Modern life is busy. Sometimes it can feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day, juggling school drop-offs, traffic jams and busy trains before we’ve even got to work in the morning. There is always a never-ending to-do list, as we try to balance home life with work life, while also finding a little bit of time for ourselves too.

Taking a few brief moments to step away from the stresses of the day can make all the difference to how we feel. O Relax, an app offered for free along with ColorOS 12.1 on the latest launched flagship OPPO Find X5 Pro, offers a peaceful sanctuary in your mobile phone — a private meditation space where you can take time out to enjoy relaxing sounds, helping you to relieve stress, improve sleep and sharpen your focus. When you feel like too tired to look around, you can use your ears to feel the world.

The power of sound

Is there anything more calming than getting outside, and hearing the natural world in its element around you? The feeling of relaxation as you close your eyes and hear the leaves rustling in the breeze, the crickets in the grass and the birds in the trees. By contrast, simply hearing the sad soundtrack of a film can be enough to bring tears to our eyes.

There have been various studies that show us how sound is intrinsically linked to our emotional wellbeing and can have a big impact on our stress levels. It’s a truly powerful experience and can help regulate our breathing, relieve anxiety, improve our mood, and focus better.

As an industry leader in sound technology, with a rich history in audio production, OPPO knows the impact that sound can have on our feelings and emotions, ever since it released its first MP3 player in 2005. That’s what makes O Relax such an important feature, and why it’s been built into ColorOS 12.1 in Find X5 Pro.

Through a combination of audio-visual-haptic feedback, O Relax helps users to release their stress. This multi-sensory experience not only deepens our connection to the audio we’re hearing but also offers things to see, touch and feel, across all features of the app.

Explore the city through sound

Travelling isn’t as straightforward as it used to be, plus the additional stresses of money and other commitments also result in us putting other things first.

One of O Relax’s key features is Sounds of the City, which offers users something that can’t be found in any other app. So far, O Relax has recorded sound samples of the day-to-day occurrences in six iconic cities around the world.

To capture a city through sound is not an easy task. Every city is unique and the sounds that make up its identity are stitched together from many different components. That could be the hustle and bustle of a busy subway, friends chatting in a cafe against the background whir of the coffee machine, or children laughing as they play in the street.

In order to bring each city to life in an authentic way, the O Relax development team partnered with professional production agency Musicity to capture all the different sounds of these vibrant cities in different countries, editing them together into a single soundtrack for a snapshot of the city through sound.

OPPO has also encouraged its users to share the sounds that reflect their memories or favourite things about their city, to create user-inspired soundtracks. The first of these was Chengdu in China.

Whether it’s the sound of busy markets in Bangkok or the breeze through the trees in Reykjavik, O Relax transports its users to the heart of these cities with their own unique soundscape.

Not just that, but with a digital map on screen that helps users to visualise exactly where the sounds were captured, Sound of the City helps users to deepen their connection and experience with the city while listening to the sound.

Through a combination of sound, vision and innovation, Sounds of the City aims to take people away from their current moment, helping them to relax and feel reinvigorated through the realm of discovery and exploration. For the times you need an escape from your surroundings, Sounds of the City can help you to do that.

Personalising your sound experience

Alongside Sounds of the City, O Relax also offers a variety of comforting music tracks and ambient nature sounds, to help clear the mind and reset your focus. White noise is a crucial part of this offering, which is proven to block out the distracting sounds around us to help improve sleep and maximise relaxation.

White noise doesn’t have to be clinical or abstract though. Should you prefer, O Relax uses the sounds of white noise in nature, such as the sound of rain or waves, to help deliver those moments of calm.

All of O Relax’s sounds and soundtracks are chosen and produced by OPPO’s master tuner, who conducts experiments on the different combinations of tone, rhythm and audible frequencies to find the perfect balance. However, if none of the pre-selected sounds are helping you find your calm, O Relax offers multi-track mixing to create the perfect personalised sound experience for you.

This extensive ability for customisation and personalisation is reflected in the design philosophy of ColorOS, which places a huge emphasis on the importance of the user experience, and personalising their experience when using the phone. The Creation tool is a huge part of that, which allows users to change almost every aspect of the ColorOS design to suit their taste. This is done while maintaining the modern and elegant universal design language that OPPO users know and love.

With inclusivity and accessibility at its core, ColorOS aims to enrich a user’s daily life through its design and customisation.

Experience a deeper connection

Through the combination of audio and haptic feedback, O Relax’s deep breathing exercises and relaxation games are designed for users to feel calm. They can help users to regulate their breathing, can calm and focus the mind through touch and response, or simply offer a more tactile, screen-free experience if preferred.

With the strongest haptic motor available on an Android device today, Find X5 Pro provides you with better O Relax user experience than ever before, generating natural, crisp and quiet feedback with every touch and delivering a further dimension to the audio and visual experience.

However, O Relax doesn’t stop there. With precise placement and movement of individual sounds, the addition of Dolby Atmos panoramic audio helps to place a listener at the heart of the sound for an even more powerful and moving experience, offering breathtaking sound quality, with impressive clarity, richness and detail like no other.

With O Relax, OPPO brings together this human-centric approach with its passion for audio to create an experience that brings a much-needed moment of calm back to busy lives. All we have to do is take it.

*Note：The availability of O Relax may vary among regions.