It was amusing at first — all our screens and Zooms and Reels and constant busyness and endless rushing and the pace and insanity of the news. But the fun wore thin, and our nerves wore thin, and so, before their last synapses fried, 45 San Franciscans filed one recent evening into a large, dark room.

We took seats under a round, space-age dome, hung with small and large orbs. These were among the 176 speakers belonging to the Audium, which since 1976 has submerged visitors in total darkness and a brain-bending form of spatial audio art. From past performances, I knew to expect a sonic sculpture of some sort: sounds and tones and music fragments sliding around the space in different directions at different speeds. This was an all-new composition, one of many sonic immersions I’d be experiencing in the weeks and months to come. Dark rooms all around town seemed to be filling with sound  — and with addled San Franciscans in search of something they’d lost.

What we heard first was water. Drops for a bit, then rushing. I’d never experienced anything like it — sounds so radically clear and vivid as to be specific sounds: not just any water but specific water running down a specific Virginia storm drain I’d straddled as a specific boy. 

Then, somehow, the sounds morphed into a menagerie of visions parading across my blank visual field. I saw old Russian baubles lining a shelf, a plaintive hound painted for some reason in an impressionist style. Here was a saxophonist playing just 10 feet to my left. By the time the lights came back on, I was seven-dimensional. 

I’ve been doing a lot of this these past few years: stepping away from our mindlessly relentless, oversaturated reality and into dark spaces where big, imprecise things happen in my ears. For a long time, a San Franciscan requiring this sort of sonic bewilderment had just the Audium. No longer. Billed variously as sound baths, sound healing workshops, immersive audio experiences, spatial sound art and so on, a host of opportunities for tonal envelopment have come to the Bay Area. 

Google around, and you’ll find these happenings cropping up in small theaters, drab warehouses, the occasional yoga studio. Grace Cathedral offers monthly evening sound baths. The recent Logos Method “Sound Journey” in Golden Gate Park promised “a symphony of soothing sounds designed to reduce pain and stress while boosting calm, mental clarity and spiritual connection.” My friend James even recently had me and my wife over for a late-afternoon gong bath. Something is in the air, and in the ear. 

The sounds themselves, of course, are not new. Charles Ives was building sonic spatialization into his compositions before World War I; the harmonic overtones of a Tibetan singing bowl have been inducing meditative states for millennia. What’s new are all the options. When even the Ritz-Carlton at Half Moon Bay hires  a “certified sound practitioner” offering vibrational therapy, you know you’re going to be hearing about sound for a while.

On a recent Monday night, I drove to a nonprofit listening space called Envelop. Tucked into the Midway, a venue at the southern edge of the Dogpatch, Envelop features live performances, listening events and other ear-based happenings. At the appointed hour, 10 of us crept shoeless into a circle on a carpeted floor. Thirty-two speakers surrounded us, encased in eight glowing columns around the room, and then we became vegetables.

Or maybe geraniums. Half a century ago, inspired by his wife’s horticulture habit, an Angeleno named Mort Garson began composing songs for plants. Those songs turned into an album, and the album turned into a promotional gift for anyone who in 1976 purchased a plant from a store on Melrose Avenue called Mother Earth. You could also get a free copy from Sears with the purchase of a Simmons mattress. RIP the ’70s.

As plant-centric promotional albums go, Mother Earth’s Plantasia found limited success. But thanks to its rediscovery in recent years, we at Envelop were treated to a new experience of it. I’ve since listened to the album on my boring old earbuds — it’s fine! Kinda kitschy. But fully enveloped in it, more serious, Eno-adjacent things happen. The resonant low tones scoop out your woozy work angst; the warbly high chimes ring away the grinding stress of the political moment.

I can’t speak to the healing benefits said to accompany many of these sonic immersions. But a cocoon of pure sound undeniably subsumes the cacophony of daily life, synthesizing it into a kind of obliterated clarity. 

That effect — I think it’s what the multidisciplinary artist Devon Turnbull first experienced as a teenager. Sitting in the dark, in the presence of his dad’s old stereo, he sensed something profound, he explained to me recently. But then he got older, and life got busier; among other things, the streetwear line he launched in 2002, Nom de Guerre, had taken off. At the same time, music itself was getting more ubiquitous and less sacred; as a limitless sprawl of free songs found their way onto our phones, the specialness of any single musical experience diminished. One day, Turnbull realized he hadn’t experienced that aural profundity in years. 

So he made a hard pivot and began designing a new kind of high-end stereo equipment. Rather than striving for acoustic accuracy, Turnbull designed it to be emotionally true. The idea was to facilitate that quasi-spiritual connection to sound that many of us have been missing, whether we know it or not.

Through Aug. 18 — and here’s hoping it gets extended — you can immerse yourself in “HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 2,” Turnbull’s contribution to SFMOMA’s Art of Noise exhibition. In a darkened room, before a bank of his futuristic-looking speakers, you sit as an evolving playlist washes over you: West African music, classical, Stones B-sides, Coltrane, Balearic house and so on. (Small cosmic world department: A few weeks ago, Beck showed up at SFMOMA to spin records. Among them was Mother Earth’s Plantasia.)

The other day, I sat there, among a bunch of other people on the museum’s seventh floor, as an old Jon Hassell album played. Most museum exhibits, you shuffle along after a few minutes. But we couldn’t move. The audiophiles around me were presumably thinking about biradial horns and single-ended triodes. Others, I assume, were pondering the difference between a sound bath, an immersive sound experience, a healing sonic journey and a spatial sound sculpture. 

For the first time in a while, I thought about nothing at all.

Chris Colin is a San Francisco journalist and author whose writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Pop-Up Magazine, Wired and Best American Science & Nature Writing.