Radio “hits” deliver long term brain damage

CHICAGO

Fri Nov 12, 2010 8:09am EDT

(Reuters)

HEALTH

Researchers at the University of Nijmegen report today that sustained exposure to certain musical structures through headphones may, in as few as five years, shrink soft cartilaginous tissues of the outer ear and weaken craniofacial nerves. For 3% of test subjects, the effect is accompanied by slight deformation of the sinus cavity and neurasthenia within the prefrontal cortex.

Scientists believe the condition correlates significantly to a documented rise in musical homogeneity since 1985, an effect sociologists have attributed to the inability of audiences to dislodge aesthetic taste from narrow and repetitive conventions of popular music. The study has been funded as part of renewed efforts to investigate the role of socio-economic, cultural, and even aesthetic factors in human epigenetics. The multidisciplinary research team at the University of Nijmegen includes political scientists, anthropologists and ethnomusicologists. In their report, the team describes lax enforcement against payola radio; a statistical analysis of radio playlists reveal that a handful of songs on heaviest rotation have not changed in more than forty years.

The tendency to cling to outdated artistic forms as evidenced by the persistence of “hit music” in popular culture since 1965 is what led the Nijmegen researchers to investigate the possibility of attendant physical effects. “We found a significant neurasthenic effect. Apparently, listening to Hotel California three thousand times doesn’t just suck, it can actually cave-in the head and debilitate the prefrontal cortex.” Martin Ledwick, head nurse on the research team, said in a statement. “Think of it as an injury, a kind of plantar fasciitis, the equivalent of shin splints caused by traipsing endlessly over one musical terrain.”

Dr. Emil DeMaris, professor of Psychoacoustics, presented the group’s findings at a conference in Rotterdam. “Our species is perhaps poorly described as Homo Sapiens. We are in many ways a herd species, led astray by a willingness to conform to social stability so long as basic needs of food, shelter and clothing have been met. This social behavioral fact makes human beings particularly susceptible to the numbing effects of cultural homogeneity. The danger to humans is no different than domesticating other species; a herd of wild caribou survives in the shifting environment of arctic tundra, but slowly perishes in the stultifying terrarium environment, a Habi-trail, either for caribou or humans is a tool of genocide. We have been dangerously slow to detect the equivalent tools wielded in corporate advertising culture today.”

By focusing on contemporary art and popular music, DeMaris said his team sought to improve on “the myopia of the microscope” which passes for scientific method today. “The assumption that humans are ruled by logic, long discredited in economics and political science, persists today as the facile foundation of too many scientific disciplines.” The report, to be published in the Journal of Psychoacoustics, concludes that human faculties of reason and perception are engaged most fully by experiences that are unnerving, confounding, and even terrifying.

Pressed by reporters to explain whether and how science should arbitrate aesthetic and cultural tastes, DeMaris explained that his team took an “anything but Top 40” approach and had found many contemporary artists actively developing radically new aesthetics. Study participants introduced to recordings from a new musical group called Nerfbau showed high brain function in the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for fight or flight responses which are known to heighten acuity of perception. The researchers also cite facial expressions of anguish, horror, surprise, and amazement as responsible for the attendant strengthening of craniofacial nerves rooted to the outer ear. Such phenomena were present in fewer than .01% of control subjects who were more likely to exhibit slack facial expressions when exposed to music from the VH1 Classics playlist. Members of the band Nerfbau were contacted for comment via their record label, Resipiscent. Responding by phone and only through voice masking software, one band member was quoted as saying, “Blood builds your smiles from loose screams.”

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Resipiscent Q&A

[Heule] Resipiscent focuses on Bay Area musicians, but has also released albums by artists from around the nation. There seems to be a unifying element of playfulness, looseness, humor, invention, and experimentation in the Resipiscent catalog that seems particularly strong on the West Coast, if not in the Bay Area itself. Do you see the Bay Area as a special place for this sort of music, or is it thriving in obscurity everywhere?

