One of the curious arenas of new media activity is management of the self. There are hundreds, probably even thousands, of products and technologies to help each of us become the best possible version of our self – at least according to someone’s idea of best. In his TED talk,1 ‘The Quantified Self’, journalist Gary Wolf celebrates a host of these technologies. He begins with the following inventory of his self:
I got up this morning at 6:10am after going to sleep at 12:45am. I was awakened once during the night. My heart rate was 61 beats per minute. My blood pressure, 127 over 74. I had zero minutes of exercise yesterday, so my maximum heart rate during exercise wasn’t calculated. I had about 600 milligrams of caffeine, zero of alcohol. And my score on the Narcissism Personality Index, or the NPI-16, is a reassuring 0.31… (Wolf 2010)
He continues, suggesting (with more than a hint of technological determinism) that technological developments have made these monitors, sensors, and apps possible:
… Now, we know some of the technological facts that are driving this change in our lifestyle – the uptake and diffusion of mobile devices, the exponential improvement in data storage and data processing, and the remarkable improvement in human biometric sensors …(ibid.)
When it comes to considering the implications of these technologies, however, there isn’t even a shred of a place for critical thinking; Wolf’s perspective on the quantification of the self is purely celebratory.
… What is this for? What should it be for? Some people will say it’s for biometric security. Some people will say it’s for public health research. Some people will say it’s for avant-garde marketing research. I’d like to tell you that it’s also for self-knowledge. And the self isn’t the only thing; it’s not even most things. The self is just our operation centre, our consciousness, our moral compass. So, if we want to act more effectively in the world, we have to get to know ourselves better. (ibid.)
Wolf is very, very excited about the possibilities these sensor and data-processing technologies bring to us for personal training (not just in the gym sense) and feedback, and of course he is to some extent excited with good reason. If every asthma patient had GPS transceivers on their inhalers – this is one example he mentions – we would get a very important time/space map of asthma that could conceivably yield entirely new insights into causes of flare-ups of the condition.2
But I’m not a cultural studies scholar by accident. I hear the word ‘regime’ and I break out in hives (Wolf talks about noticing ‘that people are submitting themselves to regimes of quantitative measurement and self-tracking’). Wolf’s notion that we could use all of these sensors to manage ourselves towards self-reflection and self-improvement makes me want to run screaming in the opposite direction. But if I stop to think that this puts me in the company of all the neo-Luddites who are opposed to mobile phones and all of the other joys that new technologies have brought us recently, I’m not too comfortable, either. Since neither ‘Yippee! We can manage ourselves!’ nor ‘Self-management is a bourgeois plot!’ will do, I want to take a step back and think about these technologies from some other angle.
I actually came to think about the question of using music to sleep during the research for my forthcoming book on ubiquitous listening. Many people use music or speech to fall asleep to, and I made some passing observations about that in the book. But then two things happened at around the same time. I got a pillow for Mother’s Day that allows me to plug a listening device in so you can listen through the little speaker in the pillow. And, right about then, I noticed that several of the smartphone apps I was studying (for a different paper) had sleep timers on them.
I went to the app store and put in ‘insomnia’, and then ‘music sleep’, and so on, and hundreds of apps appeared, although not all about inducing sleep. I got ‘Slim While you Sleep’, ‘Baby Sleep’, games like ‘Don’t Wake Daddy’, and Mayo Clinic’s encyclopaedic insomnia app, which costs US$25 or £17.49. Moreover, many apps with sleep timers do not show up in these searches, because the sleep timer is a simple add-on that isn’t a defining feature of the app itself.
Perhaps not surprisingly, all the apps have some kind of sound. They work by offering the sufferer of consciousness things to which we can listen. These ‘things’ break down into four broad categories: sounds, music, voice and binaural beats. In the most complicated of the apps, you have all four options, and you can mix them together as you please. Some even offer relative volume control of the individual sounds, and one even calls the interface a soundboard. The simplest, ‘Count Sheep’, offers an adorable cartoon image of a lamb jumping a fence, and for musical accompaniment you have the following choices: ‘Frere Jacques’, ‘Brahms’s Lullaby’, ‘Hush Little Baby’, ‘Rockabye Baby’ and ‘Twinkle Twinkle’. It helpfully also suggests that you might just start your own music before starting up the sheep, if you prefer. You can also display the sheep counter or not, control their speed, allow landscape mode or not, and control the music’s volume. As sleep apps go, this is about as bare bones as it gets.
