A: Both believe in the secret power of sound to change our brains.

First, these teens…

In the last few weeks, reports have been popping up everywhere about a new craze among the iPod generation – ‘i-dosing’ – listening to music designed to get kids ‘high’. It’s based on the musical illusion of binaural beats. But the makers of these digital drugs have been claiming that listening to these audio clips will create the same effect as taking illegal narcotics.

If the concept sounds silly, the media’s coverage of it has been even sillier:

The idea that certain sounds can mess with our brains isn’t a new one. Far from it. Time for some ancient Greek philosophy…

Back in Plato’s time, songs could be played in a variety of different musical modes, kind of like how we use major and minor. Each different mode evoked a slightly different emotion for an ancient Greek listener, just like the major mode sounds “happy” and the minor mode sounds “sad” to us. But Plato and other philosophers believed music could affect more than just emotions. They thought these different modes would affect mental states and behaviours. Listening to one mode would mold their youths into intelligent warriors, while another would make them lazy drunks. Sound familiar? Some things never change.

If you’re wondering what Plato had to say about it, here’s some of his dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon, from the third book of The Republic. They’re deciding which musical modes would create a nation of intelligent warrior teens:

We said we did not require dirges and lamentations in words.

We do not.

What then, are the dirgelike modes of music? Tell me, for you are a musician.

The mixed Lydian, he said, and the tense or higher Lydian, and similar modes.

These, then, said I, we must do away with. But again, drunkenness is a thing most unbefitting guardians, and so is softness and sloth.

Yes.

What, then, are the soft and convivial modes?

There are certain Ionian and also Lydian modes that are called lax.

Will you make any use of them for warriors?

None at all, he said, but it would seem that you have left the Dorian and the Phrygian.

Socrates then goes on to explain that the Dorian mode instills a sense of courage, while the Phrygian mode promotes thoughtfulness. If only it were that easy to change our behaviour! Then again, there’s always the Mozart effect…

A note for our music nerds out there – even though the modes Plato mentions have the same names as modes we use today (Lydian, Dorian, Phrygian), these ancient Greek modes sounded nothing like them. Medieval music theorists confused matters by misnaming and misinterpreting the ancient Greeks!

If you’re interested, you can find out a little more about ancient Greek music here.

Charlie McCarron, Sound Consultant
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If you type ‘Advert’ into Google ‘Advert Music’ appears immediately after ‘Advertising’ and ‘Advertising Standards Authority’ and before all other dimensions of a television campaign. From these analytics, this would seem to suggest that it’s the music in TV commercials that captures most peoples’ imaginations. Yet in my 30 years of being in this business, the Advertising Trade press rarely give the track or music supervisor who called the tune in the first place, a mention – that is until the national press pick up the story of course.

However, considering how many commercials use music each year, it is curious that we can remember so few. When one comes along, like the recent John Lewis commercial using Fyfe Dangerfield’s version of the Billy Joel song ‘Always A Woman’, it is extraordinary how much coverage the music track elicited. It would seem that suddenly everyone becomes a music supervisor – social commentaries and explanations emerged from The Guardian to The Times to Style Magazine as to why and how the writer of the article believed the track worked. Yet the real creative minds behind the idea, the creative team at Adam & Eve and Abi Leland, (the Music Supervisor) are still, well…anonymous.

Are these tracks happy accidents (chosen in post-production and just seem to work), or are they the result of careful planning and strategic decision-making? While we are all aware that music can operate on a deep level, we still seem surprised at the level of emotional connectivity that the right music track can have with the right visual. It’s as if once a track touches us on a personal level, we are all driven to explain how those emotional connections are being made – deep meanings become attributed to a campaign that’s selling a department store.

The magic of the latest John Lewis commercial is that it takes us on a visual journey, supported by a song that has its own intrinsic narrative. The advantage of using such a well-known track is that it creates a familiarity for the viewer and whats more is perfectly ‘on brand’ with the target market – the John Lewis female customer. Joel’s song leads us into the commercial, like an old friend opening a door and welcoming us in. However what truly makes this commercial resonate so well, is the perfect match of song and imagery. Some have criticised the seeming mismatch of the lyrics (“She steals, she lies, she takes what she can.”) with the ‘cosy’ visuals. Putting aside the fact that the song is about loving someone despite their failings, we have seen many times before that it’s the overall emotion of the song that’s important and not just the lyrics – remember the emotional impact of The Cars track ‘Drive’ with footage of starving African children on Live Aid?

