The Universal Sense (22 page)

At the other end is the use of silence. One of the films that always struck me as incredibly powerful was Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey
. It seemed to me that every use of sound in that movie was iconic, from the use of classical music to highlight motion and movement to the ambient, almost tempoless flowing frequencies of Ligeti’s
Requiem
during times of tension and contemplation. But what I found most interesting was how the film used the
lack
of sound. Not just the absence of dialogue at the beginning and end of the movie, not just the lack of overlap between music and dialogue at any point, but rather the proper use of silence in the space scenes. When the deranged computer, HAL, activates and sends the pod under remote control to attack Frank Poole, followed by the scene of him hurtling out into space, there is nothing. No sound. No music.

As a space baby, I was raised conflicted.
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I knew from all my early astronaut-wannabe childhood years that there was no sound in space, yet Saturday afternoons were filled with science fiction movies of the 1960s and 1970s, which always had spaceships going
whoosh
and hearing the explosions of whatever space weapons they were using to kill the Thing from Venus (although I do confess to having a soft spot in my heart for the elephant trumpet/car screech that the
Star Wars
TIE fighter made when it screeched by). Perhaps the most well-known example of this
conflict was described in an interview with Gene Roddenberry, the creator of
Star Trek
. Being technically minded, Rodenberry knew that the
Enterprise
wouldn’t make a sound as it swooped past the viewers in the opening sequence, but he had the sound team add in a swooshing sound because he thought that otherwise it felt too flat. At a psychophysical level, he was right—we’ve evolved to expect dynamic events to be associated with sounds. A large object moving by us at high speed (without feet to make footsteps or wheels to make road noise) would move a large body of air out of its way, generating a noise-like band, shifting its center frequency up as it approached and down as it moved away because of the Doppler effect. A lack of sound would make us feel strange, kicking in the anticipatory heightening of auditory and attentional sensitivity that silence triggers even at a neural level. That is what, to me, made that moment in
2001
so unique—by using the lack of sound an observer would experience if he or she was actually in space, Kubrick took us viewers out of our normal environmental context and put us in a soundless void, bringing along all the tension and attention that silence carries.

But while big-budget movies can usually count on being shown in a theater with a decent sound system, what if you are relying on whatever system and environment people have at home? Sound design for the small screen is different. In a movie, if you want to add tension, you can throw in atmospheric music or the sound of engines with a serious 40Hz rumble in it and shake the theater, triggering the listeners’ fight-or-flight system. But unless the person has a really good home theater setup (which wasn’t even available at the affordable consumer level until the 1990s), those audio effects are lost. Sound design for the small screen takes a bit of widgeting, as it has to use the
middle-of-the-road technology and middle-of-the-range sound quality that most common home systems have.

Luckily, even inexpensive systems these days are stereo and have a sound quality that is far beyond just adequate in the best human hearing range, so by using some psychophysical tricks, you can get some very powerful effects even through a home TV set. For an example, one of my favorites occurred in an episode of the 1990s show
The X-Files.
The show was highly successful, spanning nine seasons and spawning two movies. I liked it, but not for its acting or originality—many of the episodes were serious homages to previous mystery/conspiracy shows such as
The Twilight Zone
of the 1960s or
Kolchak: The Night Stalker
of the 1970s. I (and a lot of people I’ve spoken with) liked
The X-Files
because its atmosphere was genuinely creepy and emotionally powerful, largely due to the efforts of composer Mark Snow, sound editor Thierry J. Couturier, and sound designer David J. West.

The show used many typical auditory tricks—lowpitched strings, sudden silence, characters speaking in noisy environments—but one that particularly stood out for me was a specific scene in which the character Fox Mulder was speaking to his partner, who was supposed to be a maternity patient in a lab, and for some reason it was incredibly tense. I kept watching the scene, repeating it, switching to headphones, finally breaking down and recording the background sounds and removing the dialogue, trying to figure out why this rather banal scene seemed so incredibly menacing. When I finally examined a continuous piece of the background sound, I found that what I thought was supposed to be air-conditioning noise was in fact the expected noise convolved or mixed with the sound of a nestful of angry wasps. A wasps’ nest is one of those sounds that
doesn’t require interpretation; it gets right into your brain stem and lets you know at a very basal level that this is not a good place to be if your desire is to remain in a pain-free state. By sampling the sounds of wasps, a fear-inducing primitive sound, and pushing it way down in the background but still leaving it perceptible, the sound designers were able to manipulate the scene to create a sense of tension and fear far beyond that elicited by the visuals or the situation.

Another aspect of audience manipulation that is specific to radio and the small screen is the laugh track. It’s a pretty simple thing—the “studio audience” (often a pre-recorded tape) laughs at moments that are supposed to be funny, and you are supposed to laugh along. The laugh track was supposedly born in 1948 on the
Philco Radio Time
show. A show was recorded when a comedian was having a particularly good night, but because of some rather off-color humor, the jokes couldn’t actually be used on air. However, they saved the laughter from the audience on tape and reused it on other shows. On television, a CBS sound engineer in the 1950s named Charles Douglass started using prerecorded laughter to tweak the laughter from a live audience, mixing in the taped laughs if the audience wasn’t laughing hard enough, or muting everything down if their laughter went on too long. By the time the 1960s rolled around and most shows were pre-recorded without a live audience, canned laughter became a rather annoying default, not dying out until the 1990s; since then it has become a bit of a rarity.

