String Theory Media

sound branding is the new, old way in to your brain

Marketing guru Martin Lindstrom writes about "addictive" sounds in Fast Company with all the glee of a mob boss who just figured out how to get a new hyper-addictive drug on the streets of his territory. 

There's no doubt about it, sound is immensely powerful. And yet 83% of all the advertising communication we're exposed to daily (bearing in mind that we will see two million TV commercials in a single lifetime) focuses, almost exclusively, on the sense of sight. That leaves just 17% for the remaining four senses. Think about how much we rely on sound. It confirms a connection when dialing or texting on cell phones and alerts us to emergencies. When the sound was removed from slot machines in Las Vegas, revenue fell by 24%. Experiments undertaken in restaurants show that when slow music (slower than the rhythm of a heartbeat) is played, we eat slower--and we eat more!

Sound used to be a vital tool of branding because it was invented on radio (i.e. the NBC chimes) but it's taken a back seat to visuals in the TV and HDTV age. Lindstrom is struck (as he should be) by the success of the Intel sound, which ranked among the most "addictive" sounds he tested in a trial of deep brain response. If a computer chip can be given a "sound" by marketers, imagine how much further advertisers could take this. 

OR we could take charge of our own ears and brains and take more steps to improve the signal to noise ratio of what we hear. Demand more noise abatement and buy better speakers. Go to more concerts. Sit in the park and just listen. We get a vast amount from our ears semi-consciously because they're so hyper-evolved and sensitive. But as with our other forms of attention, if we don't attend to them, advertisers will hack that powerful and wide-open port we carry around on the sides of our heads.

doctor, mother, cellist

 This quickie blog entry led me to this remarkable essay from a year ago by physician and writer Danielle Ofri. The publication is The Lancet, Britain's premiere medical journal, which has long included ruminations on medicine and life to compliment the double-blind clinical trials that are its stock in trade. This is not a music therapy piece per se, rather a reflection on how Dr. Ofri's life has been changed by taking up the cello as an adult. It's one of the best things I've read about music integrated into a whole life - music as it could be for more of us if it was not presented to us with so many forms of baggage. She writes:

I still love my ”day job”, taking pleasure in teaching students and connecting with patients, but I have to be honest that, at this point in my career, the sense of growth has remained at a relatively steady state. With music, however, the intellectual challenges develop in ways that are new and surprising to me. The trajectory of learning, of frustration, and of accomplishment for the beginning musician has more in common with the intellectual vibrancy of life as a beginning medical student.

Dr. Ofri centers the article on studying her first Bach unaccompanied cello suites, which I've long held as among the handful of the most perfect works of art ever composed. It feels great to vicariously weave through his spellbinding contrapuntal melodies with her. But she goes on to investigate the profound ties between music and medicine, between the spirit and the body corporeal. She gives me a lot to think about, in that my practicing is almost entirely dedicated to finding my voice as an improvisor, learning to make my guitar say what's in my head in real time (and to have better ideas), while she's taking the more traditional (and demanding) route of playing composed music and getting deep enough inside the notes to interpret them. She's on an important journey, and she shares it with rare clarity and insight. 

missing leonard

 

Even with hundreds of cable channels to choose from today, the likelihood of running into a show like this is slim.

The New York Times reviews a new DVD collection of Leonard Bernstein's 1950s un-lectures about music on the TV magazine Omnibus. And, quoted above, the reviewer Allan Kozinn makes the understatement of the year. Not only is it unlikely that you'd find a show cracking into the mysteries of music, you'll find quite a few options misleading you about music. Year upon year of celebrities lip-synching to auto-tuned, compressed pop recordings and the incessant American Idol drum beat of "follow your dreams" to some kind of vaguely imagined stardom has put our national conversation about music the art form and human nourishment in a box on a shelf in a dark closet. If Bernstein were here, he'd be chagrinned. And then he'd start explaining to whomever would listen.

instrumental music in crisis and a book in progress

Alex Ross opines on the unnerving graph below:

You can see clearly how various generations experienced a bump in participation as they got older. The so-called Generation X, however, has yet to exhibit an upward spike as it moves into middle age. Every classical organization in America should print out this graph, pin it on the bulletin board, and ponder what is to be done. If the light-gray line doesn’t reverse direction in the next ten years, those organizations may begin to fold.

 

This is one of those cases where you know something's bad and then you see actual data and your heart sinks because it's worse than you dared dream. I'm an X Gen kid, and what this says is we not only started out less involved in classical music than any American generation in a century, we're growing increasingly alienated from it.