Music and visuals have to work seamlessly together; when one outshouts the other, it can be de-stablising to the whole experience. We literally feel out of synch. Sound and vision must have an almost symbiotic relationship with each other. It may seem an obvious conclusion, but perhaps it is only through the perfect convergence of all these elements, that we will see more commercials as successful as the recent John Lewis campaign. The agency have done a brilliant job, our only regret is we can’t add this to our showreel!

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In this final run up to the elections, and with Nick Clegg being declared the most popular politician since Winston Churchill, we had to ask – did his music supervisors get it right?

Choosing music is always an emotional process, but choosing music for politicians often evokes feelings of mild displeasure to downright outrage, from artists and fans alike. So how have Nick, Dave and Gordon fared in their musical messages to the people?

Have a look at the Lib Dems campaign video:

Sound familiar? The keen-eared among you may recognise it as the Brian Eno track “An Ending (Ascent)” from the film 28 Days Later. Visually, the ad is almost ripped straight from the film, particularly the shot of the Houses of Parliament across an empty Westminster Bridge. The Eno track, though subtle, gives Clegg’s message an ethereal tone rarely heard in political advertising.

A strong choice next to the predictable music used in this year’s Labour and Conservative videos:

While the Lib Dems went out on a limb with their relatively darker and trendier advert, Labour went with wistful, dreamy music and the Conservative party (after their ‘Keane incident’) settled for a sunny, generic track. Sure, it does the job as background music. But it doesn’t say anything! It takes courage to strengthen your message with an emotional track that says what you mean and gets at the guts of your audience. Too late to change the music now, but how about Cameron, as a big Killers fan, one-upping Clegg and getting the rights to “When You Were Young”…

“You sit there in your heartache
Waiting on some beautiful boy
To save you from your old ways
You play forgiveness
Watch it now, here he comes

He doesn’t look a thing like Jesus
But he talks like a gentlemen
Like you imagined when you were young

Can we climb this mountain? I don’t know
Higher now than ever before…”

Now that’s a powerful message.

Our advice to the parties when using music: be brave, be honourable (yes honourable) and ask permission, even if ‘legally’ you don’t have to. Use music to say who you are and what you stand for rather than live in fear and choose watered-down elevator music.

Clegg’s unique advert is a step in the right direction. At soundlounge, we’re ready to hear some more inspired music choices for our political candidates, winners and losers!

Ruth Simmons, Managing Director
Matthew Lee, Music Supervisor
Charlie McCarron, Sound Consultant
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“When You Were Young” written by Flowers, Brandon; Keuning, Dave Brent; Stoermer, Mark August; Vannucci, Ronnie Jr. Lyrics reproduced by kind permission of UNIVERSAL MUSIC PUBL. LTD.

At soundlounge, our job is to seek out the most talented musical minds for any given commercial brief. Our music supervision team can attest to the abundance of talented new composers eager to write original scores for TV ads and films. But what if we were able to tap into the minds of past geniuses like Bach or Beethoven? What if original music could be composed from beyond the grave? It might sound ridiculously farfetched, but through the power of computer processing, one clever composer has found a way to ‘reanimate’ the dead masters…

The folks over at Radiolab spoke with David Cope about his controversial dead-composer-resurrecting software EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence). His program can analyze sheet music and spit out an entirely new piece, based on the compositional style of the original music. Cope has tried it out with just about every famous composer, from Mozart to Scott Joplin, and the results have been eerily on-the-nose. When performed by human players, these pieces often turn out to be beautiful and moving.

Have a listen to the Radiolab conversation:

Cope admits that he gets criticized more often than praised. He has been in shouting matches and has even been physically attacked by people who feel threatened by his experiments. Cope explains:

“If you’ve spent a good portion of your life being in love with these dead composers…and along comes some twerp who claims to have this little piece of software…that can move you in the same way, suddenly you’re saying to yourself, ‘Well what’s happened here? Certainly my relation to the original pieces of music has cheapened in some way. Is Chopin really just nothing more than a bunch of clichés strung together?’”

It’s an unsettling thought for most music lovers. If we’re moved by a piece of music, we like to think it’s because the composer felt that same emotion, and was brilliant enough to put the emotion into musical notes. We’d feel like fools if we got emotional over a string of random notes.

