Clap on your Bose, baby, ’cause it’s noisy as heck out there
“What if death is nothing but sound?” asks the protagonist of “White Noise,” Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel. “Electrical noise,” his wife responds. “Uniform, white.”
For DeLillo, the background aural oversaturation of quotidian life — beeping microwaves, commercial jingles, cars on highways — signified death and our attempted denial of it. Compared with the modern digital soundscape, though, his era is positively muted. Bombastic, attention-grabbing inorganic noises are becoming the norm, disruptive sonic alerts trigger Pavlovian feedback, and simulated sounds are supplanting analog ones.
Consider the cacophony produced by today’s mobile phone or tablet. Beyond an all-you-canhear buffet of ringtones, there is the default whoosh and ding of text messaging; the click of typing; alarms that sound like analog clocks or tweets (of actual birds); the shutter click of the camera; and noises for a bevy of other functions and apps, such as a cha-ching effect for Venmo payments. Then, too, the racket on computers: the clatter of files being “tossed” into the trash or recycle bin (and of being “emptied”), email alerts, startup and shutdown chimes.
We are so sufficiently habituated to these sound effects that their presence in TV shows and movies is no longer a novelty; it is stranger to hear a landline ring in a contemporary show than to hear the default iPhone marimba beat.
Mobile games may be where sounds have changed most over the past decade. Phones have a small dynamic range, meaning the difference between the softest and loudest portions is limited compared with, say, a high-quality movie theater sound system.
“Everything is loud for games,” said Jean-Luc CohenSinclair, an assistant professor of electronic production and design at the Berklee College of Music and at New York University who has worked on games’ sound designs. “They’re designed to have transient-rich sounds that have a snappy attack — a quick, percussive buildup of energy, like someone snapping their fingers, as opposed to a fading note on a violin.”
Why can you so often overhear other people’s games? Cohen-Sinclair said designers accentuate the midrange sound frequency, which translates best to earbuds and small speakers, and to which humans are most sensitive. Because mobile games often compete with external noise, they also contain louder sounds that often carry beyond the player’s earbuds.
Constant earbud and headphone use and high-decibel public venues have led to hearing loss (the World Health Organization estimates that more than 1 billion teenagers and young adults are at risk), forcing listeners to crank up the volume even more. And, of course, there is the occasional altruist who eschews earbuds altogether and generously allows others to share in the melodious sounds of his game, music or video.
We tend to think of visual stimuli as the dominant forces of distraction in modern culture, but sounds too make bids on our attention in the raucous marketplace of noise. Moreover, we have been conditioned physiologically to respond to these auditory cues with dopamine spikes, especially when the alert is for the reward-based feedback of social media validation. It’s hard to be nonreactive to the sound of an incoming text or new Twitter follower.
Something similar was certainly at play with the ringing landline of yesteryear, but phone calls come at a far slower pace, take more time and rarely involve the caller (let alone hundreds of them) affirming how much they “like” you.
Digital brands have developed imprinting strategies that pander to our shorter sonic attention spans. Television and film networks and production companies have always had audio signatures so long as there have been talkies; think of the fanfare accompanying the iconic 20th Century Fox logo, the growling lion of MGM, the three-tone chime of NBC.
Contrast those with the popular networks of the cable and streaming age. HBO has long begun its shows with a television zapping onto a static field that resolves into an ethereal hum. Netflix has a four-second double timpani strike followed by a wash of strings. Amazon Originals offerings start with a whooshing, revolving sound and conclude with a series of vibrant chimes. The new 21st Century Fox logo forgoes the orchestral arrangement and ends in a series of R2-D2-like bleeps.
Whereas the old guard privileged pleasing musicality or organic sounds and tried to create distinctive signatures that somehow represented their brand, the new wave seems primarily concerned with securing the viewer’s attention immediately, at a minimum of time, through jarring, synthesized noises that are ultimately interchangeable with those of other companies.
“It’s a ruthlessly corporate way of trying to coerce the attention of the viewer,” said Paul Grimstad, a writer and composer in New York who has scored a number of films. “The scale of attention asked of the viewer for a Netflix episode is comparably smaller than the grand cinematic experience the 20th Century Fox orchestral fanfare sets you up for.”
As we blithely send our personal data to companies on a whoosh and a bleep, we think less and less about hearing so many other disembodied and artificial noises in the background. We may not love Big Brother, but seem to be OK with his cacophonous little siblings.
Their ubiquity suggests a postmodern aural backdrop in which the artificial is increasingly replacing the real.