1971: The Earworm 27

It’s 3.09 a.m. You were asleep, dreaming. Eyes closed, pulsing with inverted activity, ears gaping, vulnerable as always. You spasm up from the darkness. Your eyes open, focusing on the fluorescent digits of the wake-up machine. Something has changed since you went under. You are no longer alone. Something has arrived and entered. You think you saw it, or them. A pack of them, wriggling through the radio waves. Maybe that was just the motion blur of the digits on the clock radio display, as you jolted your head to hunt the intruder. But no sign. Just a chain of sounds, muffled, wordless, timbreless from deep down in the throat chamber. Perhaps less than a sound, a string of resonance effects. Not yet a tune, but with some divergence in frequency. Unnamable, an entity has folded itself into your gray matter. It has hooked you, staging a pirate attack on your vocal chords. It needs you to replicate, and it’s begun already, sounding you out. What happened? You’ve been infected by an earworm: a tiny microbe or rather micro-riff—a spiraling, coiled vibrational loop. Later today it will be spending your money while you’re singing its tune1

In 1984, Klaus Maeck’s and Muscha’s paranoid, low-budget, post-punk movie Decoder explored the potential of sonic weaponry deployed against the forces of Control. Against the backdrop of immanent nuclear annihilation, the film describes a world where all that is left for youth to do is to dismantle it. In the film’s Manichean vision, Muzak, as the concoction of doctors, musicians, and marketing experts, aiming to stimulate productivity and employee morale alongside generating a pacifying glow of comfort in the consumer, represented by the ultimate, insidious musical agent of evil.

The film develops a number of sonic concepts revolving around a confrontation between Muzak and a kind of counter-Muzak. The lead character, FM, experiments with sonic techniques to intervene into the piped musical environments of consumerism. Set in Hamburg in the early 1980s, FM is a reclusive, alienated youth who spends his time experimenting with recording equipment in his studio. The film follows the awakening of FM, who one day grows very suspicious of the ever-present Muzak played in his local hamburger restaurant. He suspects that the Muzak is controlling consumers and starts to hear subliminal messages within. He begins to record the Muzak to analyze it and starts producing his own form of “anti-Muzak” by manipulating his recordings, changing their speed, reversing them, or layering them with the sound of riots and animals. While roaming the city, he meets an underground cultish group named the “pirates” engaged in dark-side “black noise” rituals. FM ends up joining forces with the “pirates” and conducts attacks on Burger Kings and McDonalds equipped with their cassette players loaded with anti-Muzak, inducing nausea and rapid evacuation of the fast food restaurants. In response the Muzak Corporation sends a secret agent to hunt down the sonic terrorists. Meanwhile, social disorder escalates as FM and his allies in the “pirates” reproduce and distribute their anti-Muzak cassettes.

The riot scenes featured in Decoder were the actual riots filmed during President Reagan’s early 1980s visit to Berlin. According to Vague magazine in 1984, the film crew intended to plant actors with tape recorders in the crowds during Reagan’s visit. On location, they noticed that local anarchists were already handing out tapes (with instructions for playback and replication) of war sounds such as approaching helicopters and random gunfire to stoke up the crowd’s anger and produce disorientation. In fact, the police had already begun confiscating tape recorders. Klaus Maeck described that it was a kind of game: “Whenever the Police were going to another area, we had time to think of something new to get them back into action. We placed tape terrorists—friends holding tape recorders—to get footage for our film wherever the action was.”²

The film featured an underground yet star-studded cast including William Burroughs, Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis P. Orridge, and Einstiirzende Neubau-ten’s Mufti. But more than anyone else, Burroughs’s writings seem to have been the primary conceptual guide to the cut-up techniques promoted in the movie, particularly his ideas from Electronic Revolution that described the use of tape-recorders to sonically catalyze riots and crowd disturbance. Burroughs appears in one dream sequence of the film (playing the part of a shopkeeper dealing in spare electronics) to pass the main character an audiocassette. Like Leif Elggren’s CD project Virulent Images, Virulent Sounds, Decoder’s tape terrorism seems to stem directly from passages that describe the contagious use of the tape recorder.³