If we begin to look more closely still across the apps, though, there are a number of deeply embedded ideologies at play here. The easiest place to begin is with the voice. It is very rare for voices to appear in the musical selections, and I have not heard any with words in English. There are several instances of religious chanting, such as Tibetan monks. But the only significant presence of voice is the focus of a genre of sleep apps, in which a warm, soft, intimate voice guides you toward a state of relaxation, both mental and physical. Interestingly, none of these uses some of the other tried and true staples of voice relaxation, such as meditation or guided imagery. And none uses anything resembling the reading of bedtime stories. (For example, I fall asleep to Librivox readings of my favourite novels.3)
In most of those with voice available, it takes centre stage. ‘Deep Sleep’, from Andrew Johnson’s large selection of hypnotherapy-based apps, ‘Pzizz Sleep’, and ‘Deep Sleep with Dr Elaine Ryan’ are apps where the major activity is listening to the voice. Johnson’s app has some very thin synthesized background music, while Ryan’s offers some nature sounds and a time-lapse image of the Irish coastline. These apps use all the auditory tropes of intimacy, close-mic-ing, no echo and so on.
For example, in the Erick Brown line of hypnotherapy aids, the sleep app is called ‘Deep Sleep Hypnosis Subliminal’, and it advertises itself as having the following features:
• Soothing, therapeutic hypnosis/hypnotherapy tracks from world renowned master hypnotist Erick Brown
• High quality, state of the art recordings
• Optional hypnosis instructions that can be opted out of once you have learned how hypnosis works
• Your choice of a short or a long hypnosis induction
• Your choice of one of three different soothing, white noise background sounds to enhance your hypnosis, or none at all
• Loopable full-length featured hypnosis track
• The option to wake you up when the program has finished, or
• Use our built-in alarm clock to wake up at a particular time, or
• Program the app to allow you to remain asleep after completing hypnosis.
(Erik Brown Hypnosis 2012)
The narration is fairly predictable, although the mic-ing and mixing in this app are slightly different. Whereas in most voice-based apps, the speaker uses a near-whisper as if not to disturb anyone, like a parent in a child’s ear, this one has more echo, acting a bit more at a distance, and perhaps with more authority (for example, the authority of being the main speaker at an event). Brown begins his script this way:
Take a long … slow, deep breath in. Hold it just for a moment … and then slowly exhale. Just allow any tension just to melt away as you gradually relax more and more deeply with each breath [long pause]. Take another long, slow, deep breath, hold it, aaaand exhale. Empty your lungs completely with your out breath. Take that third deep breath in, take your time… holding … and then let it go. (Erik Brown Hypnosis 2012)
As you can perhaps hear from this small transcription of the opening few lines of one of the many apps, there’s nothing very different about any one of these apps’ voice tracks from any other. But none of these hypnosis/meditation voice-based apps has anything like the complexity of the other apps I will discuss in a moment.
From a certain perspective, I was tempted to leave out the voice-based apps, because they are so very different. But in the end I decided to include them because they share with the others a presumption that certain kinds of sounds, for a range of reasons, have the capacity to soothe, relax and eventually send their listeners to sleep. This connects sleep apps to the CD collections being interrogated by Freya Jarman elsewhere in this volume, and to studies like Uchiyama et al. (2012), where mice with heart transplants were divided into four listening groups (La Traviata, Mozart concerti, music by Enya or monotones). Jarman’s collections are about classical music as a source of relaxation, and Uchiyama’s study found that, as New Scientist reported, ‘Classical music appeared to slow organ rejection by calming the immune system. Blood from these mice had lower concentrations of interleukin-2 and gamma interferon – which promote inflammation – and higher levels of substances that dampen inflammation, such as interleukin-4’ (Uchiyama et al. 2012). ‘We don’t know the exact mechanisms but the harmony of Verdi and Mozart may be important’, says Uchiyama (Coghlan 2012: 16).4 These apps are based on an idea we have about sound and sounds that bears further examination, some contours of which I hope to begin to set out here.
