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

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

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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.

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¹

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

²

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

Haunted by Hyperacusis

And the Consequences

There is this weird phenomenon called "Hyperacusis" - it is pretty alien. It is a loss of hearing at the same time coupled with a hypersensibility towards sounds, mostly high-pitched ones.

Hyperacusis can be caused by traumatic acoustic events or exposure to loud environments for a couple of years, or an inflammation of the middle ear (mostly during childhood it can go unnoticed).

In any case, one's eardrum gets ruptured and scarred. One has a dropoff of 10-20 Decibels in the higher frequencies, but is, as said, also extremely sensitive to loud noises in that frequency band.

In hindsight, it cannot be told, if there was a previous injury that was worsened by an incident or if it was due to the incidence itself, and/or a former problem, like an inflammation as a child.

I myself experienced this. It hurt, and the day after I could not get up, because I felt really dizzy, after all, our hearing apparatus is also responsible for our sense of balance.

And all of a sudden every noise, be it the radio or the TV or talking felt very loud and uncomfortable to me.

The doctor's diagnosis came as a shock to me, since I am a musician and heavily rely on my sense of hearing. And nothing can be done about it.

The consequences are, I have trouble understanding speech and am totally helpless in loud environments. The action my left ear takes when something unfitting arrives is to shut down and make an uncomfortable Tinnitus noise that lasts for a few minutes, which hurts.

The other weird part: my right ear kind of chimed in, achieving „Hypaccusis“ - not to be disambiguated with Hyperacusis, it is a simple loss of hearing.

I created some music because I got invited to a project – I did it Beethoven-style: Deaf. I could not listen to it at all, actually.

I had let some customized hearing protection made for me, because I am a man of music and I want to go to concerts. They work pretty well, even in the hardest part for me: The handclapping of the audience.

This experience changed my sense of hearing profoundly. I could not listen to my own music for quite a while – but now my hearing is faintly better, and I am not so much afraid to lose it at all, anymore. I took up a job in the field and found balance in how to adjust volumes for me, and to use hearing protection on the right occasion.

Here is my deaf composition: https://pwgen20.bandcamp.com/album/get-this-32-tracks-for-free-a-tribute-to-peter-rehberg

It is the first track, called „Alarms“. I am now able to listen to it and have my dog sing along.

By nokturnal

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.

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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.

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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

Haunted by the Kunstkopf

A „Kunstkopf“ is also called a „Dummy head“. I prefer the first term.

It is a very intriguing recording device, available in the upper 4 digits EUR class if you are in need of one carved out of wood...

In modern installations, the actual head is represented by special X-aligned condenser microphones.

Before, there are wood, styrofoam & vinyl heads with inbuilt condenser microphones which allow for binaural recordings, „real stereo“, as we understand it.

Various artists, like CAN used it in their studio sessions as a recording device instead of standard microphones, since the studio seemed too sterile, too exact. With the artificial head, one could make recordings that could be perceived as if actually sitting in the natural stereo field.

Mostly, this device found a home in Radio Plays.

A very enchanting short demonstration is to be found on YT (in German):

by nokturnal

Haunted by the Dynamophone

 At a Certain Point, a man had a haunting Idea about broadcasting Sound:

Thaddeus Cahill: Electric Music

Let's quickly describe the device he imagined first, the Telharmonium:

Cahill built a large, quite a few tons heavy transformer bank (The Mark I weighed 7 tons. The Mark II weighed almost 200 tons). It is considered the first electromechanical musical instrument dating from c. 1896. Electric tubes were neither invented than transistors, so this was the only contraption he could use to generate electric music sounds. He considered it as an electric organ.

As amplifiers also were not invented yet, he invented some kind of loudspeakers (basically horns with an electrically driven diaphragm, today known as "Tweeter") for live performances, which were attended and received quite well, for example by Mark Twain.

Cahill also seems to be the inventor of additive synthesis, as he added so-called "color wheels" to his contraption, which did the job.

But then, Thaddeus Cahill developed another, revolutionary idea:

He wanted to distribute his electrical signal to people out there. So, since radio was still in its diapers the only possible network was: 

Phone lines, powered by his second device, called the "Dynamophone"

It got advertised in newspapers when transmissions would be available, so one could dial in and pick up the receiver at the right time.