Muzak, since its birth, has often been referred to both as “functional” and “background” music.⁴ Its description as background music, however, has always signaled an ambiguity between the organization of sound thought to be typical of Muzak and that of music that demands more attention or merits more aesthetic worth. This ambiguity revolves around the overlap between “background” music and what has come to be known as “ambient.” Continuing the mutability of Satie’s “furniture music” in the 1920s onward, “ambient,” it has been claimed, can fluidly shift from background to foreground and vice versa, and perhaps undermines this distinction. But the credit for this blurring should not merely be attributed to the cultural influence of ambient music but points to a shift in modes of audition within a broader operative logic of power. If we follow the strategic shift in the Muzak corporation, for example, it appears that, according to Annahid Kassabian, by the mid-1980s, background music had become foreground music in that what was being piped into environments of consumption and labor was in fact generically understood as foreground music in other contexts. There was nothing that necessarily differentiated music and Muzak any longer.⁵

Kassabian, then, describes a mode of ubiquitous listening that corresponds to a mixing of foreground and background, a mode in which listening becomes a parallel process among others in a saturated media environment. According to Jean-François Augoyard and Henri Torgue, the sonic condition of ubiquity pertains to an “effect linked to spatio-temporal conditions that expresses the difficultly or impossibility of locating a sound source. In the major variant of this effect, the sound seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.”⁶ Flat panel speaker technology migrates from military research and proliferates into the everyday⁷ Vibration research ensures a ubiquitous media environment in which any surface whatever, organic or nonorganic, becomes a potential emitter of sound. Whatever the specific genre of music deployed now, Muzak—often similar to, often the inverse of the attention-grabbing tactics of sound in radio, TV, and film advertising—still promotes a specific politics of frequency. This revolves around the subtraction of very low and high frequencies (like the perceptual coding involved in mp3 compression), mono playback, the deprioritization of vocals, and often heavy compression to create a continuity in and minimization of dynamic range. In the history of ubiquitous music, in fact, Muzak preempted our submersion into a generalized surround sound culture, the insidious purr of control and the digital modulation of affective tonality that smoothes the experience of the ecology of fear. As such, it is only fitting that Muzak Corporation now brands itself as providing an “audio architecture.”⁸

Early Muzak combined the so-called Hawthorne effect,⁹ in which workers would increase productivity when they were aware that they were under surveillance, with the James-Lange theory in psychology,¹⁰ which pointed to the autonomic affects of music in modulating physiological responses such as breathing, metabolism, pulse, blood pressure, energy levels, and galvanic skin response. The effect, it was thought, was to slightly increase productivity while subtly maintaining the attention of the labor force during lull periods in the workday. According to Sumrell and Varnelis in Blue Monday, the shift to ubiquitous music and audio architecture in relation to Muzak marks a transition in operative logic that they refer to as from stimulus progression to quantum modulation. Emerging during World War II, stimulus progression tactically organized the day around the pulsing center of gravity of the human heartbeat at roughly seventy-two beats per minute. Increasing and decreasing tempo across the day could therefore produce intensification or disintensification. Alternating between music and quiet would produce alertness by the oscillation between silence and arousal. From the mid-1980s onward, Muzak’s strategy of sonic intervention shifted as a response to the already sensorially overloaded environment. Muzak in this sense provides a sonic microcosm of what Deleuze described as the shift from disciplinary societies to societies of control. From the surveillance of stimulus progression that constituted an early form of sonic discipline by Muzak, to the horizontality of background, atmospheric control in quantum modulation that no longer needs to correct individual action directly. Quantum modulation affects mood rather than just trying to manipulate attention. In addition to modulation, Muzak, as audio architecture, helps to mask the babel of consumption in the polished postmodern surfaces of the shopping mall, airport, and other “non-places.” Whereas stimulus progression varied intensity and mood in the music, quantum modulation numerically indexed music in relation to qualities “such as tempo, color (light or dark), rhythm, popularity and so on to ensure that the same intensity can be maintained even as the music appears to have changed. Atmospherics address individuals as they traverse different ambiances through their everyday lives [my italics].”¹¹ Quantum modulation therefore, simulating the logic of the DJ, attempts a smooth affective control by creating a plateau of musical intensity.