The most significant category of aural event across these apps is ‘sounds’: by far the vast majority of those available is water sounds, and in a close second is nature sounds. There are always machine sounds available – usually a fan, and some white, brown or pink noise. Brown noise (also called Brownian noise, Red noise or Random Walk noise) is noise that mimics Brownian motion, and pink noise is mathematically between white and red noise. (Wikipedia has reasonable explanations of these different ways of filtering noise and how they are understood.) These and other ‘colours’ of noise – other statistical sound distributions – are often said to be more soothing to some people’s ears than purely random white noise. There are sometimes other machine sounds available in the apps, like airplane interiors, the metro or traffic, and people sounds, like restaurant interiors or busy city streets. But the distributions are always clear: water, nature, with machines a distant third and people nearly absent. ‘Relax Melodies’, for instance, has 23 water and wind sounds, 14 nature sounds, six machine sounds, three people sounds and four instrument sounds. While this is only one app, it is fairly representative of how things sound across the programs. In users’ comments and reviews, there are often comments about recording quality, loop length and especially loop structure (how easy it is to hear when the loop starts again), but given the size and quality of speakers in the phones or headphone earbuds, I’m not convinced that most users hear these issues – I think their frequency relates to the self-selecting sample of who chooses to write such reviews.
In any case, it is very clear, if one looks at the distribution of sounds available across the sleep apps, that nature and water sounds are understood to be the most relaxing. This is, of course, consistent with the sounds available on the sleep machines that have existed for quite some time; I have not yet discovered when they first came on the market, but when we bought one for my daughter, 15 or more years ago, they were not new. Either we find such sounds relaxing and soothing, or someone has convinced us that we do – and the difference might not really matter to the person who’s having trouble sleeping. It’s just that as academics we care about such things.
However, the connection of nature with relaxation and beauty is at once obvious and disturbing. One of my former PhD students, Jacky Waldock, is a soundscape researcher, and she has argued – quite compellingly, I think – that the equation of beauty with nature has some terrible consequences for both soundscape policy and research. She cites an article by two ecologists who state that the aesthetic preference for nature has skewed their field, so that insufficient research has been done on ecologies in man-made environments, including cities. She argues from her own research in Liverpool that, for instance, working-class communities have different ideas of desirable sound levels than those we generally presume we all share. Several people she interviewed, for example, missed being able to hear their neighbours when they were forced to move to ‘better’ accommodations. Relatedly, Odd Are Berkaak’s current research on tranquillity shows that The Campaign to Protect Rural England clearly equates nature with tranquillity and tranquillity with quiet. When I last spoke with him, it was unclear whether the Campaign made a distinction between quiet and silence.
In terms of the sounds that the apps make available, then, there is a direct and completely unproblematized assumption that nature sounds, especially water sounds, are relaxing. To the extent that any man-made sounds are included, they are a small minority and almost exclusively either musical or some variety of white noise, as if white noise alone among machine sounds can be relaxing. White noise has a strange cultural status:5 it is often recommended as a noise abatement strategy (‘If the street noises bother you, you might try a white noise machine’) and as a baby soother (‘If he won’t settle down, try running the dryer or vacuum’). It is almost as if the complete disorder of white noise has a ‘natural’ status of its own. But it isn’t just the sounds that are susceptible to an easy ideology critique – the musical selections are equally stereotypical and unthinking. When I was originally imagining the Ubiquitous Listening book, I had planned to write a chapter on new age musics and alternative health practices, but that never came to pass. Nonetheless, all the things that both interested and disturbed (and sometimes even repulsed) me then are audible in these apps: relaxation comes from the East, musically speaking, and more specifically, East and South Asia. There are a number of other musical features one could describe – they are very reduced in modal complexity, often featuring either major or pentatonic scales, they have simple or no harmonies, they eschew percussion and lyrics, and they tend to be thin in texture; that is, they use few instruments. (I mentioned some of these points above, when I was talking about the voice-oriented apps, but it becomes much clearer here, where the music isn’t subordinate to something else.) Some of these features, particularly simple harmonies and the absence of lyrics and percussion, they share with the rules of composition for Muzak from the 1930s through the 1980s and what was once called, at least in the US, ‘beautiful music’. In other words, we seem to have some very stable notions of what constitutes ‘background’ music. But that doesn’t explain the prevalence of Asian instruments and sonorities, nor the preference for Asian-sounding titles.
The connection with Asia takes us handily to Said’s 1978 Orientalism, in which he describes how the Orient6 was produced by and for the West, the Occident, as (among other things) a place of untrammelled beauty. A great deal has been said on the topic of Orientalism since Said, but, even within his work, he describes different positions of the West towards the East at different times, because orientalism is a complex historical process. The ideas of the East embedded in these sleep apps, however, are as bald-faced and uncomplicated as the worst of the texts Said chose to analyse more than 30 years ago.