There are no recordings available of the devices, nor tangible remains. The devices were too heavy, and quickly overcome, by more simple and less energy-consuming devices.

It can be said, Thaddeus Cahill's machines caused a lot of "Crosstalk" along the not yet shielded phone lines. So one having a phone conversation could have easily been overtaken by outer worldly sounds.

Last but least, for sure, this must be the first known synthesizer, with a commercial streaming service attached.

by nokturnal

Muzak, Mallsoft

 Music, this wonderful entity, often takes on a consciousness of its own; triggered by human and non-human intervention, a stream of audio particles flows out of a source - and seeps away from the noted auditory presence into the cracks of other fault lines as well, for these cracks and crevices of the mainstream are often full of mysterious signals that develop their own unconscious agendas unnoticed at the margins. These audio particles then often lie unnoticed in invisible breeding stations for long periods of time before being attracted to a new event. 

In the climate of the cold war after 1945, especially in the USA, the strangest creative blossoms emerged, most of which had nothing particularly good in mind - for example "Background Music", later also known under the brand names "Muzak" and "Seeberg", or quite hip "Elevator Music". "Background" is the most important term here, because behind purring orchestras, whining violins and extra-lascivious voices was a scientifically proven recipe - namely, to brainwash larger gatherings of people in a nasty way. Not particularly flashy - after all, you didn't want an assassin, but happy-brainless work and leisure zombies. 

These groups of people (e.g. the employees of a company, or factory workers) became test subjects without ever having signed a contract; without them noticing it, their consciousness was stolen, and returned to them in an altered form.

At some point the unfortunates had no feelings of their own anymore, only Pavlovian reactions to events that were given to them in a gentle way. Perhaps this is how the great callousness began, the lack of empathy with other human beings in this horrible modern age a zombie has no personal feelings.

But then, the annoying background droning was simply turned off and replaced by radio stations - which, of course, again fit into the psychological-musical scheme. But "Muzak" in its antiquated guise no longer mattered.

Nothing happened for many years.

Then came Vaporwave.

Vaporwave, this indeterminable giant entity, which is oddball to Western ears, but has a gigantic millionaire life in Asia. And this huge blob of wacky ideas has at least about 50 subgenres, which may sometimes amaze the connoisseur in their radicalism.

From the idea "Vaporwave", just like "Muzak", is not music to enjoy. But instead of shuffling zombies the apocalypse has happened here long ago. You can often tell that from the postings on various scene pages - the shimmering cocoon consists in truth of boundless contempt. Well and honestly meant nostalgia waves like "synthwave" or "chillwave" have finally turned into the ultimate rejection, the caricature of all former consumer values. For example, the genre "Mallsoft": to very strangely recreated "Muzak" of the 1980s we see only a picture of an abandoned shopping mall, where the electricity and escalators still work; but nothing is transported except dust and bad thoughts from the old days. 

Thus, as a listener, one has lost on all corners - even what one did not like is now gone. Turbo capitalism has died, in dilapidated temples of consumption it still babbles on like an idiot... and we are condemned to listen to this prolonged death throes over and over again from the beginning.

by Doc Nachtstrom

Haunted by Northern Lights

Sun Wind

Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis are mostly a spectacular visual appearance in green or amber up in the polar regions (there are also Southern Lights towards the South Pole, but are not as easily accessible).

While one must be lucky to see Northern Lights on a trip covering parts of Alaska, Canada, Iceland, Finland, or Norway, one must be even luckier to be able to listen to them! It is a mostly unexplained phenomenon, but it is possible, as a team of researchers confirmed and recorded it in 2016.

It has been mused and theorized that the Auroras could also be heard for a long time already. Let us quickly explain what they are:

What is called Solar Wind, and a mass of other particles from outer space, bombard our earth continuously. But since we have the luck to have a magnetic field coming with our planet, these potentially harmful loads don't land on our heads but get swirled around the magnetic poles. Thanks, Mother Earth!