This powerful, if often counterproductive, sound production tool relied on psychology. A laugh track relies on auditory social facilitation: the laughter is a social signal, often given off as a way of relieving stress (most basic comedic situations involve something unpleasant happening to someone else). Studies have
shown that there are four basic states that are communicated in the acoustically complex signal of laughter—arousal, dominance, the sender’s emotional state, and what the sender thinks the listener should be feeling (called “receiver-directed valence”). Certain aspects of laughter are similar to the prosodic emotional cues found in speech, making it a powerful non-language-based communication channel.

Perception of laughter is processed throughout much of the auditory and limbic centers, with different types of laughter processed in different regions. For example, the kind of laughter that is evoked by tickling is processed in the right superior temporal gyrus (STG), a region that is often implicated in social “play.” Laughter from an emotional response is processed more in the anterior rostral medial frontal cortex (arMFC), a region implicated in emotional and social signaling. But neural imaging studies have shown that both the perception of laughter and the act of laughing itself can cause the ventromedial prefrontal cortex to release endorphins, the brain’s native and powerful pain reducers; in fact, many studies have shown that laughter can actually elevate your pain threshold. Another interesting possibility is that synchronized release of endorphins may play a role in social bonding. So while the laugh track emerged from one comedian’s particularly good night telling off-color jokes, its ability to induce social bonding through sound turned it into an industry standard for manipulating the emotional response of audiences.

But there is another form of media that uses sound to immerse and manipulate its audience, and only recently has it gotten the kind of attention paid to radio, TV, and movies. Many examples of this form use extremely short, simple sounds that produce rapid emotional responses among almost all listeners, and
yet they remain unstudied and unused, probably because they’re video games. Go play a simple video game, particularly those from the dawn of the home computer game era, when sound was limited to 8-bit boops and beeps and very simplified tonal phrases—something such as
Pac-Man
. A trio of chords going up means victory. A descending arpeggio means you died and should be sad about it. A noisy blatting sound (such as in
Q-bert
) means frustration. These sounds had to be as simplified as possible given the constraints of the technology of the time, yet still rapidly emotionally evocative enough to keep you involved in the game.
⁴⁵

But the tremendous strides in computing power and the lowering costs of components have led to video game sound design being a true leader in the quest for sensory immersion.
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Today’s video games are even more powerful bastions of emotional manipulation, using more subtle techniques that match the more powerful underlying technology and sound programming. I remember that in the late 1990s when I was stuck playing
Quake 2
, the sound was what really got me—the sound of flies around a dead body, voices supposedly of tortured soldiers with flat affect, repeating over and over. But the one simple sound effect that caused me the most trouble was a simple tapping sound made by the foot of one of the Strogg (bad alien guy) characters—a simple, quiet
taptaptaptaptap
repeated over and over quietly as you approached its position, the only thing that
warned you that it was around. After spending about eight nighttime hours thoroughly immersed in the game when I should have been working on my dissertation, I had to drive to work the next day. I was going along in my car when I suddenly heard the same
taptaptaptaptap
and found myself slamming on my brakes, just narrowly avoiding ramming into the eighteen-wheel diesel whose exhaust flap was tapping in the exact same pattern as the monster in the video game. I’m still not sure if the adrenaline rush was from not dying in a car crash or from realizing I wasn’t going to be fragged by a Strogg in the middle of Peacedale, Rhode Island.
⁴⁷

All of these types of media—radio, movies, TV, video games—are based on the idea of using sound to create a world, to let people suspend their disbelief by using their ears to create an environment beyond the edges of the screen; the creators hope the experience will be attractive enough for you to want to pay for it. But sound is also used to create an emotional micro-world, one that you take with you—and one that the creators also hope will induce you to pay for the experience. The micro-world is called the jingle.

My friend Lance was anointed the most annoying person in the world by
Maxim
magazine. If you know him, this would be surprising—Lance is very kind, hardworking, and funny, and he spends most of his free time coming up with new and unusual ways to get your attention with sound. But the numbers don’t lie. You see, Lance is the creator of the T-Mobile ring-tone. Five notes that come as a default sound for more than 30 million people in the United States alone and which signal dinners interrupted, work overdue, or one more annoying but
unavoidable phone call. Five notes that somehow never really leave your head. Five notes that you hear anywhere you walk, even now, when you can download anything as a ringtone.
Maxim
called it “an aural scourge on humanity.” Lance says, “It’s just a jingle.”
⁴⁸

There may not be that much difference between the two. And not all of it is Lance’s fault. Some of it’s your brain’s.

As a neuroscientist, I’ve always been fascinated by jingles in the same way I was fascinated by leeches. Jingles are sort of a microcosm of applied music in the same way that the nervous system of leeches is a functional miniature of a human brain. Jingles are just about the simplest form of music out there that have all the same hallmarks as whole songs, concertos, et cetera—they are composed of pitches at specific tempos, they manage to worm their way into your memory, and they evoke an emotional response. They just have to do all that in a few seconds.

You know what a jingle is—it’s a horribly catchy piece of music tied in with a product or name, a bit of sound that you can’t get out of your head for days on end and which you can find popping up years after the product being advertised is long gone, or at least no longer advertised that way.
⁴⁹
But if you widen the definition just a bit, jingles have been with us for a very long time. When I started trying to do some research into the history of jingles, I hit a sort of roadblock. Every online source I found seemed to talk about the Wheaties jingle of 1926
being the first jingle used in broadcast (radio, of course). All of them seemed to be either a paraphrase or in many cases a direct copy of the article on jingles from Wikipedia. The only other types of jingles mentioned seemed to be radio station ID jingles. All of them described jingles in exactly the same way, as a short tune used in advertising, a form of sonic branding. But really, a jingle is not just a way to sell you a thing—it’s about linking an object with an emotion and transferring it to your long-term memory without requiring you to pay attention to it.