The Universal Sense (23 page)

A successful jingle is an advertising tool based on the use of basic psychological and neurological principles. The thing is, advertising emerged long before either of these fields did.
⁵⁰
Ancient wall paintings in Pompeii described things for sale; professionals in the Middle Ages put up large logo-like carvings indicating where you could get your horse shod, bled, or made into horseburgers; print advertising showed up in the first newspapers in the 1700s, using large letters in different fonts to grab your attention. Even in the twentieth century, people had the Oscar Mayer wiener song stuck in their heads long before the advertisers hired neural marketing researchers with access to fMRI machines. This is because over the eighty years or so that we’ve been able to broadcast sound into our environment, media people have learned the basic rules needed to get the job done.

A jingle requires five things to be successful: (1) it must be short enough to fit into your short-term memory, which means between four and seven notes or other elements; (2) it must be at a tempo that allows other sensory and motor systems to form correlations with the sound (i.e., you can hum it or tap your fingers to it); (3) it must be different enough from other things
you may hear so you can identify it; (4) it must be presented in the context of some
thing
, whether the thing is a specific object or a brand; and (5) it must use all these other aspects to create an emotional response. In other words, it requires frequency discrimination, temporal identification and integration, multi-sensory convergence, association, and connectivity with the emotional processing regions of the brain—all the elements that go into auditory processing and identification. But it has to go further than that. Hearing a jingle once does very little, so it must be repeated often enough to be transferred from short-term to long-term memory. If you hear it repeated a lot, a jingle will be logged by your brain as noise, which means both that you recognize it automatically and that you will start to find it profoundly annoying. At the same time, the presentation of the jingle must be strictly associated with a product so that you form a cognitive association with that product
and
provide an emotional context, so that when you recall the product, the emotion associated with the jingle comes along with it.

In short, the ideal jingle is an
earworm
, a piece of music that you can’t get out of your head. For several years I’ve been working on an outside-the-lab bit of research I call the Earworm Project, in which I’ve been trying to figure out what makes an earworm and how to make the perfect one. There are numerous examples of good earworms or jingles—Walter Werzowa’s Intel audio logo and Lance’s T-Mobile ringtone are the two best-known examples. Lance described his process to me. The original T-Mobile logo (back when the company was known only as Deutsche Telekom) consisted of five boxes: three gray ones and then a pink one elevated out of the line, followed by another gray one. Five visual elements, with one different. Lance basically came up with a six-note logo formed of three notes the
same, then one raised a third, and finally a return to the first tone, with the sixth just as a resonance fading away at the end. The simplified version is only five notes but they form an auditory match for the visual logo. Limiting it to five tones keeps it within the limitations of short-term memory, so it is easy to remember, and by using multisensory convergence (matching of sound and vision) you had two sensory systems coding the jingle or sound logo. One of the most powerful elements for integrating any sensory object is multisensory convergence—your brain codes objects that share characteristics, whether by color, nearness, or tempo, as a single object. (This is the base of auditory stream segregation; it works even better across modalities.) Multisensory convergence and coherence of stimuli seem to underlie what is called in neuroscience the
binding problem
—how the brain manages to take all the low-level sensory elements and form them into objects.

But it’s not limited to just vision and sound. My wife, a sound and biomimetic artist, is also a former ballerina, and she pointed out that what always helped her remember music was the ability to move to it, adding tactile and proprioceptive (muscle position) feedback to the sound. Try this for yourself. Think of the first tune that you like or jingle that you remember, and I’ll bet you that you can tap your toes or drum your fingers to it easily. So we expand the timing of a successful jingle to include not just the millisecond speeds of auditory recognition and the several-hundred-millisecond speeds of visual processing but also the slightly slower-than-vision rate of motor output.

One question is how quickly you can form an association between a sensory stimulus and an emotional state. It depends on a number of factors, including whether you are trying to form an instant association of emotion and sound or attempting
to condition a listener to accept the sound as a substitute for what would normally trigger such an emotion. Certain sounds, such as a sudden roar—consisting of a loud fast-onset sound continued with lots of low frequencies with inharmonic, fingernail-on-the-blackboard components—are scary in and of themselves. While in most cases, someone trying to sell you something wouldn’t want to scare potential customers off, I do remember a local haunted house radio ad that used a five-note minor-key jingle played on a detuned bass pipe organ that was pretty effective until they added the cartoonish scream at the end.