The applied magnetic inter-charge covers all the mysterious and beautiful lights. They even dance, as NASA is telling us! According to the periodical changes in earth's magnetic field, so do the Aurora displays change. They are interlinked.

But for almost centuries, there remained the question, "Can we also hear them?".

As said, "Yes, We Can". Little was known of the composition of the Auroras, so for long times only myths and tales remained. But there was little doubt that they can be listened to, as well.

While mentioned by Galileo in 1619, they have been known forever, have been depicted in cave paintings in 30,000 BC, and were recorded by a Babylonian astronomer around 600 BC.

So finally, in 2016 a team of researchers was able to make recordings using special equipment. It sounds rather eerie, like snaps of a whip, but seems to make sense when one imagines that lightning can also go upwards direction.

Anyway, the acoustic phenomena will happen around seventy meters above our heads, so it is not that farsighted to think of that for the Vikings, they were the shimmering reflections of the armor of the Valkyries sent by Odin to collect the bodies of the warriors slain in battle, while in Finland fire foxes traveled through the sky so quickly that their tails produced sparks as they brushed the mountains.

The skies sound eerie.

By nokturnal

Haunted by the Taos Hum

The advent of electricity and all its wonders also came with a breeze of uncanniness

Although James Clerk Maxwell's laws explain electromagnetism quite straightforwardly, they are not for the laywoman and -man. So a little bit of mystery got carried along with all the contraptions it made possible. 

This time I would like to refer to the Taos Hum or "The Hum". Although this phenomenon has been reported in the UK in the 1950s already, in 1989 there was a massive "surge" in the city of Taos (US, New Mexico) of these kinds of reports. I think it is not for no reason, that the district is called "Tierra del Encanto" (Land of Enchantment). 

Anyways, let us come back to "The Hum" and quickly describe it:

In silence, especially in want of sleep, people hear a deep, humming noise that disturbs them, like an idling Diesel engine in front of a building or something like it. It is modulated and can become very intense. But this is not the only false explanation. Besides the car (there is none), many more explanations can be ruled out.

Tinnitus & Otoacoustic Emissions:

While our hearing apparatus is capable of emitting virtual (tinnitus) and real(otoacoustic emissions, which can be used to measure a newborn child's hearing ability) noises, it does not caper for the description of the phenomenon, at all

Locally improved Hearing along the Spectrum:

It is possible, that certain people possess extremely finely tuned access to named emissions, but alas, as well, the statistics do not match up. But static does not tell the real truth in single cases.

Electromagnetic Frequencies:

Electromagnetic frequencies can be ruled out totally because there is no way that deep frequencies could be coupled to air compression-based sound emissions

Construction Sites:

This seems a more plausible explanation since variable deep vibrations can be brought into the ground easily and span quite a distance in urban environments, where the ground is sealed by asphalt, but nothing of the like could be brought to any statistical convergence with the perceived noise emissions.

While there can be no plausible explanation, the Taos Hum, as well as the Auckland Hum and the Windsor Hum did happen to be experienced by people.

I, myself was a victim of this (believe me, not very pleasant) phenomenon. I read tons of stuff about it, talked to many people, and went out at night to find possible sources. I even went to the local transformation station to find if it could be found as a source, but to no effect. It has to be said, that I was in a stressful situation at work at that time. 

A while later, as the stress was ebbing off, the phenomenon got weaker and easier to deal with. So I started to forget about it. But when, after all, I took a vacation in a mountainside cabin, travel was a bit far and stressful, I took the same experience! No power grid in 50 Kilometers! And no construction sites, trees only.

So: it could only come from me!

This is the last explanation I could accept, that the sense of hearing of some people is extremely fine-tuned to hear inter-organ noises produced by the body itself.  In extreme silence, we can even train ourselves to listen to the sound of our nervous operating system, it is about 4KHz hiss.