But Cope’s invention upends the idea that the composer is the only emotional genius. In a way, it gives the performers and listeners more credit. As performers, we can take computer-generated sequences of notes and convey a meaningful story with them. As listeners, we hear these performances and create our own meaning. The emotions we feel are entirely from within, from our own musical background, from our own life experiences.

What are your thoughts? Does Cope’s software cheapen the work of the great composers, or does it honor them? Would you pay to see the premiere of a ‘new’ piece by Beethoven? Would you be offended if it showed up in the next car commercial?

You can listen to the entire Radiolab episode here. You can hear Cope’s EMI pieces here.

Charlie McCarron, Sound Consultant
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What does the diagram above mean to you? If you’ve never studied music theory, it probably looks like some strange symbolic art. This diagram (known by music nerds as the ‘Circle of Fifths’) is actually like a secret decoder ring for musicians and theorists. It shows how some musical keys are more closely related, and others are just distant cousins. But to the casual listener, this kind of dry analysis might seem to suck all the fun out of music. How does all this theory translate into musical emotion?

That’s where baby genius Stewie Griffin comes in.

Sometimes a cartoon is worth a thousand music theory classes.

Charlie McCarron, Sound Consultant
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It’s rare for a commercial to be so moving it sends chills down my spine, but Nike’s “Human Chain” ad struck me just right.

“Ali in the Jungle” by The Hours is great song, but I’m not sure the song itself would have given me goosebumps. And the visuals, stunning as they may be, would never have done it for me without this song. Many of the 250,000+ YouTube viewers would probably agree – these music supervisors and film editors found the perfect match of music and images.

If an ad agency knew the secret formula for a “chill response” and could guarantee X number of them in their viewers, they’d be set for life. Why?

1. A chill response signifies an intense emotional reaction.

2. These reactions to music and film are almost always associated with positive feelings.

3. The chill response is physically measurable market research.

So why haven’t marketers been all over this? In truth, psychologists have been studying chill responses to music for years, but their findings have been limited by the unpredictable nature of chills. A powerful chill reaction is rare, and it seems to depend on a delicate balance of many factors. Reactions can vary widely from person to person, and some people reportedly never experience chills or goosebumps at all when they listen to music.

Still, some studies have found common musical qualities that tend to give people the chills:

1. Changes in volume

2. Entry of a voice

3. New or unprepared harmonies

4. Sudden textural changes

5. Solo instrument emerging from a softer orchestral background

While none of these factors alone will guarantee an emotionally powerful song, they can be helpful guidelines for critiquing a track. Ask: does the track change enough musically? Does it have dynamic highs and lows? Does it surprise the listener at key points? These questions can help steer you toward the next goosebump-inducing hit.

Which commercials are so good they’ve given you the chills? Post them in the comments section below.

For more info, this study outlines some of the best chill research out there: “Listening to Music as a Re-Creative Process” Grewe, et. al., 2007 (pdf).  http://musicweb.hmt-hannover.de/kopiez/Grewe-etal(2007)Chills.pdf

Charlie McCarron, Sound Consultant
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Everyone in the recording business felt it coming – the growing stampede of internet-savvy listeners who got a taste of free music and never went back. While many cynics see this as a harbinger of doom for the music industry, optimists like Terry McBride see this transformation in listener behaviour as an opportunity to rethink the system. McBride believes the focus needs to shift away from monetizing music files, because he predicts our desire to “own” music will fade away in the next few years.

“The iPod is over,” says McBride, referring to the hassle of downloading and organizing music files. If his predictions are correct, on-demand streaming programs like Spotify and Last.fm will inevitably change our cultural instinct to collect CDs, download mp3s, or otherwise “own” a music library. Instead, we will have instant access to any piece of music ever recorded (just check out the YouTube-based Muziic.com if you don’t agree). Who wouldn’t want infinitely free music?

There still may be a part of us that isn’t convinced. Why should I replace my personal, meaningful album collection with a vast, impersonal database of songs somewhere up in the clouds? This question is one at the heart of the new music revolution, and it’s precisely the point McBride is getting at. According to McBride, it’s no longer content that matters, but the music’s context. The new industry leaders will be those who create the most emotionally engaging system for listening to and discovering music.

