Music from Ventilators - Part 2: ASMR and the Colours of Noise.

Note: for better understanding, please read Part 1 of this article 👉first.

***

If you are reading this, you may have come across the term ASMR before. ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) is a relatively new definition and means something like "sensory massage" or "brain orgasm". ASMR is used as an acronym in the German-speaking world; there is no official corresponding German translation for the term. ¹

ASMR Cherry Crush/youtube

However, it can be described quite well: For some people, hearing certain sounds and other auditory stimuli causes a tingling sensation on the skin that spreads from the head down the spine to the buttocks. This sensation is often described like a pleasant shiver of goose bumps, but it lasts longer and is more intense. Triggers for this include whispering, speaking or singing softly, or the sound of touching an object with long fingernails. After all, this type of ASMR video has already made it to several million videos and millions of enthusiastic subscribers on Youtube.

For many, ASMR seems to be strongly associated with this type of Youtube video - although the phenomenon has been around much longer than Youtube has even existed. A very important figure in the 1980ies was painter Bob Ross, whose quiet speech and soft brushing gave some viewers their first "ASMRgasm".

Personally, I am a devotee of a variant of ASMR that has to do exclusively with "white noise." My brain massage starts automatically when I catch a fan somewhere, a ventilator, a heater. If it's also raining and thundering and lightning, i am practically in heaven. The fact that you feel a sense of happiness when you feel a warm stream of air may well have its origins in early childhood experiences of security. Many people, for example, also love the sound and warm blast of a hair dryer - and can be incredibly creative from this state.

Al Lullaby ASMR/youtube

Analog fans and hair dryers are of course the real thing - but the constant use of these devices is of course also a question of cost. It's cheaper to switch back to videos. On Youtube there is white noise in all combinations for really every need: rain, rain with thunder, rain with thunder and fan heaters, all kinds of fans, sounds of server rooms, sounds of trains, airplanes, even all kinds of agricultural machinery noises - the possibilities are endless. Here you can choose what makes you feel good, depending on your intuition. But you can also do a bit of analysis beforehand - by taking a closer look at the "basic material", i.e. the noise.

>> For this, we will leave out all the physical definitions - there is an analogy that illustrates the whole spectrum of noise quite well, namely that of light: Just as white light contains all colors, white noise contains all frequency spectra - including the high frequencies. We know this noise from earlier times, when there was NO program on TV and the well-known "snow flurry" on the screen was accompanied by a loud noise. If you filter out certain frequencies from the white noise, you get different frequency spectra that are perceived as stressful or pleasant, depending on your personal disposition - and these are designated with different colors.

https://sleepasloth.com/

Pink Noise: Pink noise has been the most popular frequency spectrum for a number of years: white noise is joined here by a relatively concise bass sound that softens the high, "sibilant" peaks. Rain is a perfect example of pink noise; because of its soothing, unobtrusive sound, pink noise is therefore also often recommended for calming crying babies, but also for people with problems falling asleep and, on the other hand, for students to promote concentration.²

Brown Noise: Brown Noise has even less treble components, whereby here the low and middle frequencies are approximately equally intense. By the way, in the technical literature "Brown" is not a color classification, but comes from "Brownian Motion", named after a specific way in which particles move in a liquid. Brown noise is most reminiscent of strong wind or the sound of large ocean waves crashing in. 

Blue Noise: Blue noise is mentioned here only for the sake of completeness; it contains only high frequency components. This spectrum is used in recording studios, for example, to round off any overmodulation peaks in a recorded song afterwards.

Gray noise: This is the spectrum your blog host is most comfortable with; it mainly uses low frequencies. This is the sound of huge fans used in industry. Musically, Grey Noise is essential for the composition of so-called drones. 

Green Noise: Due to its mainly mid-frequency components, Green Noise is often used to simulate ambient sounds in nature.

By the way, a purely theoretical concept is "Black Noise": The absence of all signals would mean total silence - something that is nowhere possible on earth (I wrote about it in the first article of this series). 

So with this rough classification, it should be possible for the curious listener to find the perfect noise for them. What you do with it (mask the tinnitus, fall asleep easier, concentrate better, etc.) is up to you. For the pareidolia described in the previous article, which can trigger quite exciting audio phenomena such as voices and "ghostly" music, I recommend a combination of different sounds and for sensation enhancement the consumption of various substances.

