three days taught us more than we expected. We spent day one entirely in research, reading about somatic therapy, interoception, and the science of binaural sound. There are over 30 distinct sensory perceptions most people have never heard of. We wanted to find the one nobody had designed for yet.

Getting clean pitch detection from a browser microphone is genuinely hard. Human hums are messy and early readings were all over the place. We spent a lot of time tuning the algorithm before the readings felt meaningful. The bigger surprise was the language problem.

Nervous system data sounds clinical. Translating a hz number into something a person can feel and act on turned out to be one of the hardest design challenges we faced. The insight copy went through more rewrites than anything else in the project.

What we built it with

We built the entire thing using Figma Make, Claude, and the browser's built-in Web Audio API. Real time pitch detection, live sound synthesis, no pre-recorded audio. Everything is generated live based on your reading.