Headphones are a setup cost disguised as a preference
Most guided breathing is really guided listening. That is fine at home. In the gap you actually have — a corridor, a queue, the minute between two calls — finding earbuds, waiting for them to pair and checking the volume is not a small step, it is most of your window. And in a shared office it is also a visible act: putting headphones in to breathe announces what you are doing more clearly than the breathing does.
Tacet does not have an audio track to be optional about. The pacing arrives as vibration against your palm or through a pocket, so there is nothing to connect, nothing to level, and nothing to take out afterwards.
What this changes in practice
- On a train or a plane. Nothing leaks into the carriage or the cabin, and the phone can stay in your hand at your side.
- At a shared desk. A session runs with the phone face-down. There is nothing to overhear and nothing to see.
- In a corridor. No dead earbud battery between you and a session you have ten seconds to start.
- In a room where sound would be rude. A waiting room, a library, a lobby, someone else's house.
It also means the practice does not depend on hearing
A breathing exercise delivered in a voice — "in, two, three, four" — is unavailable if you are deaf or hard of hearing, and the usual accommodation is a visual animation that puts you back in front of a screen you have to watch. Tacet's design lands somewhere better by accident of its own constraints: the breath arrives through touch, which is a channel that does not care whether you can hear.
And because the screen is dark rather than the point, the session is described for screen readers instead — the time remaining, and how to end it — so it does not quietly depend on sight either.
Tuning it to your hand and your phone
Without audio, the vibration has to carry the whole session, so its strength is adjustable and free for everyone regardless of subscription. The range sits around a tuned default: enough to follow in a hand, a pocket or on a desk, and never enough to be heard across a table. On a phone with a high-fidelity haptic engine you feel a breath envelope that swells and fades; on simpler hardware, a recognisable version of the same breath; and on a device with no usable vibration motor, the app says so plainly rather than doing nothing.