your ears
There is a dome in a warehouse in North Vancouver with more than thirty speakers in it, projections across the ceiling, a custom vibroacoustic floor, and LEDs bent around the curve so the whole interior can be saturated in colour. Mark Nazemi and his partner opened it in January. It’s called Sensorium — and before any of the technology went in, the first thing they did was make the room quiet.
That turns out to be the part worth dwelling on. The space was a concrete warehouse — rectangular, hard, reflective — and Nazemi worked with an acoustic engineer to hunt down every mode and frequency build-up before the dome existed. Now people walk in and say I feel so calm just being in here, before anything has been switched on. “We’re so over-stimulated,” he says, “that we don’t always have awareness of how much that’s impacting us.” He says it, in the recording, over the sound of a garbage truck reversing outside his window. We left it in.
Nazemi came to this through music — producing, performing, running a music college for fourteen years — and through migraines he treated, without knowing why it worked, by going into the studio. Research at SFU’s Pain Studies Lab turned that instinct into a discipline: immersive, binaural audio that can reduce anxiety in waiting rooms within five minutes. The dome is the full expression of it — sound that bends around the curve until a whisper lands at your ear, bilateral stimulation for a whole room at once, sixty-minute compositions he thinks of not as genres but as worlds. And he is unusually honest about evidence: why he won’t build on black-box wearables yet, how to tell whether a study is any good, and why a two-hour online course shouldn’t make anyone a sound practitioner.
In this conversation
- Why a dome bends sound so strangely that someone across the room sounds like they’re whispering in your ear — and how that becomes group EMDR-style bilateral stimulation
- The Oura Ring paradox: a client’s ring logged forty minutes of deep sleep during a session she was awake for — and why he won’t build on black-box algorithms
- How to tell whether a piece of research is any good — confounding variables, homogeneous samples, blind protocols — in five plain-language minutes
- Composing sixty-minute worlds instead of genres: “It’s like taking a cough syrup — you may not like it, but you know it’s going to help”
- The warning: everyone is now a sound practitioner, and sound works in both directions
THE GUEST
Mark Nazemi
Sound researcher, composer, and educator. Founder of Sensorium, North Vancouver’s multisensory dome for nervous-system health, opened in 2026. His research with SFU’s Pain Studies Lab showed immersive binaural audio can reduce anxiety in clinical waiting rooms within five minutes; before that, he ran an independent music production college for fourteen years.
THE HOST
Howard A. Rose
VR and digital-health pioneer, TEDMED and TEDx speaker, writing at the frontier of what it means to be human.