The best place to start to see this tendency is the app called ‘Asian Sleep’ (Figures 3 and 4), although it appears in all the others, too. Its very existence is the first support for my argument, since there is no other geographically, ethnically or racially defined sleep app. It stands alone. Its sounds are not substantially different from any other app, although it does have more people sounds than any other, and it has among the largest number of choices. (Two of its sounds are ‘Sushi Bar’, which is lots of dishes clattering and people speaking, and ‘Chinatown Street’, which similarly has lots of talking and some background sounds.) Some of the visual images are Asian-themed, and there are only Asian instruments in the sound section: a large gong, a meditation bowl, a Chinese flute, taiko drums, wood chimes, an old bell, an indo flute, cymbals, and small chimes. But Asian Sleep is not alone – many of the sleep apps invoke East and South Asian cultures in range of ways, sometimes subtle, sometimes less so.7
Figure 3 ‘Asian Sleep’ app screenshot.
Figure 4 ‘Asian Sleep’ app screenshot.
Surprisingly, it turns out that this app is structurally more or less identical to another one, called ‘Relax Melodies’ (Figures 5, 6, and 7), which has cleverly managed to think up a seasonal twist on sleep apps: you can now purchase Relax Melodies Christmas. Not surprisingly, both Relax Melodies and Asian Sleep are made by the same company, ILBSoft. On some level, this is hardly surprising – it is a very recognisable industrial strategy, applied to everything from breakfast cereals to pop songs. I was only surprised to discover it because the appearance of the apps is so different.
Both of these apps offer the ability to combine an unlimited number of sounds, with volume control on each individual sound, along with melodies and binaural beats, which will be discussed later. In Relax Melodies, the tunes are mixed in with the sounds, whereas in Asian Sleep there is a separate section for each. In Relax Melodies, some of the tunes have instrument names; some of those are only recordings of the one instrument, while others, such as ‘Duduk’, have not only a duduk but several Western instruments playing, including violins; other melodies have mood names, such as ‘Lounge’, from which I expected something like lounge music, but which is just another New Age arpeggio thing with some drones. There is also an option helpfully titled ‘Melody’, which is a series of four descending tones with some synth filters and a recording called ‘India’ that is the least Indian sounding music I can imagine. Relax Melodies also has some wordless alternating tones with the tag ‘Choir’, a sort of Celtic-sounding loop called ‘Medieval’, and something with gongs and wood flutes called ‘BaliMist’. In Asian Sleep, by contrast, all of the 22 musical choices, are Asian-themed in a yoga-and-reiki sort of way; they are: ‘Arrival’, ‘Asian Prayer’, ‘Bamboo’, ‘Cherry Blossom’, ‘Temple’s Morning’, ‘Chinatown’, ‘Chinese Lullaby’, ‘Traditional Asian’, ‘Asian Duet’, ‘Hot Sand’, ‘Lament’, ‘Chinese Melody’, ‘Dramatic Asia’, ‘Mothers and Daughters’, ‘Secret Pearls’, ‘Awakes’, ‘Silkroute’, ‘Temple Grounds’, ‘Waiting for Winter’, ‘Wild Flowers’, ‘Green Garden’ and ‘Water Prayers’. At the moment, as I write, I’m listening to ‘Temple Grounds’, along with ‘Bucket Drops’ and ‘Fire Roaring’. I can add, if I want, more sounds, or even more music; but I can also add binaural beats, to which I will now turn.
Figure 5 ‘Relaxing Melodies’ screenshot.
Figure 6 ‘Relaxing Melodies’ screenshot.
Binaural beats are an auditory phenomenon first discovered in 1839 by Heinrich Wilhelm Dove. If you play two pitches with a small difference in frequency, one in each ear, you will hear apparent beats at the frequency of the difference between the two pitches. So, if I ask you to put on headphones, and in your left ear I play you 300Hz and in your right I play you 310Hz, you will hear a 10Hz beat. It is a processing artefact in the brain, not an actual sound. There are a few quirks to these beats: they only form if the two tones are separated by less than 26Hz, 30Hz at most. This maximum declines as the carrier wave moves away from 440Hz. Also, binaural beats wane completely past a carrier wave of 1000Hz (somewhere around C6 or high C).