However, the question pertains as to whether the contemporary nexus of viral marketing and sonic branding extends beyond control as modulation into a mode in which preemption attains a new autonomy. The “hard sell,” the “soft sell,” and immersion in the immaterial haze of a brand environmentality all deploy techniques of suggestion to induce consumption of a product. In preemptive power, however, a product does not necessarily preexist the contact between brand and consumer. Rather, the contact in terms of the viro-sonic production of allure serves to produce memories of contact with products that do not yet exist. When capital becomes speculative in this way, it forces critical analysis onto the same speculative terrain. Audio virology takes some initial small steps toward this speculative method. The submerged affective sensorium in which ubiquitous listening is now a subset compels the transformation of outmoded frameworks of sonic thought. In an attempt to perform the necessary upgrade, an audio virology starts from the premise of a mode of audition that is “always on.” As with all other continuously open network connections, the body becomes vulnerable to viral contagion. If Muzak as sonic architecture preempted the environment of ubiquitous audition in which consumption is now routinely submerged, then sonic branding and its genealogy traceable to radio jingles aim to catalyze the motivation to consume, creating a sonically triggered tipping point. A brand comprises both actual and virtual relations, influencing the patterning of activities, rhythmically distributing them in time and space. A brand functions as a nexus, holding together a set of relations while maintaining, by iterated feedback, a dynamic unity in an environment of product differentiation and brand integration. On its concrete side, in extension, the brand faces actual products quantitatively registered with prices. In its abstract dimension, it expresses intensive qualities. The virtual dimension of the brand acts as a device generating and congealing an aura of associations extending to the horizon. The brand nexus acts as a relay or filter between consumers and producers, diagramming their interrelation, managing the interval between contact. The positioned logo, sonic or visual, allows the brand to intervene in a field of perpetually shifting products, producing and sustaining a relation where there may have been none.

In a dual strategy that makes use of the new technologies of ubiquitous media to mesh viral marketing and sonic branding, the brandscape is becoming increasingly predatory. Brands close in on you from the future, locked into your affective sweet spots, laying an array of seductions, traps, diversion, bluff’s, and decoys. Branding has gone preemptive in the move from product to pattern, swooping down to capture the interval between code traces and network profiling. This is the full-spectrum dominance of multidimensional synesthetic branding, operating in the gaps between sound, sight, touch, taste, and smell. In 2001, the London Financial Times described how “having conquered the visual world of logos ... [brand consultants] are now embarking on an aural attack. Sonic branding is all the rage.” In an era in which two seconds of sound strategically attached to a brand is the equivalent of a heat-seeking technology programmed into a missile’s guidance system, sonic branding becomes a targeting device of increasing power, guiding commodities toward the libidinal demographic hot spots at which they are fired. One consultant from a brand agency, Identica, explained, “We will always invent a sonic logo, for those times when you can’t see, touch or feel the brand.”¹² Sonic branding therefore becomes a tactic of softwar, power through audio seduction.

Some interesting recent research related to sonic branding revolves around a strangely common psychoacoustic condition. At the forefront of this research is branding psychologist James Kellaris, who has been dissecting earworms, unraveling their slight bodies to investigate their basic affects.¹³ For Kellaris, earworms cause a neurodisturbance that he terms “stuck tune syndrome,” the effect of a seemingly innocuous piece of music lodging itself into the brain and refusing to leave. Kellaris has noted that certain types of music (particularly anomalous stimuli) operate as “mental mosquito bites.” They create a “cognitive itch” that can be scratched only by replaying the tune in the mind. The more the mind “scratches,” the worse the itch gets. Using terminology close to memetics, Kellaris talks of conditions such as “stuck tune syndrome,” which describe earworm infection. Musically, the primary vector of earworm transmission is what is referred to as the hook. But how do hooks hook? What is the affective dimension of sonic branding? How does an earworm worm its way into your memory to replicate?