[decker] We’ve released internationalists in Masonic Youth, and talking with Freeka Peeka and Company Fuck among others but hard to jumpstart from afar.

There does seem to be a connection between playfulness and obscurity, the kind of play that experiments and discovers doesn’t have time or energy for popularity or acceptance. Often, it’s those who gave up on social acceptance (not hindsight claims of being maverick, but actually gave up) who came to dwell in experimentation as play. Contrast that to retro and pop bands that want to entertain and be super uncool, they forms tons of new bands that quickly dissipate into clothes fashion, that long popular recess of irrelevance on the “upper playground.” Artists of obscure music would love to be cool, but they aren’t. Obscure music attracts audiences with terrible social skills, awkward human beings paralyzed by the high stakes of starting a conversation. That kind of community draws artists whose own ideas are a real threat to themselves, they may produce horrible results which fascinate audiences but also may both audience and artist alike by catching a current of totally unique potential. Either way, you can’t afford to miss it.

The artists we put out have to be heard live since experimentation is so much about time, accident and the manifold rifts between thought and action; but recordings are an important secondary point of reference, an idealized space where you get to hear what musicians achieve in an environment of artificial time. Recordings are also essential for audiences to acclimate to unorthodox sounds and non-repeating compositions. Once people do acclimate, few can go back to repetitive conventional self aggrandizing music, so caveat emptor.

[Heule] Modular synthesis is all over the Resipiscent catalog, notably on the new Serge compilation, and Loachfillet's new album. Of course Don Buchla invented this instrument here in the early 60s, in collaboration with Morton Subotnick and the SF Tape Music Center. Serge itself was eventually based in the Bay Area. And Mills College has for years been training an army of modular synthesists. Do you see the Bay Area's rich history and leadership in experimental electronic music as a direct influence on the musicians released by Resipiscent?

[decker] Absolutely! Unlike so many bay area cultural institutions helicoptered in as the requisite establishments of a big city (e.g. SFMOMA, ACT, sfOpera, etc), the street-level advent of electronic music in San Francisco proved beyond doubt what a willingness to shed conventional methods, materials and aesthetics can yield. Maybe not the great shopping mall of Haight & Ashbury, but when the SF Tape Music Center found a home at Mills it established music as the most vital art of experimentation in the bay area, challenging composers, musicians and audiences alike to forge new sensibilities. That in and of itself is distinct from entertainment that measures success by prestige whether top40 or fetishist classical anachronisms (both of which substitute formal repetition for composition.)

When Buchla, Subotnick , Oliveros, et al. disabused us of the idea that there are rules or limits to what materials, modes and aesthetic norms are possible, they accomplish something tantamount to inventing the cello, or drum! Yet monied patrons insist on dressing up as Nelson Rockefeller for yet another rendition of Mahler and refuse to even hear local contemporaries, Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick much less Hans Grusel, sfSound, or Anti-Ear. SF Symphony’s American Mavericks effort was apparently a one-time-only nod. MTT knows where his bread gets buttered and he’s keeping that Barry Manilow golden retriever look well-honed for the long haul.

Rather than assail 18th century music fans, better to praise the SF Tape Music Center and Buchla who fundamentally changed how audiences worldwide hear sound and conceive of music. Along with a new texture, pitch, and tempo (not to mention the stacks of circuitry with patch cables pouring out that forged new visual associations for sound) musicians on older instruments gained license to play extended technique, microtonal, harmolodic, disassembled and bent instruments, though certainly Partch and others didnt wait on that license.

Many of the artists on Resipiscent came out of Mills’ world-class program, but it’s the ability of those composers and musicians to collaborate with and be influenced by emerging self-taught artists (who spent those same years outside any academy) that’s most unique. That collision is what makes bay area experimental music as unpredictable and rich as it is. That sensibility seems to arise from the street-level origins of the SF Tape Music Center, invention and performance joined there to forge a playfulness that proved resistant to dissipation as clothes fashion.