In 1973, Scientific American published an article by Gerald Oster entitled ‘Auditory Beats in the Brain’, in which Oster argued that binaural beats have diagnostic possibilities. Some people cannot hear the beats, and he argued that those people fall into different categories, which makes the beats useful. For instance, he argued that Parkinson’s patients cannot hear the beats, and that women in general have different abilities to hear the beats across the menstrual cycle. He posited from there that binaural beats might be a helpful tool in diagnosis of Parkinson’s, or in evaluating oestrogen levels in women.
Figure 7 ‘Relaxing Melodies’ screenshot.
After Oster’s article, which is still very widely cited, Robert Monroe, a radio executive who popularized the term ‘out-of-body experiences’, supported research into binaural beats and their capacity to alter states of consciousness. He founded the Monroe Institute, which continues to market its patented ‘Hemi-Sync’ technology, which it claims can tune consciousness to attentive and focused states or to more relaxed and meditative states using binaural beat technologies. This idea about binaural beats, that certain frequencies will produce certain brainwave states, also called brainwave entrainment, has become exceedingly popular, and it is the basis of the presence of binaural beats in these sleep apps.
In ‘Asian Sleep’, the following beat frequencies are available, as shown in Table 1:
Table 1 Beat frequencies in ‘Asian Sleep’
Beneath this table of options, the text reads ‘Binaural beats influence the brain through the entrainment of brainwaves. The effect on the brainwaves depends of frequencies of the wave. They are produced using a beating tone between the ears, so stereo headphones are required to hear them correctly.’ The explanation is an awful one, but perhaps being told that your brainwaves are being altered by a neurological processing phenomenon that doesn’t really exist outside your head is less appealing, which might make the beats less effective. In other words, if binaural beats work by having some kind of placebo effect, that could be negated by learning that the beats aren’t actual sounds. (It could presumably even have what’s called the nocebo effect, in which a patient who does not believe in the treatment has a negative response to the treatment, regardless of whether it is inert or medically active, and distinct from any known side effects [see Kennedy 1961].)
The use of binaural beats to entrain brainwaves to produce particular states of consciousness, which is what these apps are selling, depends on two premises, each of which still has some controversy attached to it in the medical literature. The first premise is that it is possible to ‘tune’ brains to particular brainwave ranges that correlate to particular states of consciousness. Brainwaves are measured by electroencephelography, which measures conductivity on the scalp. The theory suggests that the following ranges are significant:
• |
Delta wave |
(0.1–4Hz) |
deep or slow-wave sleep |
• |
Theta wave |
(4–7Hz) |
REM sleep |
• |
Alpha wave |
(8–12Hz) |
wakeful relaxation |
• |
Mu wave |
(8–13Hz) |
no intention of motion |
• |
Beta wave |
(12–30Hz) |
activity and active concentration |
• |
(25–40Hz) |
heightened awareness, meditation (descriptions of this state remain controversial). |
These ranges are still being studied, and their relationships to brain activity is still only observational, meaning that there are good correlations between observed behaviours and brainwave frequencies. Nonetheless, the sleep states in particular do seem to show strong correlations between state of consciousness and particular frequencies.
The medical literature on entrainment, however, is less clear, and on binaural beats in particular, it is quite complex. There are only a few well-conducted scientific studies published in reputable peer-reviewed journals that support the contention that binaural beats can entrain brainwaves to alter a listener’s state of consciousness. In particular, one study stands out. It has the utterly memorable and catchy title of ‘A prospective, randomized, controlled study examining binaural beat audio and pre-operative anxiety in patients undergoing general anaesthesia for day case surgery’ and was published in the journal Anaesthesia in 2005. Here’s the abstract, edited for comprehensibility by non-medical professionals:
Pre-operative anxiety is common and often significant. Ambulatory surgery challenges our preoperative goal of an anxiety-free patient by requiring people to be ‘street ready’ within a brief period of time after surgery. Recently, it has been demonstrated that music can be used successfully to relieve patient anxiety before operations, and that audio embedded with tones that create binaural beats within the brain of the listener decreases subjective levels of anxiety in patients with chronic anxiety states. We measured […] and compared binaural beat audio (Binaural Group) with an identical soundtrack but without these added tones (Audio Group) and with a third group who received no specific intervention (No Intervention Group). Mean decreases in anxiety scores were 26.3% in the Binaural Group, 11.1% in the Audio Group and 3.8% in the No Intervention Group. Binaural beat audio has the potential to decrease acute pre-operative anxiety significantly. (Padmanabhan et al. 2005: 874)
This is genuine data. Most of the rest of what I have been able to find doesn’t have good control groups, isn’t published in peer-reviewed journals, or is associated with a business like the Monroe Institute selling its binaural beat wares. It seems, at least from my inexpert reading of the literature, that while there is quite likely something to be said for the addition of binaural beats to these sleep apps, it’s hard to say how likely they are to help sleep (since there aren’t good studies) and in any case the beats, as we learned from Oster in 1973, cannot be heard by everyone at all times. So there is reason to try it out, but ample reason to be sceptical about it as well.