Of course, the cultural industry symbiotically intertwined with branding and advertising, and that makes its everyday business the engineering of audio viruses is popular music.¹⁴ Advertising has learned much from the success of popular music’s viro-tactics of hook engineering. In 2001, Kylie Minogue’s “I Can’t Get You out of My Head” captured this potency on two levels as her voice intensified the insinuating refrain. In the economy of attention and distraction of viral capital, marketing force fields traverse bodies from every angle, implanting earworms. Earworms are the virological vectors onto which sonic branding latches. The term derives from the German ohrwurm (an infectious musical agent). A commonly cited species within memetics, the earworm is the catchy tune that you cannot get out of your head, the vocal refrain, the infectious rhythm or the addictive riff. There are many species of earworms traveling at different speeds through the epidemiological field of sonic culture. Kodwo Eshun registers the programming of the alien earworm precisely: “an audio-insinuation that seeps into the ears and taps out mnemonics on its drums. It smirks, sated—because as soon as you drop the needle on the track, you’re in its domain. Now you’re there its ‘doing it in your ear hole.’... It’s talked you into letting it molest your sensorium.”¹⁵

According to sonic brand experts, suggestions for the removal of earworms are few and far between. The limited repertoire usually includes techniques for removal such as substitution, completion, donation, and extraction. Substitution implies a resignation to the fact that there is no escape from the parasitic earworm, so all one can do is attempt to usurp the reign of one refrain with that of another, perhaps less irritating to the host—a simple replacement. Completion involves the host of the earworm listening to the piece of music from which it escaped in full. Of course, not all earworms are susceptible to such techniques, and completion comes with the added danger that repeated playing makes innocent passers-by vulnerable to infection. This approaches the logic of donation, where a host will deliberately voice the earworm in the hope that it will take the opportunity to pass through and attach itself to a more welcoming body. Finally, the extraction of an earworm, thought to be the most effective, can be attempted. The first stage is to identify the strain of earworm. This is not an easy task, often complicated by a related condition to earworm infestation, the side effect of déjà entendu, that is, partial recognition of something heard but corresponding to the inability to attribute cause or location to the source of that sound effect. Extraction, once identified, involves some of the earlier techniques just described, followed by the analysis and dissection of the worm until it loses its virulent potential. Again, this is a risky strategy, as analysis always presupposes a potential escalation in the intimate relationship between host and parasite.

Sonic branding entails an intervention into the affective sensorium’s mnemonic system. It can be considered a program for modulating the auditory nervous system through contagious vibration. It is obvious to self-proclaimed experts such as Kellaris that they are dealing with potent (and clearly very lucrative) material. Therefore, it is not too surprising that he does not seem overly concerned with the pragmatics for removing earworms, although he is with their implantation, the fabrication of branded memory, a second skin channeling processes of desiring production. It is a brain program, as one sonic branding memory consultant, Duane Sprague, has outlined:

In short, the actual process of branding is the result of using echoic memory recall (the memory of things heard) to implant an associative memory (a new memory you create with your specially created branding message), that has become linked to a positive memory already anchored in the individual’s mind, and then recalling that anchored memory on demand (and thus the desired response) with a recall cue or stimulus (your branding ad which is the associative memory now linked to the anchored memory).... Therefore, the hearing of your branding ad, which is the recall cue, and also the new associative memory, automatically pulls-up the pre-existing anchored memory. Because this anchored memory is positive, a positive feeling is associated with your [brand] name upon hearing the cue.... Branding can also be achieved using iconic memory as a recall stimulus (memory of things seen), but this is much more difficult, time consuming, and expensive, as the human brain is easier to train and condition using the sound of words over sight alone. To the brain, spoken words seem to carry far more emotional impact than written words. And the greater you can make the emotional impact, the deeper rooted the associative memory, or recall stimulus becomes. The deeper rooted the associative memory becomes, the easier and more reliable it is to stimulate on demand, and the more likely to be permanently linked to the desired anchored memory.¹⁶

It is misleading, however, to suggest, as Sprague does, that the most potent level at which such sonic mnemonic processes operate is the level of associations, of significations through spoken words. Another more basic dimension is suggested if you follow advertising’s evolution from the rather crude bioweapon of the jingle in the 1950s to the current attempts at ubiquitous immersion of sonic branding, with its armory of nonverbal “earcons,” “sonic logos,” and “idents.”¹⁷ A catchy tune is no longer sufficient; it merely provides the DNA for a whole viral assemblage.

Instead of an outmoded associative psychology, most branding theory has already moved on to invest in the modulation of emotion by nonverbal means, signaling a mutation of capital logic into a more subtle colonization of memory through the preemptive sonic modulation of affective tonality. The symptoms of such a shift of power are manifest in acoustic time anomalies. Analyses of these glitches reveal much about the way in which sound hooks.