"Nee-nee-nee-nee-nee-nee-nee. Naw. Nee-nee-nee. Naw-naw-naw-naw."
Brian Krohn is chanting into his phone, which is displaying animated missiles shooting down a red whale.
It's a new smartphone app, a voice-controlled game that Krohn has helped develop to get users to perform what he calls "pushups for your tongue."
The app, called Soundly (sleepsound.ly), just might be a cure for snoring, according to the young St. Paul entrepreneur and inventor, who developed the game with colleagues at the University of Minnesota's Earl E. Bakken Medical Devices Center.
Soundly is a bit like the old Space Invaders arcade game, in which your character moves back and forth along the bottom of the screen to shoot down targets. But instead of pushing buttons with your thumbs, you control your character by saying "nee" to move your character to the right, and "naw" to move it to the left.
According to Krohn, those two words alternatively push the base of the tongue back or forward in your mouth, which tones and strengthens the upper airway muscles.
Weak and flabby airway muscles can cause snoring, which affects more than 90 million Americans. Snoring has been linked to sleep apnea, which, in turn, is linked to a host of ailments ranging from heart disease to depression. There are other treatments for snoring, but wearing mouthpieces and CPAP machines can be bothersome and expensive.
Soundly started when Dr. Umesh Goswami, a sleep expert at the university, showed Krohn a Swiss study which found that people who were taught to play the didgeridoo snored less, possibly because playing the Australian wind instrument develops stronger upper airway muscles.