Apps to help us fall asleep, to alleviate (if not cure) insomnia, to relax us into a sleep-conducive state, rely on a series of received wisdom, ideologies and untested science. According to these apps, people are soothed by:
• nature
• Asia
• whispering voices
• binaural beats at about 10Hz, and
• music with thin instrumentations, simple or no harmonies, and no vocals or percussion.
There are many different kinds of observations one might make about these apps, including some of the ones I discussed above and just reviewed now. But there are three points that I want to draw out further.
The first has to do with sound and affect. While there is no entry on sound in the index of The Affect Theory Reader, and very little on music, nonetheless I would argue that sound has a privileged relationship to affect as it has come to be defined by a range of contemporary theorists. As Seigworth and Gregg (2010a) define it on the second page of the reader,
Affect can be understood then as a gradient of bodily capacity – a supple incrementalism of ever-modulating force-relations – that rises and falls not only along various rhythms and modalities of encounter but also through the troughs and sieves of sensation and sensibility. (Seigworth and Gregg 2010a: 2)
Sound and music have the capacity to modulate our bodily states with a mere fraction of a second’s intervention (a slamming door) and without our conscious consent (vide the patients in the pre-surgery study). They have long been, and are ever becoming, more and more finely tuned technologies of affect modulation. That explains why they are used in the apps. Sound has an extraordinary capacity to work on us before consciousness, to (as American slang might put it) ‘yank our chains’, to tune us like instruments. It works across bodies, both within and across populations, and offers possibilities that visual materials cannot.
That sound and music have such capacities makes them absolutely crucial to study along these lines. My own work, first on film music, and then on ubiquitous musics, and now on sound and music in digital audio-visual media, has focused on precisely this question, but that is not a mainstream view in either musicology or media studies – nor, if The Affect Theory Reader (and the rest of my reading in the field) is anything to judge by, in the realm of affect theory, either. There are some important exceptions, such as recent work by Patricia Clough (including in this collection), Amit Rai (2009), Jeremy Gilbert (2004) and Steve Goodman (2010). And this collection is a very welcome corrective to the relative absence of music in the literature on affect, even though Larry Grossberg (1992) was one of the earliest proponents of the term (in the Deleuzian sense used by most authors named here). I certainly hope that it provokes more work in this area, and that that work is taken seriously not only by music scholars but by media and cultural studies scholars as well. It is long overdue that scholars of popular culture generally, and most specifically those who write about popular music and audiovisual culture, stop ignoring the power of the sounding materials. We don’t stop talking about visual culture because we aren’t art historians or painters; nor should we eschew discussions of musical sounds because we are not musicologists or members of a band. Affect works in sound – and especially in musical sound – in ways that are far too important to leave on the sidelines of cultural analysis.
Secondly, we know even less about the other senses and their relationship to affect and their potential to be exploited by new technologies. There are several issues here: a) it is important to note that recent research suggests there may be as many as 21 senses, rather than the five most of us learned in school,8 b) most senses, aside from vision and hearing, remain outside of mass media cultural forms, although kinaesthesia is certainly being put to use by all of the new game platforms that include motion sensors, such as Wii, Kinect and Move, and c) this is an area into which marketing is rapidly moving, especially in developing scents. Scents are being called on to build brands, just like sonic and visual branding:
No longer confined to lingerie stores, ambient scenting became standard practice in casinos in the early 2000s and invaded the hospitality sector soon thereafter. Sheraton Hotels & Resorts employs Welcoming Warmth, a mix of fig, jasmine, and freesia. Westin Hotel & Resorts disperses White Tea, which attempts to provide the indefinable ‘Zen-retreat’ experience. (Morgan 2010)
Experiments are not only taking place in ambient scenting and branding, but in scent-based media as well, including a new version of Smell-o-Vision for TV that is a joint project of Samsung and the University of California at San Diego (The Week 2011).