But since you can get a strong positive emotional response to sounds in less than a second, a brief series of sounds should be sufficient to give you a useful emotional association. This is one of the underlying bases of a type of simple learning and was first characterized by Pavlov in his early work in classical conditioning, which, as we’ve seen, involved conditioning dogs to associate the sound of a bell with food. The model most often used to describe the operation of classical conditioning is called the Rescorla-Wagner model, and while it was developed and tested on rats and pigeons, its basic precepts hold up on any organism complex enough to figure out how to chain more than two actions together to reach a goal (so, for example, this is beyond the capabilities of nematodes).

The problem is that advertisers rarely have the opportunity to shove a plate of their product right in front of you within half a second of hearing their jingle, as would be required with simple classical conditioning. So they rely on principles of learning to help you remember their product, form a positive association with it, and go and buy it later that day or week or year. This theory, called
operant conditioning
, is different from classical conditioning in that the learner has to modify his or her behavior
to actually
do
something to earn its reward—such as spend money or go to that resort timeshare sales presentation.

And it’s here that sound starts shifting away from something that enhances your suspension of disbelief, your enjoyment of a show, your emotional involvement with a created world. Here at the junction where people are beginning to use sound to deliberately shift how your brain and mind respond, with the goal of getting you to do something, we move from simple entertainment to the world of brain hacking.

Chapter 8
Hacking Your Brain Through Your Ears

As you walk down the dark alleyway from the theater, the slightest noise makes you turn your head and startle. When the volume doubles as an ad comes on during a commercial break, you instinctively press the mute button. When the radio plays the song you heard when you had your first kiss, you stop what you’re doing as brief memories well up without words.

Sound affects us in ways of which we are not aware. It changes our emotions. Changes our attention. Changes our memory, heart rate, desires, response to the opposite sex. Sounds like … is it …
mind control
? (Cue the threatening,
Manchurian Candidate
-esque soundtrack, which sort of proves the point). Well, yes, of course it is. The ability of the film score composer John Williams to manipulate the emotions of millions of people is why he’s paid the big bucks. But there is really little to fear from this kind of mind control: music and sound work on preconscious levels, and a little understanding of the underlying mechanisms can explain how you (and others) can and do hack your mind through your ears—without the problems inherent in pushing the Q-tip in too far.

First of all, what is “brain hacking”? The first image most of us conjure comes from watching really bad movies and usually involves someone ending up with a light-bulb-studded colander on his head while someone else in a lab coat is screaming, “Fools! My creation shall destroy you all!” Then the switch gets thrown, and after the de rigueur exploding control panel and shower of sparks (because no one in science has ever heard of circuit breakers or fuses) the newly transformed creature develops mental powers that let him turn invisible or communicate with some hidden dimension where the electrical wiring is adequate. A more sedate version (and hence much less fun) can be found in consumer electronics catalogs where you can buy “mind/brain machines.” These devices are supposed to induce altered states of consciousness ranging from pedestrian “meditative states” to my favorite, “synchronization with the electrical resonance with the earth itself,” which sounds like what Nikola Tesla would buy if he had invented the Home Shopping Network before alternating current. You can even download sound files to “hack your brain with your iPod.” It all sounds very exotic, and most of the vendors for these materials throw in all kinds of intricate-sounding “brainwave frequency ranges” with sexy Greek-letter nomenclature and more decimal points than you can shake your calculator at.

