Atop a dining table inside Elizabeth Dell’s Oakland apartment is a minimal speaker: Two knobs, aux-in and aux-out jacks. Next to the speakers are two colorful plugs in a shade that can only be described as Brat green. These are meant for your nether regions. This is the Groove Thing and it’s exactly what you think it is: A music player to fill your earholes, and other ones, too.
Groove Thing was founded by Dell and inventor-cofounder Michael Weiss-Malik, a former director of product at Uber and Google. It will retail for $275 and Dell and Weiss-Malik describe it as an industry-defining sex toy. Their pitch is something like this: If music and sex are already connected, why not experience music as its own form of sexual pleasure?
“The power of the sensation is really amplified when it starts inside your body and is radiating out to the tissues of your body,” Dell explains.
Sound-activated sex toys are a buzzy, recent development in the multi-billion dollar pleasure enhancement industry. Companies like Lovense have already entered the market, but Dell says that Groove Thing is something new. Rather than vibrate based on volume — louder is harder, quieter softer — Groove Thing pulses with the song’s sound waves. An angular guitar riff can shake your Groove Thing (ha) differently than a chunky guitar does. A low, sub-bass tone barely detectable to the naked ear will be very detectable to a naked person using the device. The feeling, as one beta tester told Dell, is like fucking a subwoofer. A convincing (and very NSFW) promotional video shows beta testers writhing and moaning in pleasure.
Already, they’ve received buy-in: The Kickstarter for the Groove Thing has secured more than $350,000 in funding. Noted sex coach Caitlin V. Neal has joined as the company’s “chief groove officer.”
Neel offers me a chance to demo a pre-production model which I oblige, but I opt for the non-insertable attachment. I place the resonator in my right hand as she runs me through the playlist they used to beta test the device.
First, comes a quick and dirty four-on-the-floor drum fill. The Groove Thing shudders in my hands with each hit. It is nifty, if a bit basic.
She then tees up a synthpop number from L.A. band Cannons; the device ripples, steady and calm until the drop in the chorus, making me feel parts of the song I probably would’ve missed with my ears alone. When we get to the pop songs, Groove Thing really gets interesting. Dell puts on Billie Eilish’s “bad guy” and tells me, “All of the female pop vocalists of our last generation do amazing bass.”
Immediately, I feel the song’s “spy-on-the-dancefloor” kick drum and bass run through my arm. As Eilish’s low voice kicks in and that bone-crack snap loops, I feel jolts of energy.
Dell looks at me and tells me to wait for the bridge.
The bass and tempo drop; then comes a barrage of hi-hats that sends the Groove Thing to overdrive. I can’t imagine what this would feel like if I’d gotten even more intimate with this thing.
“Everybody gets quiet. Everyone's like, ‘Oh, the song's over.’ And then boom,” Dell says with a devilish laugh.
She then puts on The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights.” It’s one of the most-streamed songs in the world, a song so ubiquitous it may as well be Muzak, but Dell says she now has what she describes as an “almost Pavlovian response” to the song. This was her test song, the jam she used while dogfooding multiple iterations of the Groove Thing. I wonder, if I were in her shoes, what song I would choose.
Dell emphasizes that Groove Thing is less about the crescendo — the big finish — and more about the ride. It’s as much a sex toy as it is a full-on sonic journey, like a sound bath within, she says.
“Your brain learns a new way to interpret music, because your brain now has proprioception,” she says. “It has touch and it has a way to say, ‘Oh, I know how a song sounds in my ears, but I also now know how a song would feel in my body.’”
Groove Thing may not be for everyone. Wired’s sexual product tester didn’t exactly love “feeling the bass inside” her when testing a prototype. And there is, of course, the major caveat that this is still in the Kickstarter-funding round and nearly a tenth of Kickstarters fail outright, while countless others under-deliver. (They want to ship by the beginning of 2026, and they’re currently working on manufacturing.)
But Dell recalled receiving an email from a complete stranger a week after the Kickstarter launched, and it had a 75-minute playlist of hypothetical songs that would go great for their Groove Things. There could be entire categories of songs dedicated to people’s Groove Things. You could even “try playing a guitar in your partner's hoo-ha” she says.
“I want to leave room for all the experiences,” she says. “There are so many that you can have, and it’s marvelous.”