No one else was there.

by nokturnal

Worship the Glitch

ELpH vs Coil "Worswhip the Glitch" Vinyl

The legendary Industrial Music-Duo Coil was always at the forefront when it came to using audio technology as a vehicle for the "Otherworld" ("Time Machines"). In the midst of the band's highly creative and turbulent 1990s, Peter Christopherson and Jhonn Balance (both sadly deceased) noticed strange glitches in their equipment during various sessions. And Coil wouldn't have been Coil, of course, if the two original artists hadn't immediately personalized this occurrence; as "ELpH", a hybrid of machine and spirit being:

“During the studio sessions that developed into what would become ‘Worship the Glitch’, Coil became aware of random compositions emitting from their gear, and were at odds with constant ‘accidents’ that were perpetually plaguing the recordings. The band called these unintentional emissions ‘ELpH’: a conceptual being that is one part physical equipment, one part celestial being… constantly playing the role of trickster, throwing a wrench into Coil’s methodology. Eventually, these accidents and mistakes were embraced by the band, and the process of misusing audio software to create intentional ‘errors’ was adopted as a musical technique. The acceptance of the ‘mistake’, and the use of discovered mistakes as intentional elements slowly became the drive and concept behind the album, thus birthing the title ‘Worship the Glitch.“(¹)

For me personally, Coil were always quite great, admirable rogues, who knew exactly how to get their listeners and fans in the right mood - with mysterious, self-invented urban legends. They always work: "Worship the Glitch" may or may not come from a ghost, the music creates a very strange, unreal feeling in any case - and that even without colorful pills and 4/20 technology (I would recommend the former only to experienced psychonauts at Coil sessions anyway).

"Worship the Glitch" was released in 1995 under the band name ELpH vs Coil. It should be noted that already one year before the EP "Born Again Pagans" was released under the band name Coil vs ELpH. There are no surviving explanations for this, but on the original release there are such wonderfully enigmatic notes as: "Patent Pending 184" or "Taken from the forthcoming double compilation CD 'The Sound of Music' (Threshold House Records - Due Spring 1995)" - a release that of course never existed.

(¹)https://www.daisrecords.com/products/elph-vs-coil-worship-the-glitch

by Doc Nachtstrom

Rosemary Brown, Music Medium

Rosemary Brown (1960-2001), Music Medium

The renowned David Toop once wrote, "Sound is a haunting, a ghost, a presence whose location is ambiguous and whose existence is transitory. The close listener is like a medium who draws out substance from that which is not entirely there." (¹) But what is meant by "there"? If the sound presented is incomplete, is there a ghostly presence that fills the void?

Let's consider Rosemary Brown, a British housewife who claimed to have been visited by a strange tall man with long, white hair when she was seven years old. Decades later, he revealed himself as the ghost of Franz Liszt, the once-famous composer. Liszt dictated a musical piece to her, and with some supernatural help, guided her hands on the piano. Not only Liszt, but also Bach, Grieg, Debussy, Schubert and Chopin lined up to dictate their unfinished musical business. Brown recorded these pieces and gained fame, at least in England, where citizens cherish their oddities and preserve them at all costs.

However, there is one riddle: how could Brown write and play these seemingly complex pieces of music with only minimal piano training during her childhood?

(¹) David Toop, "Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener", Continuum 2010

by Doc Nachtstrom

Haunted by EVP

For eras, the EVPs have been haunting us - Now there might be an evenly haunting explanation...

Since the beginning of the usage of voltaics, humanity has started to spread a globe of radiation around our mother Earth, which is expanding at the speed of light in all directions. So we see that since the first official overseas transmission in charge of Guillermo Marconi, 125 years have passed, which equals

1.1825913 x 1015 Kilometers or, 7,905,134.6 Astronomical Units.

This is to say: A very vast distance that our signals reached over time in space. Talking about space, we assumed that radio waves would move at approximately the speed of light in empty space. But space is not that empty, after all. Fine dust, small agglomerations of dust, tiny particles, agglomeration of particles, and lighter and larger particles, all yet unidentified. What all these phenomena can do for us, is to mimic a vast echo chamber, a delay device, that sends reflections of our own sent signals back to us. So in a sense, we are listening to the dead, but we cannot talk to them. In a larger sense, the acquisition of the broken signals may be due to pareidolia, too. But I still think the reverberance of our electronic past is a great opportunity to understand our electromagnetic ancestry and have our past selves reflected.

by nocturnal

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