But brain hacking really just involves taking the research discussed in the previous chapters out of the lab and putting it to use in the real world. Brain hacking can be as simple as changing the virtual position of a sound from one ear to the other in time with basic rhythms of the brain to induce a change of mood. Or it can require complicated filtering and modulatory post-processing steps to try to get specific psychological or physiological effects. There are almost limitless possibilities for
application of auditory neuroscience and psychology to the sounds we hear every day. These can include creating video games that make you feel more excited as you go up levels or actually feel ill as you lose points; composing film or video scores that use specific algorithms embedded in the soundtrack to manipulate viewers’ emotions, without needing a full orchestral arrangement; using attention-grabbing sounds to shift a driver’s attention to a blinking dashboard light or to people about to be run over; and what you would think would be a real money-maker, making advertisements “stickier”—creating an audio logo that’s impossible to get out of your head. The question is, can these techniques work consistently enough to form the basis for modern marketing?

To see what sonic brain hacks can and can’t do, we have to examine some specific applications. Brain hacking, aka ways of altering states of consciousness, can be broken down into two major types: (1) ones that induce global changes and generally change your brain’s overall state by increasing your arousal, and (2) ones that modify specific elements of your mental state without inducing overall cognitive changes. The two seem very different on the surface, but either can be brought about by using a few simple rules for controlling sensory input. And if you are the hackee, understanding these rules can either enhance your experience or help you fend off the effects when you find out someone is using such manipulations on you.

Let’s take a look at the simplest approaches first. What’s interesting here is that two of the most effective techniques seem diametrically opposite in their nature: either limiting the sounds your listener hears or increasing them to the point of being overwhelming.

Brain hacking using limited sounds is probably the simplest:
just cut out the noise. Take noise-cancelling headphones, for instance; they may not seem like a brain hack, but they assuredly are. They shut out your normal auditory environment so you can focus on the internal one, usually your music or your audiobook. Think of it this way: if you’re walking down the street or sitting on a plane wearing noise-cancelling headphones, you are cutting out all the environmental signals that your subconscious normally processes to help you orient yourself without thinking about it. This is a boon in a plane, as it’s not likely that hearing a change in the sound of the engines is a good reason to leap up and storm the cockpit to save the passengers on your flight. But wearing such a headset while walking or running on the street is more likely to make you miss something important, like that SUV making a right-hand turn from the left-hand lane. Your exercise in auditory damping thus yields results closer to brain squishing. You would have done less damage with the Q-tip.

But if you’re still not convinced that damping the noise is a serious form of brain hacking, call around to a local university and find someone who does auditory research, preferably someone who works with bats. Bat scientists are a bit weird. They will be happy to talk to you, as they don’t get out much in the daylight and a lot of their social interaction involves math or discussions of things such as how a pallid bat can hear a scorpion fart from five meters away. While you may not think of these as the best pickup lines, these scientists often have cool toys and specialized gear for playing with animals whose hearing is several orders of magnitude better than yours, as we discussed earlier. More to the point, they probably have an anechoic room for the bats to play in. And an anechoic room will show you how warped true silence can be for normally chatty humans.

You walk in and see that the walls, the ceiling, and occasionally the floor are lined with egg-crate-shaped foam to absorb sound or reflect it to another absorbing surface. Close the door and it gets quiet. Real quiet. After about two minutes, you can’t help but say, “Damn, it’s quiet in here,” just to hear something. But the lack of echoes and reverberation muffles and damps your own voice. Make a sound and it gets swallowed up instantly. And your brain tells you that is just
wrong
. Some people begin having anxiety issues within a minute or two, but most people can hold out for another minute or two before they start hearing a faint hiss. A really good anechoic room is so quiet that your ears are suddenly able to show off their stuff and you start hearing the air molecules banging around.
Hissssssssssss
. And then you start getting the “I’m stuck in a Vincent Price horror film” feeling, as above the hiss comes a gentle and quiet
lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub.
It’s your own heartbeat. And that’s all that you can hear. That’s when most people leave, or start singing show tunes. So there is the simplest of auditory brain hacks—just remove all the extraneous noise of echoes, reverberation, and the susurration of background voices and noises and you are definitely in a heightened state of awareness, trying to figure out what’s wrong, what’s missing. It’s one of the best demonstrations of how expectant, if not dependent, our brain is on normal, unattended background stuff. Take it away, pare your auditory world down to the bare bones of basic signals, and your whole mind shortly starts twitching—and waiting for the giant bat to come and devour the farting scorpion before your very eyes.