The third point I would like to draw out from my examination of these apps connects back to the video I referred to at the beginning of the chapter. Management of the self has become an activity not just of discrete individuals, as the term might suggest, but of distributed subjectivity, as we might be able to glean from Gary Wolf’s presentation. In Ubiquitous Listening (2013), I defined distributed subjectivity as a non-individual field of subjectivity with lumpy nodes of dense, intersecting activities, where those nodes might be selves, but might also be computers, or collectives, or libraries, or places, or smartphones. Management of the self takes place across just such a field, on which apparently discrete entities – ‘selves’ – learn to ‘improve’ themselves not only by gathering data about our sleep, exercise, eating and so on, but also by gathering it in public contexts, such as Twitter or online support groups, so that the field around us collects data for many uses, including the management of the participating selves. Self-management, I am suggesting, is management of the self, but certainly not in any simple way management by the self, where in any case the self is far closer to a neurological processing artefact, much like binaural beats are auditory processing artefacts, than to anything else. Wolf’s delight in the use of sensor and data-processing technologies for self-reflection is, as with most pleasures, a very ambivalent one if taken seriously. The question for us, both as scholars and as players on the field of distributed subjectivity, is what, beyond a good night’s sleep, we hope to get out of the game.
Notes
1 TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, a series of conferences that explore various aspects of these three fields and especially the intersections between and among them. Ranging from 5–30 minutes, many of these talks have circulated widely, and they make cutting edge research accessible to a wider public.
2 This hints at an issue that I will return to later in this article. The ‘self’ that is being managed at once appears utterly discrete and yet not only announces itself across a range of, for example, social networking platforms but also is detailed through untold data collection practices of software makers, internet service providers (ISPs) and browsers.
3 Librivox is an organization that provides audio versions of out-of-copyright books. Volunteers read them, so the quality varies, and there are often several versions of very popular books among which a listener can choose. All audio versions are in the public domain, and they are always circulated for free. See http://librivox.org [accessed March 2012].
4 The problems with this study and most others like it are far too numerous to begin to elaborate here. Suffice it to say that a) there are many more kinds of music in the world than Verdi, Mozart and Enya, b) there are many more kinds of things Verdi and Mozart have in common and do not share with Enya than harmony, and c) it would benefit researchers like Uchiyama to involve critical musicologists in their projects.
5 My thanks to Marie Thompson for her helpful thoughts on this issue. As she pointed out, these issues get even more interesting if you explore ‘white noise’ in the app store. As one example, the app ‘White Noise’ has mostly water and nature sounds; out of 36 sounds on its menu, only four are variations on white noise, and one is of cars.
6 It is important to note that, pace much of the scholarship that was produced in the wake of Orientalism, Said was writing about the ‘Near East’, not the ‘Far East’. In a sustained work on orientalism in new-age music, that issue would need to be addressed and parsed.
7 The examples are too numerous to try to be exhaustive. For one example, see the Android app ‘Sound Massage’, which has 12 sounds, has an image of a water lily for the first sound, ‘Rainy Pond’, and the first sound on the second page is ‘Chime of Bamboo’ (photo of chime against a background of plants). The other sounds are ‘Straitening night’ (with a lightning bolt image), ‘Summer night’ (image of lit cabin in woods), ‘Hill of spring’ (an open field with a single tree, blue sky with puffy white clouds), ‘Pebbled shore’ (multi-coloured rocks with wave foam against them along a horizontal axis), ‘Lingering wave’ (arial shot of a curved shoreline, with water to left and a tree line at bottom), ‘Indian flute’ (Native American male torso with hands with silver and turquoise jewellery holding flute perfectly upright), ‘Harmony of frogs’ (green leaf with a small frog silhouetted behind it), ‘Nightingale’ (bird on branch, background of branches out of focus, no leaves), ‘Mother’s heartbeat’, and ‘Sweet music box’.
8 These include thermoception (temperature sense), equilibrioception (sense of balance), nociception (sense of pain), hunger, thirst and a host of others. The number of senses ranges enormously, from 5 to 9 to 53, but 21 is one number that comes up frequently.