Back in 2002, Wired’s co-founder Kevin Kelly wrote an insightful article on the digital music revolution:

“Copies are so ubiquitous, so cheap (free, in fact) that the only things truly valuable are those which cannot be copied. What kinds of things can’t be copied? Well, for instance: trust, immediacy, personalization.”

In other words, we don’t need a gigantic database of music files, we need a friend who finds us awesome music we will like. When the music is free and infinitely reproducible, real-life human recommendations become the precious commodity. Talent scouts will be leaders in this new music industry – heartening news for the music supervisors, reviewers, DJs, and mixtape junkies of the world.

Charlie McCarron, Sound Consultant
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A few weeks ago, we posted an article about the influential “sonic logos” of a baby’s life – its mother’s heartbeat, its mother’s voice. But what about its mother’s music? Can music be just as powerful inside the womb?

Shortly after posting the article, we were contacted by Michael Godart, whose day job revolves around prenatal music listening. He and his wife Adrianne have developed the Lullabelly, a musical belt for pregnant mothers to play songs for their unborn babies. Michael has been researching the effects of prenatal music and getting feedback from Lullabelly moms, so we were excited to hear his thoughts on the matter.

Listen…

So prenatal listening can calm babies and connect them with their parents’ voices. After birth, babies may even remember the music played to them in the womb. But now, the question on every parent’s mind – Will my baby become a musical genius? Michael shared his thoughts on prenatal music as an educational tool.

Listen…

For more information about the Lullabelly, visit lullabelly.com.

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The very first sonic logo I heard was at 12 weeks gestation. It was my mother’s heartbeat. The second was her voice. These two simple sounds gave me a sense of self and my first, albeit hazy, understanding of the world outside. With these audio clues, I could tell not only where my mother was but also whether her surroundings were exciting or calm, happy or sad, dangerous or safe. I even heard my mother’s language and imitated it in my own cries. From the moment I was born, I was able to recognise like-minded spirits simply from the sounds that I heard.

But I was no baby genius. This ability to detect subtle changes in mood, geography, safety and hostility just by listening is a survival skill inherent in us all. The truth is that sound is one of the most sophisticated communication tools that we possess and one that neuroscientists are just beginning to understand.

We are physiologically programmed to respond to nature. Most of us find the sound of the sea very soothing, and not just because it reminds us of holidays. Its frequency of 12 cycles per minute is actually the same as the breathing frequency of a sleeping human. Birdsong also promotes feelings of well-being. We know instinctively that when the birds are singing we are safe; when they stop, we get worried. BP have recently installed birdsong soundscapes in their toilets as part of their campaign of stimulating a sense of well being and calm for their motorist customers. Check out the number of garages that play heavy rock. As my colleague Julian Treasure remarks – if motorists are listening to sounds like that, are they ever going to drive within the speed limit?

So if getting close to nature is one way to connect with humans very quickly are brands using these stimuli to connect with consumers? The answer is yes.

Take MGM. Nothing says louder that I am ‘king of the jungle’ than the roar of a lion. In a time of intense competition and a city that felt like a human jungle, Metro Goldwyn Meyer adopted the lion’s roar as their logo.

But one brand takes us right back to Mama. Check out Audi’s sonic logo blatantly based on the human heartbeat. The ultimate endorsement of safety and life itself. Where’s my dummy?

Ruth Simmons, CEO
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We all know that brands love music but if they are to use sound to emotionally engage with consumers then understanding exactly how it affects them has to be at the very heart of sound branding. While great luminaries like Dr Daniel Levitin – Professor of Psychology and Behavioural Neuroscience and author of the groundbreaking This is Your Brain on Music – have been considering this on an intellectual level for many years, agencies still appear to be dragging their heels when it comes to putting a science to the art of sound branding. But last week, Levitin’s scientific paper Life Soundtrack (commissioned by Philips Consumer Electronics in 2007) re-emerged in the somewhat unlikely format of an article in Men’s Health Magazine. According to the report, music affects the human brain in a huge variety of ways, allowing us to utilise certain types or genres of music to help complete different tasks. This is supported by consumer analysis carried out by Entertainment Media Research (EMR) which found that an impressive 82 per cent of us use music to boost our spirits. It also revealed that 75 per cent of people use music when they are engaged in a physical activity from housework to the gym and even sex! Read more…