Brown noise and wellness beats – the art of aural bliss
What’s the sound of pure relaxation? Heavy rain on leaves, or gentle harp music playing in a spa? The beautiful, deep silence when the children are all finally asleep? How about something more specific: the amplified crumple and crackle of someone opening a paper package, perhaps, or the plasticky shimmer of a sheet of bubble wrap being twisted and popped?
Jennifer Walshe, Professor of Composition at the University of Oxford, presented 21st Century Relaxation Tape (Radio 4, Sunday), a rich and squeezably gorgeous exploration of our contemporary obsession with delicious sound that isn’t music. Imi King, one of Walshe’s students, is 22 and from Manchester. She explained the appeal of ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response, as experienced when certain sounds cause pleasant physical tingling sensations in the body. “That’s a strange texture”, came a whispering soundscape in the background, mixed as if coming from inside your own brain, while the sound of water droplets plipped and sploshed.
This was best listened to through headphones, because it was so ingeniously produced by Tess Davidson and Jack Howson, with sound engineering by Mike Woolley, for indie production company Peanut & Crumb. Twinkling, seductive sound textures were intertwined with speech throughout the programme to demonstrate just how strongly sounds can manipulate how we feel.
Joydeep Bhattacharya, Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths, explained some of the psychology around our reactions to sound. Unlike the eye, the ear can’t close, so we never get a break from processing the sounds of the world around us. We’re an increasingly sleep deprived species; could a noisy world be the culprit?
We heard that ASMR videos are a lo-fi, punk and experimental movement, with people recording their own ASMR videos and tracks using found everyday objects. There was also an exploration of white noise, the steady swooshing of multiple frequencies that can give our brains a constant stream of audio input that drowns out other sounds.
As technology and urbanisation continue to make the world an ever noisier place, Walshe’s programme argued that we’re not evolving fast enough to cope with the steady increase in noises competing for our attention. In response, sound artists are looking for ways to calm the cacophony and assert some control over what we hear, and blend away some of the things we didn’t ask for in our sound environments. What sounds do we want to block out, and what noises do our bodies crave?
It was the most perfect subject for radio. And while the programme itself wasn’t what I’d call relaxing – I was at turns soothed, freaked out, intrigued and on edge – this was radio that scratched your brain in a way you didn’t know it could be scratched.
I’m not saying that Vernon Kay’s Bolton vowels are a likely ASMR source, but he’s certainly bringing the sunbeams to Radio 2 this week as he takes over Ken Bruce’s old slot on weekday mid-mornings. His first show on Monday was slightly too heavy on the reading out of self-congratulatory good luck messages, but by Tuesday he’d settled down into a relaxed and approachable show that should have Radio 2 bosses breathing sighs of relief.
Speaking of a post-ken Bruce era, the Eurovision Song Contest Grand Final (Radio 2, Saturday) also sounded decisively different. Bruce used to present the Radio 2 commentary of Europe’s biggest music competition, but now, following his departure from the BBC, the baton was passed on to Scott Mills and Rylan Clark, calling themselves “Eurovision husbands”.
Clark is never more at home than when he’s doing Eurovision. It’s simply his natural habitat: listening to him is like watching a red squirrel scamper up an oak tree. He hosted from the Radio 2 commentary booth wearing leather trousers, a sheer shirt, and Christian Louboutin heeled boots.
An hour into commentating on the final, he gave a shoutout to some listeners who claimed to be tuning in via a wind-up radio on a campsite in the Peak District. Now, surely that’s the one place you’d think you could go to avoid Eurovision, but there we are.
Rylan cried real tears when Loreen, representing Sweden, was announced as the winner. He’d done karaoke with her once, and her last album “means so much to me”, he said. That set Mills off crying, too. Eurovision is always a fabulous TV spectacle, but there was something glorious about experiencing it through the radio, in the company of two completely over-invested best friends, feeling the love.