***

¹

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_Sensory_Meridian_Response

²

https://time.com/4694555/pink-noise-deep-sleep-improve-memory/

Music from Ventilators - Part 1

 In some newspaper I recently read that due to constant warming, noise pollution from air conditioners and fans is also increasing - it hums, buzzes, clanks and blows everywhere. According to the article, people would be subjected to additional stress from this noise pollution and would want nothing more than silence.

The problem: silence is a purely theoretical concept; it doesn't happen in real life. This can be seen in so-called "anechoic" chambers (more correctly, "anechoic rooms"), as exist at the University of Vienna and many other universities.

 Such a room at Harvard University was visited by the famous composer John Cage in 1951. What he heard in this probably most silent room in the world, he had explained to him afterwards: on the one hand the murmur of his own blood and on the other hand the high-pitched buzzing of his nervous system. ¹ So even in an anechoic room one cannot speak of absolute silence.

This experience not only shaped his musical philosophy (and ultimately led to the legendary composition 4'33) - until the last years of his life, it made Cage not only stoically endure the street noise below his New York apartment, but become a constant source of inspiration: "Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating". ²

4'33 shows the way quite exemplarily. As is well known, this work by Cage, which is still very controversially received today, consists of a concert pianist lifting the piano lid during the performance, starting a stopwatch, and then doing NOTHING for exactly four minutes and 33 seconds.

What Cage meant by this is that if we are forced to listen to our surrounding sounds within a certain period of time, we can compose our own "music" with this material - which in the case of the concert situation at hand consists of the whispering, rustling, murmuring, and chair-backing of a highly irritated audience.

 
By the way, this is also a wonderful exercise recommended in some introductions to "composition": Take a certain situation during the day (for example, during a walk, on the way to work) and listen carefully to the surrounding sounds during this period of time - given a bit of imagination, these sounds can be put together in your head to form a real symphony.

***

Back to the „rushing fans“: If you give up the annoyance of noise pollution and try to listen to the sound of these machines without prejudice, you will be amazed at what you hear: many kinds of unexpected sounds, strange music, human voices and more. This can also become quite irritating in between.

The reason for this lies in the so-called Clustering Illusion, which, according to its definition, "describes the human property of attributing meaning to random patterns that inevitably occur in sufficiently large amounts of data." ³ A variant of this is so-called Pareidolia - the dubious ability of our hyperactive brains to immediately recognize some kind of meaning in what we consider disordered environments like this.

Hasn't everyone seen a face in the irregularities of a wall? Recognizing faces in random structures is a perfect example of pareidolia and, as in the case of the "Martian face," can even go around the world as a headline. Pareidolia can also be used as an explanation for just about all "ghost photos" that circulate on the Internet and are not deliberately faked anyway.

Of course, the whole thing works also on the level of hearing: Here, too, our brain tries to filter out something familiar to us from the disordered patterns of a sound - this then ranges from the slight audio hallucinations described earlier to the "heavenly music" received from supernatural forces to the "dead" speaking to us from the beyond via radio or to the so-called "reversals" said to have been discovered when playing popular songs backwards.

By the way, the meanings of these phenomena ascribed by esotericists and conspiracy theorists can be demystified quite easily: Unless you are told beforehand what you are going to hear (a mandatory practice in such circles) and your brain then dutifully confirms this interpretation, you will hear only what these alleged phenomena really are - a purely random arrangement of weird sounds.

Incidentally, in the case of the described Pareidolia, there is also a close relationship to the so-called Apophenia - a symptom of schizophrenia in which perceptions in random patterns begin to take on a personal level of meaning. If that is the case, it is very urgent to do something about your own mental health. We all know one or the other tragic case of "personal messages" being transmitted to a mentally ill person via the radio, TV or other media; in almost all cases, this is a relatively sure sign of psychosis.

However, this should not stop us from listening to nice music from fans. At least the stress level regarding ambient noise can be wonderfully reduced or decreased. In fact, there is already a real industry that has assimilated the phenomena of ASMR and White Noise - but that is the subject of the next part, which you can read here soon.

 ***

¹ https://kirkville.com/john-cage-and-the-anechoic-chamber/

² John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings, Wesleyan 50th Anniversary Edition, 2013.

³ https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering-Illusion